1. Messiology
When I first wrote Out of the Comfort Zone, one of my greatest hopes was to see a reawakening of grace, especially among those involved in global missions.
Again and again we hear of tensions among those working to reach the world with the gospel. Many local churches go through very heavy and complex divisions. This is why I believe we desperately need a theology of “messiology.”
Put simply, messiology is the idea that God in His patience, mercy, and passion to bring men and women to Himself often does great things in the midst of a mess. That is not an excuse for sin or failure; every Christian should strive to avoid making a mess. But it’s the other side of the coin. It’s God’s way of working in spite of (actually, by means of!) the messes we make to bring about His plan and purposes. I sometimes refer to this as “radical grace.” Large portions of Acts and the majority of the epistles demonstrate this.
Throughout the Scriptures, we see God working through all kinds of messy situations. For years I have quoted a personal proverb: “Where two or three are gathered together in His Name, sooner or later there will be a mess.” Almost always the congregation laughs. I then ask, “How many have experienced that?” and most hands go up.
Gordon MacDonald’s book Rebuilding Your Broken World, along with many other great books, has helped me develop this theology of messiology. It has helped me understand God and His work more than almost anything else.
Over the course of fifty-seven years in over ninety countries and thousands of churches and other organizations, I have often observed some kind of mess within them. Sometimes clear sin is involved that needs to be repented of. Other times it is just silly stuff. I have said, and I feel it strongly, that no matter how filled we are with the Holy Spirit, we are still human. Our humanness has its beautiful side and its messy side.
I admire many Christian leaders, and try to have a grace-awakened attitude toward all of them, but many of us (including me) do ridiculous things and say even more ridiculous things. Yet as I have observed more carefully, I have seen God working in the midst of it. I have even seen many people used of God who were clearly living in sin at the same time. We have all heard of pastors being used of God—their churches growing with people being saved and discipled—and yet it is later discovered that they were living in adultery and unfaithfulness all that time. These are married pastors with children. Of course, after some time, their sin usually finds them out and the consequences fall like dominoes: they are fired, disqualified from church leadership, sometimes divorced, and so on. But years later, I sometimes meet with the person and his new wife and discover them being used in ministry. If I wrote a book about that, I could give hundreds of similar examples. This is messiology in action!
When it comes to messiology, some other key words are mystery and mercy. The last verses of Romans 11 have helped me again and again:
Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways! (v. 33 NASB; see also vv. 34–36)
The hardest thing for some people—especially leaders—to understand is that God can work in a mighty way through someone with wrong theology. How can this be? I meet people who are upset with certain televangelists. Many people tell me that they will not even watch them. I agree with these criticisms. Things I have seen and heard on “Christian” TV make me weep, especially the deceptive fundraising tricks that some TV preachers employ. But do not be surprised when you get to heaven and meet hundreds of thousands who came to Christ through these ministries. Do we need more of the apostle Paul’s attitude as shown in Philippians 1:15–18? It is both clear and hard to accept that God uses ministries and people that we may want nothing to do with. He uses preachers and ministries that I would not even send a dollar to. We want to explain these things and try to fit them in our box, but they will not fit! The answer—messiology.
Another area where things get very messy is in the whole area of finance and funding for mission fields, people, and projects. Periodic stories about the misuse of funds in missions prevent some people from sending any money at all to worthy causes. I am convinced that history will show that the generosity and risk of supporting a project (like a school) thousands of miles away have been major factors in taking the gospel forward and establishing His church.
Some people will not support a new school or other similar projects if they do not see how it can be self-supporting right away. But this thinking is misguided because, in places like India, self-supporting schools have been popular for many years, and as a result there are very few good schools for the poor (generally Dalits or tribal people), but thousands of schools available for those who can pay. In the complex situation of extreme poverty, we must expect to put a lot of money in before a school can sustain itself. In the case of some schools it may not be until a couple of decades—when people who graduate from these schools have jobs—that they can be self-sustaining. It’s hard to even imagine what we are up against in India with almost 300 million locked into the extreme poverty of untouchability. These exceptional situations, and there are many around the world, call for exceptional generosity.
That doesn’t mean we should not exercise discernment and research with regard to all that we give. We need the right people on the field to handle the finance, and the project itself is the most important factor of all. But those who think that they wasted money on a project that went totally wrong may discover many great results of their giving when they get to heaven.
In all of this we need to have wisdom, common sense, and especially beware of what I call destructive idealism—the perfectionistic expectations many of us have, which can cause discouragement, disunity, and confusion. A little more wisdom, patience, and humility would go a long way in taking us into greater reality and victory.