Dan Olinger

"If the Bible is true, then none of our fears are legitimate, none of our frustrations are permanent, and none of our opposition is significant."

Dan Olinger

Chair, Division of Biblical Studies & Theology,

Bob Jones University

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On Short-Term Missions, Part 2: But First …

August 17, 2023 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Everybody in the Pool

As we noted in the previous post, missions is every believer’s business. We live out grace and peace and carry the message of good news every day, regardless of our location.

But I would suggest that the Great Commission includes taking the message to the end of the earth, and this Commission is not given to just a select few. Nothing in the text implies a limitation as to personnel or geography.

Now, of course we can’t all go to Latvia, or who would serve the rest of the planet? I would suggest that the fact that in God’s providence you were born where you were would certainly indicate that God intends you to take the message to your own people.

But still. We need to go.

It has become common these days for us to subcontract cross-cultural missions to “professionals,” who live full-time in Latvia, or wherever, and focus on taking the message to that particular culture. That’s a great idea, and it seems to work with reasonable efficiency—though I’m inclined to think that it’s better for Americans to train indigenous pastors than to try to carry the burden of church planting themselves, given the amount of resources and time required for an American to plant just one church overseas.

But I don’t think that paying someone else to go absolves us from our responsibility to go as well. Sure, it’s expensive to go, and we can stay for only so long, and we’re not as effective in an unfamiliar culture as an indigenous believer would be, but there are things we can do effectively, and there are things we can learn that will increase our effectiveness in our own day-to-day outreach at home.

That said, it is possible to do overseas outreach very, very badly. In my experience, Americans seem to be especially clumsy working in unfamiliar cultures. The expression “the ugly American” didn’t come from nowhere, and the stories are abundant. I can recall an experience in China at a Buddhist temple where my family was observing quietly and appreciating the architecture. The priest had indicated to us “no photos,” and of course we respected his wishes. After a few minutes a couple of American twenty-something girls came in, wearing halter tops and short shorts, chewing gum and talking loudly, with no apparent awareness of the sort of place this was. “Oh, look at that! Cool! OMG!” The look of dismay on the face of the priest was hard to miss.

Sure, it’s a false religion, and he’s a false teacher, but he’s also a human being in the image of God who needs to hear the message, and this kind of thing can only make the task more difficult. I was horrified—and embarrassed for my country.

I wish that I was just cherry-picking, but this sort of thing seems to happen all the time. I suppose we could speculate on why. The USA is a big country, insulated from the rest of the world by oceans on both sides, with the result that many Americans never visit a different country their whole lives. Europeans and Africans, on the other hand, cross national borders and work in multiple languages fairly routinely. And despite all the talk of polarization and regionalism in our country, the culture is relatively homogeneous; you can travel from Atlanta to Wenatchee and still understand the regional accent, conduct business smoothly, and manage not to be offensive in daily customs such as greetings.

So yes, I would suggest that all believers need to get some experience in taking the gospel to another culture. But I would also suggest that we should take that responsibility seriously enough to prepare properly, so that we don’t make things worse by going. That means we’re going to have to learn some things about the culture—they do things differently there—so as not to fulfill the American stereotype of being offensive all day long with absolutely no awareness that we’re doing so.

We’ll get to some specifics next time.

Part 3: More than Good Intentions | Part 4: Semper Gumby | Part 5: Dependence | Part 6: Closing Thoughts I | Part 7: Closing Thoughts II | Part 8: Closing Thoughts III

Photo by Jeremy Dorrough on Unsplash

Filed Under: Theology Tagged With: missions

On Short-Term Missions, Part 1: Everybody in the Pool

August 14, 2023 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

Over the years it’s been my pleasure to experience several short-term mission trips. My first was almost 30 years ago, when my wife and I joined up with another couple in our church to take a group of teens to Mexico for a couple of weeks. A few years later I was asked to teach for a month in a little Bible college near Cape Town—and quickly fell in love with the place. (It’s still my favorite city in the world.) The next year the request came from a ministry in Saipan, for another month. Then Hermosillo, Mexico; then Shanghai, China; and then St. Vincent in the Caribbean.

