Engaging unreached people means risk, and the stakes are high

In our second year of serving as missionaries in Kazakhstan, we were preparing to receive a young, single woman as a two-year missionary. She wrote me to say that her father was concerned about her living in this far-away, strange place. So I wrote a nice email to her father, dispelling some of his concerns and assuring him that we would do all we could to ensure her safety. A year later, we had another young, single woman coming – same request. So I recycled the email. I used it several times during my years in Kazakhstan and have used a variation of it with daddies of missionaries around the world since coming on our staff. I call it my “Daddy Email”.

This leads to the question: Is missionary life “safe”? Should we have that expectation? What does the Bible tell us about this? Let’s look at a couple of Jesus’ sayings: “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:34-35, NAS). “‘A slave is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you” (Mark 15:20, NAS). Paul is the first missionary sent out by the church, and he is an exampleto all of us. We know from Acts and his letters that his life wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. Not much in the Scriptures support the idea that serving the Lord is “safe” – just that His grace is sufficient.

In our missionary lore, we hear stories of the missionaries of the 18th and 19th centuries who literally packed their belongings in a coffin. The life expectancy of a missionary was 2-7 years. As we celebrate the growth of the Church in Africa in this issue of Unfinished, we need to recognize that it would not have happened if safety had been the number-one concern of the first missionaries and early African believers.

Balancing risk and safety
Yet now it seems we often expect and even demand absolute safety. The problem is that if we look where most of the unreached people of the world are, we’ll quickly see that if safety is the primary consideration, we’ll never be able to engage them. This is an issue we at The Mission Society are wrestling with as we balance our responsibility to care for our missionaries with the call to reach into unreached areas. Are we willing to invite new missionaries to serve in places that might not be “safe”? Do we have people who are sold-out to Christ enough that they have counted the cost andare ready to serve where God calls them, regardless of the safety factor?

Now, lest the reader think we plan to send missionaries intentionally into harm’s way, let me offer some assurance. It is clear that we are not to seek danger. We certainly should strive for safety. In Damascus, Paul took advantage of his friends’ assistance and was lowered out of the wall in a basket to “get out of Dodge” when things were hot. His staying would not have helped the cause of the Kingdom.

We have missionaries serving in very sensitive areas of the world and anticipate that the number will rise dramatically in the coming years as we more intentionally engage unreached people. We do all we can to see to their safety, but we also recognize that their work does carry risk. We try to minimize that risk through common-sense precautions, yet do so without minimizing the potential of their impact for the Kingdom of God.

Pointing to the Kingdom
In The Last Battle, the final book in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, at one point the children Eustace and Jill realize that they likely will not survive the upcoming battle in the magical world. Eustace asks, “If we die in Narnia, will we be dead back in England?” They had come to the realization that this was not just an adventure or a game, it was life and death. In the same way, we must realize that working for God’s Kingdom is not a game. It’s not just an adventure. Eternity is at stake.

Jim Ramsay, former missionary to Central Asia, is The Mission Society's senior director of field ministry.