The Glory of the Impossible and Sending False Dichotomies to Hell

False dichotomies are foolish, dangerous, deceptive things. Believers fall into their trap when they overreact to the emphases and excesses of a different camp or previous generation. Ironically, these pendulum-riding believers often themselves go on to become the inverse example of the very thing they are critiquing. 

Instead of this, the way of wisdom is to give both sides their biblical proper weight, to thread the needle right, even if that means we often must hold complex, nuanced positions, right alongside our bold, black and white hills to die on. To do this well, a deep knowledge of the Bible and church history is invaluable, as well as deep insight into our current culture, context, and age. 

Alas, the relationship of the Church to global missions is full of these false dichotomies. One of these days, I’ll write a post exploring which of them seem especially prominent in our circles. For now, I just want to highlight one way in which the pendulum is once again acting like a wrecking ball and out there smashing things up once again.

Here’s D.A. Carson reemphasizing for us again just how harmful these false dichotomies are:

“So which shall we choose? “Experience or truth? The left wing of the airplane, or the right? Love or integrity? Study or service? Evangelism or discipleship? The front wheels of a car, or the rear? Subjective knowledge or objective knowledge? Faith or obedience? Damn all false antithesis to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings whose oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ”

Indeed. Send all false dichotomies to hell, where they belong, including a particular false dichotomy currently gaining steam that pits biblical localism against biblical missions. 

Biblical localism could be defined as the idea that God calls the majority of believers to put down roots, to build families, to work faithfully, to live a quiet life, to serve their local churches faithfully, and to seek to leaven their communities and broader society with the light of God’s word. This is a good, hard, biblical lifestyle (1 Thes 4:11-12, Eph 4:28). 

Biblical missions could be defined as the idea that God calls the Church to send a minority of believers to leave their home communities in order to take the gospel across geographic, political, cultural, and linguistic barriers in order to plant churches – churches that then go on to practice both faithful localism and faithful missions. This too is a good, hard, biblical lifestyle (Matt 28:18-20, Rom 15:20). 

These ideas go hand-in-hand in the scriptures. They are not against one another. Rather, they uniquely sharpen and empower one another. The goers need the stayers, and the stayers need the goers. Both have a unique role in spreading the gospel in this age and pointing forward to the resurrection coming in the next. Both are taking ground and fighting the Church’s battles against her ever-present enemies, even though the dynamics on the front lines will vary from place to place. 

But here’s what’s happened. My generation, the Millennials, went out to save the world. With the not-so-good confidence fostered by all the “You’re a unicorn who can do anything you set your mind to!” messaging we ingested growing up, alongside the good gospel fire in our bones stoked by Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life, Platt’s Radical, and the missionary biographies of Paton, Judson, Taylor, and Eliot, we answered the call and laid it all on the line. 

Not surprisingly, a lot of us burned out – and that was a full decade before the previous generation had. If Gen X was hitting burnout in their forties, it came for us in our early to mid-thirties, or even earlier. Perhaps it was the young and restless part of being young, restless, and reformed that meant many of us didn’t prioritize rest, health, and sustainable sacrifice the way we should have. Yes, some of the costs we incurred were simply part of the deal, the normal and even noble suffering that comes from the Christian life in general and some unique trials of the missionary life in particular. But many of the costs were undoubtedly also due to our own lack of wisdom in things like Sabbath, embodiment, community, and the fact that the kids are not the unflappably flexible and resilient little beings we had been told they were. 

When we look back at the missions emphasis of recent decades, a lot of good work was done. We need to be honest about that fact. But the of reality of many young families returning from the mission field quite broken also coincided with big shifts in the American/Western zeitgeist, specifically, the rise of things like therapy culture, Gen Z, Christian nationalism, Christian localism, massive inflation and wage stagnation, and the foundering of the New Calvinism’s unity on the rocks of Trump, Covid-19, BLM, and ‘woke’ vs. ‘based’ everything. 

Early on, all this led to some healthy pushback, which included books like Reset and Refresh by David and Shona Murray and Ordinary by Michael Horton. Much of this pushback was good and helpful. It reminded the Church that we needed to get more biblical in prioritizing rest and sustainability, and in also celebrating the radical nature of Christians who stay and invest in their local church and community for decades on end. Praise God for wise men and women who help to balance the pendulum. 