A couple of years after that, the faculty couple that had led a student mission team to Africa most summers asked me if I’d like to take over the operation, and with some trepidation I agreed. What followed was 10 teams in 9 summers over the span of 12 years, some of the most delightful experiences of my life. I still think of those students as special.

During those 12 years there were other overseas adventures sprinkled in: Haiti, Mexico, India. This past summer I taught in Ghana, at a school I had taken several teams to, and in Togo, a new one for me.

I love these trips, but they’re hard, for a great many reasons. I found myself committing most of the mistakes we Americans can make in cross-cultural work, and to my dismay, I often haven’t learned from those mistakes with just one boneheaded incident.

I know people who have a lot more experience than what’s listed here. One of my closest colleagues at my university oversees the missions programs there, and his wisdom—prompted, I’m sure, by the sheer number of astonishing stories he can tell—continually provokes my respect.

But I have learned a few things along the way—often by experiences that I’m ashamed of—and perhaps a few thoughts can be of service to other believers, particularly those who are planning short-term mission work in the future.

So let’s spend a few posts knocking some of these ideas around.

To start with, let me observe that

Missions Is for Everyone

As he was about to return to his Father, Christ gave his disciples an order that we have come to call “The Great Commission” (Mt 28.19-20; Mk 16.15; Lk 24.46-48; Ac 1.7-8). It’s simple enough: Go—everywhere—and make disciples. Tell the story.

Church history contains a great many inspiring stories of those who have obeyed their Master well—from the 12 disciples themselves (I’m thinking, obviously, of Matthias and Paul, not Judas Iscariot) to the many martyrs under intermittent eras of Roman persecution, and through the modern missions movement, starting with William Carey and including such lights as Adoniram Judson, John Paton, John Eliot, CT Studd, David Livingstone, Gladys Aylward, Amy Carmichael, and many, many others perhaps less famous but not at all less noteworthy.

Perhaps as a result of these stories, modern Christians have tended to think of “missions” as something that happens far away, in strange and perhaps dangerous cultures. Hence the passport photo at the top of this post.

But the commission was to go—surely, to the ends of the world, but starting in Jerusalem, which to the first hearers was home, the local neighborhood. Missions isn’t something we pay subcontractors to do; it’s something we all do, naturally, daily, as we live our lives. It’s living out grace and peace, and talking about it, wherever you are. Last week I had a chance to do that in the drive-through at a fast-food joint, prompted by a question the fellow in the window asked me. Just a couple of minutes, and I wish it had been more, but it’s the normal way a follower of Jesus lives.

At the same time, however, in other senses missions is most certainly not for everyone. We’ll look into that next time.

Part 2: But First … | Part 3: More than Good Intentions | Part 4: Semper Gumby | Part 5: Dependence | Part 6: Closing Thoughts I | Part 7: Closing Thoughts II | Part 8: Closing Thoughts III

Photo by Jeremy Dorrough on Unsplash

Filed Under: Theology Tagged With: missions

Thoughts on Returning from Africa for the 9th Time

July 9, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

On June 24th I came home from Africa, again. I went for the first time in 2000, when I went to teach in a small Bible college in Cape Town. I was privileged to take my family on that trip. I thought I fell in love with Africa then, but I realized later that experience with Cape Town is a pretty narrow introduction to the continent.

I began taking student teams to Africa several years later. I’ve taken teams to Kenya and South Africa (2007), Zambia and Kenya (2010), Ghana and Tanzania (2013, 2015, 2016) and just Tanzania (2014). And this summer, for a change, I took a team to Ghana for 3 weeks, brought it home, and turned right around—24 hours later!—and took a different team to Tanzania. That cut the cost in half for each of the participating students, and it also did wonders for my frequent-flyer miles, but it also just about killed me. More on that in a minute.

Like every other time I’ve returned, I have thoughts. Unlike those other times, though, this time I’m going to share them.

