Make disciples wherever Life Happens
by Dale Losch, president of Crossworld
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“I want to impact the world for Jesus, but I don’t want to do it your way.”
My 22-year-old son, Joel, had just spoken into my world, but I’m not sure I was listening. After all, he was fresh out of college and right at the front end of figuring out life.
He was idealistic. I was realistic.
He was adventuresome. I was grounded.
He hadn’t even landed his first “real” job yet. I had just been named the President of Crossworld, the missionary-sending organization that my wife Jerusha and I had joined twenty years earlier.
Joel would learn soon enough that the well-worn tracks of the so-called “modern-day missionary movement,” carved into the soil by godly men and women over the past 200 years, were in fact tried and true and worthy of his allegiance as well.
Jerusha and I first sensed God nudging us toward cross-cultural ministry in 1986 during my third year as a student at Dallas Theological Seminary. Among other things, God used the powerful preaching and teaching of a number of great missionary communicators. One was a man by the name of George Murray whose message from Luke 15 on the prodigal son I remember to this day. Speaking to some 800 seminary students gathered in the hallowed halls of Chafer Chapel, he said: “Many of you say that you are willing to go, but you’re planning to stay. Maybe more of you should be planning to go, and willing to stay.”
That moment marked the beginning of my own journey to the nations. By my final year of seminary, Jerusha and I had settled on France as our future destination and on Crossworld as the missionary-sending organization that would get us there. We attended their four-week training for new missionaries, raised $3,000 in monthly financial support, and were on the plane headed for France as full-time vocational missionaries just one year after graduation.
Now twenty years later, my firstborn son, who had made that journey to the nations with his parents as a two-year-old child, was telling me that he wanted to make that journey again, but that he didn’t want to travel by the same path. He didn’t want to go to seminary, apply to a mission organization, raise support, and become a full-time, vocational religious worker. He wanted to make a real difference in the real world by getting a “real job” — not that mine wasn’t real, but it certainly wasn’t typical of most people.
I wasn’t the least bit hurt or threatened by my son’s desire to forge a different path. I knew that he loved and respected us in our missionary vocation, and was not passing judgment on our way. He just wanted to find a different way. But to be honest, I was frustrated — not so much by his desire as by my own inability as the leader of an organization committed to impacting the world with God’s glory, to offer a pathway to people like my son.
Joel is not alone. He represents a vast, largely untapped source of godly people of all ages who want to make a difference for Jesus in this world without having to follow the worn and often rutted paths of the missionary movement as we have known it. Dare we admit, even believe, that there is another way, a different way — maybe even a better way to engage the lost world for the glory of God?
Audacious though it may sound, I believe there is a better way as we look to the future, and I am committed to discovering it.
This is in no way an indictment of the former ways. Rather, it is recognition that the world today is a vastly different place than it was even twenty years ago. The migration of nations, the rise of a global missionary force, the rapid growth of urban populations, the development of a global economy, the explosion in technology, and the restriction on religious activity in many countries are just a few of the realities that demand we reexamine our model.
To keep on doing things the way we’ve always done them when the world and its people have so drastically changed is both naïve and arrogant. Naïve to assume that the same approach in a radically different context will continue to work. And arrogant to assume that we have no need to learn and grow in our approach to making disciples of all nations.