But I’ve noticed something shifting in the last couple of years. Reformed evangelical leaders who have been convinced by robust and uber-confident ‘happy warrior’ forms of Christian localism are also beginning to turn against global missions. Here are a couple of quotes that surfaced in recent months on my social media feeds that illustrate this. I post them here simply to illustrate. I admit I’m not familiar with the broader body of these men’s work, so they may nuance these statements elsewhere. Both are SBTS grads who speak at conferences, and we share a lot of mutual friends, so I would hope they are more balanced than they appear here. However, notice how they are drawing a stark dichotomy between foreign missions and localism – and how different this kind of talk sounds from what has been the evangelical church’s posture since the late 1700s. 

There needs to be a new and more biblically faithful version of “Don’t Waste Your Life” for the next generation.

I know many Christians who were afraid of wasting their lives and ended up chasing glory in foreign countries. But they screwed up their marriages and kids as a result. That’s actually wasting your life.

The updated version we now need is to call people to do something truly radical. Live an ordinary, faithful life of Christian service. Get married, start a family, have lots of children, work with your hands, plug into a local community, and serve a local church.

-Michael Clary on X

Notice the claims made here. 1) The book, Don’t Waste Your Life, was unbiblical, period. No mention of its context, intended audience, or what it got right. Suburban baby boomer retirement mindset, anyone? 2) Those who went overseas were only chasing glory. Is there no longer a biblical category of holy ambition that applies to taking great risks like this for the sake of the unreached, or does holy ambition only apply to those who stay and build? To say that it’s wrong to seek glory is to be out of step with both the Bible and the historic church (Rom 2:7). It’s how you seek glory that matters. 3) The costs to marriages and kids mean you’re the one who wasted your life. But what about the costs to families that come simply as part of faithful service? Is there no category for that in your theology? Or does tragic cost always equal unfaithfulness? 4) What is truly radical is marriage, kids, work, community investment, and long-term local church service. I guess Jesus, Paul, Patrick, Lull, and Paton weren’t good examples of Christian radicals? 

Here’s a response to the above post, but taking it even further:

Imagine disguising adventurism and avoidance of duty as the ideal, super spiritual thing. That is a great deal of the last few generations of evangelicalism in America and what was sold to young men and women. And we wonder why so few are married and have children.

Going to a foreign country (at other’s expense no less) – wow, you are so spiritual. You will get special services and a Sunday a month where we extol you and folks will especially pray for you… Working hard to take on a wife and have a large family and be productive and fruitful where you are and start a business that employs folks in your church? Oh, meh… unless we want more of your money.

Adopt kids from far flung nations? We will write entire books and have conferences about it… special services and recognition. Care for your actual neighbors and help their kids? Meh… yawn.

The problem? It’s been primarily rot and rubbish for a hundred years. Promoted primarily by people who don’t practice at all what they preach. I despise it so much at this point and the poison it is and has been to our nation and communities.

-John Moody on FB

This post claims 1) Missions is adventurism and avoidance of duty, and is the reason so few are having children. Is there no category for holy ambition or the faithful fulfilment of the Great Commission as the duty of the Christian? What about the fact that evangelical missionaries have far more children on average than evangelicals who stay planted in the West? 2) Going to a foreign country at others’ expense does not warrant special recognition or prayer. Those things should be for those who stay and build. Wait, must we choose one or the other? Who says so? What about 3rd John 1:6? 3) Missions has been promoted by those who don’t practice what they preach, and it is essentially poison to the American and evangelical community. I recognize the brother here is probably speaking from emotion, so, in turn, I would invite him to visit the graves of countless faithful missionaries scattered all over the world, including that of my own father in Melanesia and that of a good friend here in Central Asia. Would you say they didn’t practice what they preached when they were faithful unto death? How about their families that continue to grieve and trust God with their deaths? Are their examples of dying for Jesus poison for the American church? 

Here’s the thing. Both of these men I’ve quoted are truly onto something. There has been an underemphasis on faithful Christian localism in recent decades. And a lot of young evangelical families have come back broken from the mission field. Both of these things have been tremendously costly. We need to hear these points loud and clear. 

