All ministers and ministry leaders should be eager for guidance and encouragement to make their missionary activity church-centred. A healthy church is committed to and supportive of evangelism, both locally and globally: healthy evangelism establishes new converts in churches. A healthy missionary has both a sending church and receiving church: a healthy missionary agency strengthens these missionary–church bonds.
Prioritizing the Church in Missions, along with a companion volume, Prioritizing Missions in the Church, makes this case. “Christianity is church-shaped,” write Jonathan Leeman, Brooks Buser, and Scott Logsdon in the 9Marks Church-Centred Missions series preface (p. ix). This short book’s theological and practical exploration of the centrality of local churches in missionary activity is wholesome and energising.
Prioritising the Church in Missions
John Folmar and Scott Logsdon
In this brief guide, pastors John Folmar and Scott Logsdon share their decades of experience working as pastors in Muslim countries. Showing how healthy churches are essential for fulfilling the Great Commission, they teach biblical ecclesiology and missiology with wisdom and real-world advice from the field. They also caution readers against movement-driven missions, theological minimalism, and other techniques that replace the church’s God-given roles of equipping, training, and sending missionaries.
What is Church? What is Missions?
The book is theologically precise. Folmar and Logsdon’s definition of church begins with a grounding in the “heavenly gathering … made visible through local churches” (pp. 22–3). They then quote Aaron Menikoff and Harshit Singh’s definition of the local church from this book’s companion volume, Prioritizing Missions in the Church:
A church is a congregation of baptized Christians who have covenanted together to gather weekly for preaching the Bible, celebrating the ordinances, loving the saints, witnessing to the lost, and, in all this, glorifying God. (p. 23)
The rigorous Baptist congregationalism of 9Marks is evident in this definition and the book as a whole. For example, it argues that the receiving church has exclusive disciplinary ecclesial authority over missionaries. It also teaches that partnership in mission is the work of autonomous congregations (chap. 6).
The Church-Centred Missions series has an agreed definition of missions: “churches sending qualified workers across linguistic, geographic, or cultural barriers to start or strengthen churches, especially in places where Christ has not been named” (p. 2). This definition distinguishes missions from local ministry: a term is needed to describe ministry that goes across significant barriers. I note that the definition is prescriptive, not simply semantic — it speaks of “qualified workers”, insists on a church-focused intent, and spells out a priority for “places where Christ has not been named”— it outlines what missions should be, not simply what it is. Therefore, it would be more accurately presented as a definition of healthy and responsible missions. Even as a prescriptive definition, the strong emphasis on starting and strengthening churches is narrow. While I agree that healthy disciple-making recognises the fundamental place of the church, I am unconvinced that all missions work must, by definition, explicitly aim at starting or strengthening churches.
Church-Centred Missions
The table of contents describe the thesis of the book clearly: chapters 1 and 2 define church and missions, as already discussed. Then chapters 3 to 5 argue that the church is “the Origin of Missions”, “the Means of Missions” and “the Goal of Missions”. Lastly, chapter 6 advocates for “Churches Cooperating for Missions.” We are saved into Christ’s church, the authors insist: “the gospel makes us church members … This means the Christian life is the church-member life” (p. 7). More, local churches are the “the outcome of gospel preaching and the platform for more gospel preaching” (p. 3).
The book persuasively champions a strong ecclesiology, warning “weak ecclesiology leads to weak missiology” (p. 9).[1]The authors bring a refreshing and mature perspective when they write that the urgency and importance of the gospel mission shouldn’t lead to rushed training and appointment but rather necessitates thorough training for effective service in such a vital task (pp. 68–9). The book diagnoses a problem more widespread than weak ecclesiology: “Underlying the minimal ecclesiology in missions is a tendency towards minimal theology in general” (p. 11). It turns on its head “the popular mantra that ‘missions is the mother of theology.’” They argue “the opposite — missions is the application of our theology” (p. 12).
The authors describe what church-centred missions looks like in practice. They acknowledge the expertise of mission agencies — “churches shouldn’t try to ‘run the show’ from the other side of the world” (pp. 97–8) — but lament that churches often entirely abdicate moral, theological, and methodological oversight of missionaries. Local churches should be active in discipling, identifying, training, and assessing potential missionaries (pp. 90–1, 93–6, 100–2). If candidates are not suitable for eldership in a local church, why would we endorse them as missionaries (p. 67)? One of the ways that local churches should evaluate mission agencies is according to their view of the local church and of missionary participation in local churches (p. 99). Finding a receiving church for missionaries should be an early part of the sending process (p. 73).[2] Missionaries should honour the local churches on the field, ensuring that their ministry is welcome (pp. 80–1). The spiritual oversight of the receiving church is considered vital because “biblical membership and accountability requires proximity” (p. 121). They have a strong view of the biblical authority of the field-side church over the missionaries: “those with managerial authority over the missionary [the sending church, missionary society, donors] … should yield to the authority of the field-side church and their elders” (p. 176).
