Lausanne World Pulse – Perspectives Articles – Living Simply and Humbly in Ministry

By Samantha Baker Evens
August 2009

Aquinas was walking with the Pope through one of the grand cathedrals of his day. The Pope gestured to the art and beauty all around and said, “Behold, Master Thomas, no longer can Peter (the Church) say, ‘Silver and gold have I none.’ And Aquinas replied, ‘It is true, holy father, nor can she say to the lame man, ‘Take up your bed and walk.’”

Missionary Affluence
Western missionary wealth is a barrier to the gospel of Christ. St. Francis is attributed as saying, “It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.” The implication is that our lives preach the gospel more loudly than anything we say or even our “ministry activities.”

Missionaries are aware of this on the level of personal morality and devotional habits, but have often failed to make the connection that our wealthy lifestyles and how we use money are part of the gospel we are communicating. Often, our lifestyle inadvertently preaches a gospel of wealth instead of the good news of the Christ born in desperate poverty (Luke 2:24), who became a refugee (Matthew 2:13) and a homeless man (Matthew 8:20), who told his followers to not take anything with them on their missions (Matthew 10:9) and to give all their wealth away to the poor (Matthew 12:33).

As leaders, our primary goal for first-term missionaries is to give them every chance to bond with the host culture.

The sad consequences of our unexamined lifestyles include creating dependency on the foreign mission instead of authentic national expressions of ministry. It creates barriers to intimate friendships between foreign missionaries and members of the host culture, barriers to missionary bonding and understanding the host culture leading to premature foreign missionary attrition, and unsustainable or un-replicable models of ministry.

Cultivate a Vision for Simplicity and Humility
As Western missionaries and sending agencies, we need to break our own cultural taboo against talking about money and give practical support to missionaries in adopting appropriate standards of living in host countries.

Implicit in this is a denial of the false assumption that how we live does not affect our ministry or mission. It has been a long time since westerners routinely lived where we work; we are often accustomed to separating our work and home lives. This leads to otherwise moral people justifying unethical decisions in business because “that is the way business works.” We can also falsely assume that how we live at home does not affect our work or ministry. Often missionaries, faced with issues of poverty and wealth, create two separate worlds for themselves.

They have a home set up with a lifestyle that they would reasonably expect in their home country; however, it is a very affluent standard of living in their host country. Because it is hard to relate cross-socio-economically, the families end up relating only with other westerners. To deal with the dissonance, the missionary doesn’t invite nationals to the family home.

One of my teammates had a candid conversation with a national pastor who remarked that “those missionaries are happy to preach in my church, but I have never been in their home.” The pastor’s conclusion was that the missionaries looked down on the nationals; however, I suspect that the missionaries were ashamed of their relative wealth and unsure of how to reconcile it with their ministry.

Being a guest in a foreign culture is an experience that affects every aspect of our lives, and therefore creates an opportunity to re-examine our unspoken cultural assumptions and to re-integrate our lives in a way that is often not possible in our home country. Although far from having arrived at perfection in this area ourselves, the InnerCHANGE community has found it useful to cultivate a vision for simplicity and humility when we enter a host culture. We try to take on a posture of learning from our hosts, as well as a vulnerability and reliance upon our hosts, as we see modeled in Matthew 10.

The following suggested guidelines for missionaries are meant to offer practical ways to live simply and humbly in a host culture.

Samantha Baker Evens has been a member of the InnerCHANGE community for the last eleven years in San Francisco, Australia, and (currently) Cambodia. She is married to Chris and has two small sons.