But we need to do so while avoiding the error they’re falling into – pitting localism against missions. To fall into this trap is to be captive by a spirit of the age that hasn’t been very prominent in about 300 years, but which seems to be staging an aggressive comeback. That wrongheaded spirit misses the fundamental point that missions exists in part because there can be no Christian localism in places where there are not yet any Christians.

One of the reasons people like me do what we do is because we dream of the day when our unreached people groups are filled with healthy churches that are transforming their society from the inside out. We long to see churches filled to the brim with faithful local Christians who settle down, get married, have kids, start businesses, influence their neighbors and government, and yes, support their own missionaries who go on to expand the kingdom across new frontiers. 

Further, we live every day knowing that our family can only do what we do because there are a hundred faithful families who sacrifice by staying. That is an honor and a duty that we do not take lightly. But this is the way the kingdom has always worked, and it is what it will take to see faithful Christian localism expressed in every corner of the earth. We risk, we suffer, we accept this glorious and frustrating nomadic lifestyle for the sake of those who will one day be able to put down roots. If our families are broken in the pursuit of that vision, then weep with us, help us get wiser, and help us untangle which parts of our suffering were wrongheaded and which parts were noble and good and honor Jesus. 

But don’t so rashly throw out the very thing that has made your calls to Christian localism possible in the first place. After all, if not for the radical, adventurous missionaries of the past, there would be no Christian West to try to save or recover. As our Central Asian locals say, “Don’t cast stones into the spring from which you drink.” A little bit of historic self-awareness would serve the new Christian localists well. Pioneer missionaries are, in fact, those who take the beachheads that one day lead to the establishment of a healthy Christian localism in those contexts.

Friends, the pendulum is swinging hard. The conversation is shifting. And many are in danger of drifting away from the biblical emphasis on missions, risk, and losing everything for the sake of the gospel. Many young men no longer desire to become leaders, and many young families and singles coming to the field are so concerned with mental health and balance that they no longer understand the logic of sacrifice. I find myself longing more and more for older, stranger voices, like that of Samuel Zwemer, to wake us back up to some of these historic but out-of-fashion truths. Yes, men like Zwemer were unbalanced in their own ways, but perhaps hearing from them again is actually what we need to respond to these new challenges – and actually thread the needle right. 

If you’ve never read Zwemer’s address, The Glory of the Impossible, it really is a stirring challenge from a very different era. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here is an excerpt as well:

The unoccupied fields, therefore, are a challenge to all whose lives are unoccupied by that which is highest and best; whose lives are occupied only with the weak things or the base things that do not count. There are eyes that have never been illumined by a great vision, minds that have never been gripped by an unselfish thought, hearts that have never thrilled with passion for another’s wrong, and hands that have never grown weary or strong in lifting a great burden. To such the knowledge of these Christless millions in lands yet unoccupied should come like a new call from Macedonia, and a startling vision of God’s will for them. As Bishop Brent remarks, “We never know what measure of moral capacity is at our disposal until we try to express it in action. An adventure of some proportions is not uncommonly all that a young man needs to determine and fix his manhood’s powers.” Is there a more heroic test for the powers of manhood than pioneer work in the mission field? Here is opportunity for those who at home may never find elbow-room for their latent capacities, who may never find adequate scope elsewhere for all the powers of their minds and their souls. There are hundreds of Christian college men who expect to spend life in practicing law or in some trade for a livelihood, yet who have strength and talent enough to enter these unoccupied fields. There are young doctors who might gather around them in some new mission station thousands of those who “suffer the horrors of heathenism and Islam,” and lift their burden of pain, but who now confine their efforts to some “pent-up Utica” where the healing art is subject to the law of competition and is measured too often merely in terms of a cash-book and ledger. They are making a living; they might be making a life.

Bishop Phillips Brooks once threw down the challenge of a big task in these words: “Do not pray for easy lives; pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you shall be a miracle.” He could not have chosen words more applicable if he had spoken of the evangelization of the unoccupied fields of the world with all their baffling difficulties and their glorious impossibilities. God can give us power for the task. He was sufficient for those who went out in the past, and is sufficient for those who go out today.

Face to face with these millions in darkness and degradation, knowing the condition of their lives on the unimpeachable testimony of those who have visited these countries, this great unfinished task, this unattempted task, calls today for those who are willing to endure and suffer in accomplishing it.

-Zwemer, The Glory of the Impossible

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