A Missions Manifesto
Prioritizing the Church in Missions sets forth its positive vision with the conviction of a manifesto.[3] Like most manifestos, this book (and no doubt its companion volume), strongly reacts to prevailing alternatives. Readers may find it eye-opening how extreme some missiological views are.[4] Folmar and Logsdon acknowledge serious missionary failures in the past, caused by colonialism, Western extra-biblical traditionalism and a failure to contextualise, but are justified in their complaint that the missiological pendulum has swung way too far to correct these failures (pp. 12–13, 26).
The authors strongly oppose an individualistic approach to missions. Western culture is individualistic and consumeristic, they write, “And what we manufacture at home, we export overseas” (p. 8). In his foreword, Conrad Mbewe critiques those in mission agencies and Bible colleges, who have “produced disciples after their own kind—lone-ranger Christians who didn’t prioritize the bride of Christ.” (xvii). Folmar and Logsdon quote a pastor from northern India:
Please don’t send bad workers. If a person cannot be an elder in your church, then don’t send them … We don’t want mavericks. We don’t want entrepreneurs. We don’t want go-getters. (p. 103)
Folmar tells how his team refused to baptise a believer apart from membership in a local church because they “didn’t want to encourage him towards a lifetime of isolation from God’s people” (p. 45).
The most sustained, perhaps even repetitious, critique is regarding church-planting movement (CPM) missiology. CPMs “emphasize speed, explosive numbers, and immediately measurable success” (pp. 13–14). CPM advocates reverse-engineer their missiology from observations of what fosters rapid multiplication; they often speak as if their techniques guarantee results (pp. 28, 157–8). The authors say that CPM advocates dismiss focus on ecclesiology as inhibitive to rapid growth, often refusing to define church and insisting they do not have a model of church (p. 27). This thin ecclesiology is accompanied by “cursory biblical instruction” (p. 13). “But rabbit churches get eaten by hawks and wolves”, a missionary quips. The outcome of CPMs, according to Folmar and Logsdon, is immature and fragile movements. Better, Prioritizing the Church in Missions argues, is a healthy church that “disciples and protects the gospel over time … from one generation to the next” (p. 152).
Ecclesial Authority on the Mission Field
The book is explicitly congregationalist and at times its handling of Scripture in line with these convictions is strained (for e.g., “The church in Derbe sent Paul and Barnabas back to Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch to appoint elders” p. 171). Also strained is the claim that ecclesial authority over missionaries lies solely with the receiving church on the mission field (pp. 122–3, 176).[5] The practical reality is often unavoidably more complicated than this, and biblical ecclesiology allows for a more flexible application of collaborative pastoring and church discipline.
Prioritizing the Church in Missions makes a compelling case for the importance of local churches, rigorous theology, discernment, and theologically-driven ministry practice.
[1] In contrast to those who claim our ecclesiology flows from our missiology, the authors rightly demonstrate that our ecclesiology is the result of our soteriology and “our missiology is downstream from our ecclesiology” (pp. 9–10).
[2] If there is no church in the target location, the authors say that missionaries should go as a team and that team itself should constitute as a church in the early phase of the work (pp. 123–5).
[3] The authors also allude to the Southgate Fellowship’s ‘Affirmations and Denials Concerning World Mission’.
[4] The authors claim that some mission agencies forbid missionaries joining a receiving church (p. 8); that some argue new converts should not join local churches in certain cultural contexts (p. 9); that some missiologists argue that missionaries taking a role as Bible teachers is a form of Western paternalism, and that they should start Bible groups but not attend them (p. 40); that preaching is ineffective and should be abandoned in favour of story and song (p. 41); that baptism is unnecessary and paternalistic (p. 46); that unbelievers can be appointed as leaders of house churches (pp. 53–4).
[5] The book distinguishes the managerial authority of the sending church and mission agency from the ecclesial authority of the receiving church. Where the sending church can withdraw support from and the mission agency can fire the missionary, only the receiving church can excommunicate them.
