Rants
Gobbling the Gospel?
Many people assume that people of pagan cultures around the world are eagerly waiting to hear the gospel, and as soon as they do, they renounce their pagan practices to embrace Christ and immediately begin to serve the Lord faithfully.

This false sense of reality has gripped many missionaries only to be foiled as the missionary lands on the mission field and find that things are much different. This view is found in plenty of publicity literature and many sentimental songs that have been used to raise funds for mission work. One hymn claims, “the heathen in his blindness” is calling on the missionary to “deliver him from error’s chain.” (The Psalter Hymnal sanitizes this doctrinal error.) This teaching denies the Scripture, “There is none righteous, no not one. No one understands, no one seeks God. All have turned aside, together they have gone wrong; no one does good, not even one.” (Rom. 3:10-12) It is like taking water to the thirsty and he does not realize that he is thirsty, or food to the hungry but he does not realize that he is hungry.

It was several years before William Carey had his first converts in India. Hudson Taylor’s success in China was extremely slow.

From where did this myth develop?

First, missionaries themselves could sometimes be guilty of concocting this sense of the heathen in order to justify their work or the raising of more support for their ministries. This view, however, is no more true than to say that when the gospel is preached in the US or Canada that people immediately forsake their sins and become Christians.

Second, this myth could also have developed because of “evidence” in some places where the Gospel was preached and where there has been a greater response to the Gospel.

One needs to be reminded, though, that in these “successful areas” there was usually much faithful preaching that was done earlier that sowed the seed for the great harvest that is now being brought into God’s kingdom. Consider Korea, for example. For many years prior to the nineteen sixties the gospel was faithfully preached with little or no success. Suddenly there seemed to have been tremendous growth in the spread of the gospel, but it was not sudden at all. The successes of the missionaries of the sixties and the seventies seem to have been built upon the foundation of the missionaries from decades before. My former OPC pastor, Ralph English, testified to this. A case to be realized one day is Japan. After more than one hundred years of faithful missionary work less than one percent of Japan is Christian. In Burma, there are about ten thousand Christians after one hundred seventy years of missionary work, and yet there remain over thirty-seven million Buddhists in their idolatry. Countries in West Africa are quite similar.

What has this myth done to the Reformed Churches? Some Reformed people have been influenced to some degree by popular preaching that deceive people into thinking that we can expect great numerical results every time the Gospel is preached. We have allowed Sunday, Finney, Billy Graham, and Benny Hinn and their followers to throw “conversion” numbers in our faces every time they preached the Gospel. We started thinking that we should expect the same and are disappointed when this does not happen. However, when one examines the real results of these apparent heathen conversions, they tell a different story. Most people who make “professions” of faith at the crusades are not converted. One study shows that less than 5% of people who make professions of faith at Graham’s crusade are attending church a few years later. Where are the millions of converts that Benny Hinn has had in India?

Nevertheless, these men and their followers perpetuate the myth that as soon as the heathen hears the Gospel they he will respond in faith and obedience.

Yet, in a way, the Reformed missionary does see “success” each time he preaches the Gospel to the heathen. His preaching is not ineffective at all. He knows that his preaching is not only intended to convert, but to condemn also. It is not up to the missionary to decide whether God will convert or condemn. God is glorified either way.

What can you learn from this?
1. When there is limited “positive” success of “nickels and noses” in your missionary’s work, it does not necessarily mean that there he is an ineffective teacher, or that he needs to move to some other more “successful” place. Understand that God uses the Gospel to save and to condemn.
2. Encourage your missionary facing the difficulty of seeing little “fruit” from his labors.
3. Take a trip to the mission field and see for yourself the difficulties there. You will certainly learn to pray more specifically.
4. Don’t give up financially supporting your missionary because he does not send new photographs of baptisms every month. Replace him if he is unfaithful.