I just got back from Urbana, and came back very discouraged. I know the history of Urbana has been great in raising up laborers to take the good news to the ends of the earth. However it seems that they too are falling into the trap that Christians fell into at the beginning of the 20th century, the social gospel, and neglecting frontier missions. I am not saying that this gospel is wrong, but left to itself it is incomplete. There was much talk at Urbana about social injustices in the world, the AIDS crises, and caring for the environment, however when they talked about saving people from this problems they never explicitly and directly stated what we are to save people too. I know there was one comment that we need to rescue people not only from the hell they are going to, but the hell they are living now. I believe Jesus would have had us place our emphasis on both. He after all did command us to “Preach the Gospel of the Kingdom and to heal the sick.” We are to rescue individuals not only from their social plights, but their spiritual plights as well from leading them saving relationships with Christ that we lead them out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of His love. For more information the missing session that should have been at Urbana I want to recommend this article, “Lost Missions” (published in Christianity Today July 2006)
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That’s really not good to hear and it won’t work with just fixing the social injustices. It leaves the people believing that all they really need is white people money and westernized things. This is a little different, but we were talking on Wed. about how a lot of missionaries take all their comforts to the place they go and so the people become dependant on these new things and not so much the gospel of Jesus. I read a book from Wycliffe, Poking Holes into Darkness (or close to that) and the lady talked about how they left the tribe in Papua New Guinea for a short while and when they came back all the people raged about was not having the supplies from the west while they were gone, even though they had been fine without them for soooo many years before. I think we do some harm to cultures thinking that people need to do everything like us and need everything that we have. Some of it takes away from the impact of Jesus and the power that He has in himself.
Comment by April Talbott 01.20.07 @ 3:20 am