1.      Africa is unique.

Yeah, the animals are unique, of course. Elephants (the variety with huge ears) and lions and giraffes and wildebeests, and on and on it goes. (But, to the surprise of many, no tigers. Except in zoos.) But Africa is unique in other ways. It’s a remarkable mixture of traditional and modern, of tribal and national. Villages of thatched-roof huts with 5 bars of cell service. Cultures that are at once similar and noticeably distinct.

I suppose Africa is stereotyped, and inaccurately so, more than any other continent. First, there’s hardly any jungle—that’s in the DCR, mostly—and second, the continent has a wide diversity of culture and stages of development. There’s a mall in Cape Town that’ll knock your socks off. I could go on forever.

2.      Diversity is strength.

I’ve taken teams ranging in size from 17 to 6. Each has had its own personality. But more importantly, each has had diversity among its members. Men and women, extroverted and introverted, athletic and, well, not. And in each case, the team has sorted itself out, figured out who can do what, and distributed its strengths to accomplish the tasks at hand. In each case, the differences have led not to divisions, but to increased flexibility in complex ministry opportunities. You need Marys, and you need Marthas. By the grace of God, everybody’s good at something, and everybody enjoys succeeding at that.

3.      Aging is a thing.

This summer’s outing was more challenging physically than previous ones, most obviously in the need to take 2 different teams, back to back. One week’s schedule:

  • Sunday: 12-hour overnight bus ride from Wa to Accra, Ghana
  • Monday: hiking around Accra, sleeping in a real bed in a guest house
  • Tuesday: overnight flight to Amsterdam
  • Wednesday: all-day flight to Atlanta; drive 3 hours to Greenville; sleep in my own bed
  • Thursday: meet new team; drive to Atlanta; 15-hour overnight flight to Doha, Qatar
  • Friday: flight to Nairobi; sleep in chairs at the airport
  • Saturday: flight to Mwanza, Tanzania, via Kilimanjaro; stay awake until local bedtime so jetlag doesn’t kill you

For 7 nights, sleeping in a different place every night, and only 3 of the 7 are beds.

Seemed like a good idea at the time.

I realized pretty quickly that I was not physically prepared for the trip, and that came as a surprise to me. In previous years, I’ve just gone, and the bod did what it needed to do. Now, apparently, the bod has less natural strength than it did, and it’ll need to be prepared. Years of good health you pretty much take for granted. Time to start workin’ out.

4.      Pretty much anybody can go.

Jesus left us a command to take the gospel to the ends of the earth. Most Christians assume that they’re supporters of the goers rather than goers themselves. You know, “pray, give, go”—we do the praying and the giving, and we hire other people to do the going, which would be really, um, inconvenient for us.

Nonsense. Anybody can go. Pretty much. That 1 lady in the iron lung, I suppose she can’t go. And of course there are others with disabling health conditions. But for most of us, there are only 2 obstacles:

  • Time. We have jobs, children to take care of. But you can learn a lot, and even do a lot, in just a week or two, provided you have wise counsel on where to go and how to help. You have vacation time; donate one of those weeks, and see how your priorities change.
  • Money. Yeah, that. My 2 trips this summer cost several thousand dollars, and I’m not wealthy—though I hasten to add that God has given me everything I need, and a lot of things I don’t. So where does the money come from? Well, here’s the thing. There are people in the church—a lot of them—whose hearts God has touched, who have set aside a hundred bucks, or a thousand bucks, or even several thousand, and they’re asking God to show them where to put it. They’re actively watching for opportunities to invest those funds in ways that will make an eternal difference. I don’t like to ask for money, but after I realized that these people are out there, I found that if you’ll make the opportunity known, the funds will show up. Money isn’t an obstacle. Over the years I’ve had team members whose essential poverty would astonish you. And they went to Africa, for 3 weeks, or 5 weeks, or 8 weeks, because God, through his people, provided.

Be a pray-er. Be a giver. Sure. But be a goer. Don’t sell yourself—and your God—short.

Filed Under: Culture, Theology Tagged With: Africa, diversity, missions, teams

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