Outreach; Mission or Strategy?

By; Sulad Jhun Cardeinte

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.” Pro. 3:5,6 RSV
There was an occasion that I had privileged to attend leadership seminar in Bangkok. The featured speaker was the director of the Buddhist ministry. And so I was excited to attend with all my expectation that I can gather important strategies on how to reach out the Buddhist mind. I got my new notebook ready to list down all important procedures. But I was amazed to hear different things of what I had expected. He appealed to us to spend more time in prayer for the Buddhist people we are reaching and to pray honestly to search our own heart that we will become a living witness rather than witty. His obvious appeal was to humble ourselves before God to seek revival and reformation. To acknowledge the Holy Spirit’s power so that we will become true light bearers and by faith God will teach us of everything that we are going to do.
I have attended the seminar to improve my strategies but result was so different. His spiritual approach was so Biblically sound that it changed me!!! I started to realized to “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.” Pro. 3:5,6. Truly amazing!
What count is not how much good strategies we have made and how unique are those, but how prayerfully dependent and submissive we are to the dictates of the Holy Spirit. Truly, nowadays many evangelists substitute the Holy Spirit to strategies and methods, spending less and less time in prayer and depending on their skills, talents, budget, and new technologies to catch the attention of their audience. They have very entertaining presentation! “Therefore, by their fruits you will know them.” Matt. 7:20.
I was brought up with the thought that effective missionary means more experience, expert and knowledgeable about strategies. My understanding about equipping means logically knowledgeable. I was always conscious about the goals and objectives so I can list down all strategies on how to achieve my goals. Those were my fatal mistakes.
Often our goals have driven us to formulate strategies but not to close our doors to talk about it with God. And so when we achieved our goals, these do not brought us any good but lead us more steps farther away from God. Since God is not fully acknowledged, there was very less involvement of the Holy Spirit. Try to listen to many mission stories; we can hear many mission reports which have very self-centered tune. They tried to say praise God!!! But the whole content has the message “I’m great!”, “my success!”, That’s because of me!” and etc. This area is where satan has been successful. The living pen of inspiration has been warning us, “As activity increases and men become successful in doing any work for God, there is danger of trusting to human plans and methods. There is a tendency to pray less, and to have less faith.” DA 362.
Evangelism is not a kind of worldly business that we are going to do the conferencing only to develop our ability, to formulate strategies to increase our sales. The Apostle Paul exhort us “Therefore come out from them and be separate, says the Lord….and I will receive you.” 2 Cor. 6: 17. We are different from the worldly commerce’s approach. Ours is a mission to bring others to Jesus with a promise of a complete powerful guidance of the Holy Spirit if we humbly acknowledge. The focus of preparation is not more on equipping skills and ability but spirituality. What make our members spiritual is not actually our witty strategies, but our spirituality itself.
The message of this article is not to discourage any of you to develop Biblically sound methods but simply to encourage to completely acknowledge the Divine help, to give room for the Holy Spirit to freely work in all the details. If we love the unreach people as Jesus Christ and Paul did then we should study them carefully, learning how to reach them. If we are humble and dependent to God’s strength, the Holy Spirit will give us wisdom on how to develop evangelistic methods that could lift up Jesus Christ in all His beauty. Jesus said, "And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself." John 12: 32.