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Podcast: The Problem with Modern Missions (Matt Rhodes)

February 14, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

No Shortcuts

In today's episode, Matt Rhodes considers what it should look like to pursue cross-cultural missions with a focus on long-term success and why the American church should be asking itself that very question today.

No Shortcut to Success

No Shortcut to Success

Matt Rhodes

In No Shortcut to Success, author and missionary Matt Rhodes encourages Christians to stop chasing silver-bullet strategies for missions and embrace long-term methods grounded on theological education, clear communication, and a devotion to ministry excellence.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:49 - A Manifesto

Matt Tully
Matt, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Matt Rhodes
I’m really glad to.

Matt Tully
The title of your new book with Crossway is pretty provocative I would say. It’s called No Shortcut to Success: A Manifesto for Modern Missions. I think anyone reading that title could pretty reasonably assume that you see some problems with how missions are often pursued today, that maybe we’re trying to take some shortcuts that are indeed problematic in your mind. Before we get into what some of those shortcuts might be, I want to focus on that word manifesto in the subtitle. In my mind, and maybe in many listener’s minds, it seems to suggest that the problem—whatever it is—is actually pretty severe. Is that the case?

Matt Rhodes
The problems with modern missions have gotten fairly widespread. I think a lot of the larger missions organizations that I’m aware of that are working in most of the unreached world now are following fairly similar approaches to missions, and a lot of those approaches do seem to be taking shortcuts.

Matt Tully
Speak a little bit to your own experience on the mission field. Can you give us a little bit of a context for what you do, where you are, and how it is that you have that inside view as to what’s happening?

Matt Rhodes
I have been on the field for ten years now. I’ve been working in the Muslim world. I’ve been in three countries, and the reason for that being that in the first country I worked in I and all of the other missionaries were invited to leave by the government shortly after we got there.

Matt Tully
Is it safe to assume that the invitation was maybe not as pleasant as you’re making it sound?

Matt Rhodes
It wasn’t an entirely pleasant invitation. Although, as an American citizen you’re not likely to be roughed up by a foreign government, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience. The believers that were left behind in that country faced some pretty severe persecution once the missions community was gone. After that I spent six months in a second country and was able to find a place where I’ve worked since then. I’ve now been here for seven years. I’ve learned two dialects of Arabic now and a tribal language, which is what I’m mostly working in, and it’s pushed some of the Arabic out of my brain at this point, although I still have a very workable level. At this point in ministry, we’ve begun translating through the Bible, and right now we’ve got about 2% of it translated, which is actually a fairly long chunk of text. We’re learning as we’re going, so we’re getting a lot quicker. What we have now is sort of a basic framework for the gospel to help us to share.

Matt Tully
Do you have a wife and kids?

Matt Rhodes
I am married. We got married two years ago. We don’t have any kids yet, but we would be happy for the Lord to give us some.

Matt Tully
Would you say that the country you are ministering in is a closed country? If so, what do you mean by that term?

Matt Rhodes
I would say yes and no. It’s not closed in that there is ostensibly freedom of religion. Ostensibly, people can change their religion at will, and the government does allow people to work openly as missionaries. The country I’m in, though, is divided. There’s one region that is essentially 100% Muslim and there’s another region that is largely Christian and animist. Most of the freedom of religion talk is a sort of compromise between the Christians and the Muslims. In practice, for a Muslim person in this country to come to faith, they will almost certainly endure very substantial persecution—they can be beaten. The four people who came to faith nearest to where I am a few years back were initially sentenced to death until the national government stepped in and didn’t allow that to happen, but they were beaten up pretty badly.

Matt Tully
Is that reflective of some of these local governments that are going to be more extreme in some of those regards, whereas the national government has some kind of international face-saving dynamic where they’re trying to make sure that they are abiding by a broader standard?

Matt Rhodes
There is certainly some face-saving going on. I think also the national government tends to be much more driven by political interests than by religious interests. We, at that point, had had the same president for a number of decades, and basically they don’t want problems to arise between Christians and Muslims, or between any two groups that are in the country.

Matt Tully
I’m sure many people listening have already noticed that you’re not being super explicit and specific with where you are and exactly who you are ministering to and among. And actually, you are using a pseudonym—Matt Rhodes is not your real name. Why is it that you’re doing that? Why do you feel the need to keep a little bit of anonymity there?

Matt Rhodes
Primarily for the sake of local believers. If people do come to put their faith in Christ, unfortunately they’re at a lot more risk than I am. We have a very powerful government and a government, probably rightfully, is very pushy about its citizen’s rights. But for local people, if they were to come to Christ, they would face really substantial persecution potentially, so my entire team operates this way, mostly because we don’t want people being outed.

07:08 - Expectations for Full-Time Missions Work

Matt Tully
Before we jump into some of the concerns that you have—some of the critiques that you have—about the way modern missions is often pursued, I wonder if you could speak a little bit to what your expectations were going into full-time missions work? As you said, you’ve now been at this for more than a decade, so I think it’s probably safe to say that you understand now what the reality is like, especially in a difficult context like what you’re in. So, what were your expectations? Were they realistic before you actually went onto the field?

Matt Rhodes
I had a dose of realism. My missions pastor, before I was sent out, had spent about twenty years in Papua New Guinea planting a church there with his wife and with some other missionaries. I think they did hammer into me that this is going to be long-term work, this is going to be difficult work. I think that there was always a part of me that felt once I had been here a little bit, maybe just through relationships somehow or through close friendships that I made with people, that God would work really quickly and open things up really quickly. That certainly can happen; God is capable of doing that. But that hasn’t mostly been the story of what’s happened here.

Matt Tully
I’ve also found for myself, especially when thinking about years, it’s one thing to acknowledge intellectually beforehand I’m in this for the long haul. Perhaps it’s going to take a decade for me to really make progress in a certain way or for us to start seeing fruit. But that’s very different than actually being there for three, four, or five years and knowing that you’re still only a small way of the way in. Have you felt that a little bit? Maybe you knew it ahead of time, but the experience of it is very different?

Matt Rhodes
I think especially when I started moving from Arabic to learning a tribal language—the tribal language that we were learning was considerably harder than Arabic and it was going to take a number of years to get any kind of real fluency in it—I think there was a sense of Is this ever going to end?

Matt Tully
How proficient are you in Arabic?

Matt Rhodes
My Arabic is highly conversational. I would say I really had mastery of it a few years ago, but I don’t use it as often. Language is a little bit like a sieve—it drips out of your mind slowly. You have to keep pouring it in. At the start of my next term one of my goals is to start slowly recovering it, but because my team is not primarily ministering in Arabic, it’s less of a priority.

09:56 - A Common Shortcut in Missions

Matt Tully
Let’s jump into some of the specific shortcuts that you see being taken around the world. What would you say is maybe the most common one in your experience?

Matt Rhodes
There’s a number of newer methods. Probably the most commonly used method is a method called DMM, which stands for disciple-making movements. There’s a widely circulated missions book called Church Planting Movements that’s very similar; it was released a couple of years before DMM was introduced, and it was based on a lot of the same work and ideas.

Matt Tully
How would you describe DMM? What’s the core idea behind that?

Matt Rhodes
I think with all of these newer movements, and there are others as well, I think, first of all, it’s important to say there are some really good things in them. I’m not trying to come against things; I’m more trying to provide an idea of a correction—what do we want to be doing? So, that being said, I think where almost all of these new methods go awry from the beginning is that there’s just an overwhelming focus on speed and numbers. If you read, for example, the book Church Planting Movements, which was sort of the beginning of a lot of these newer philosophies, it opens by talking about this incredible explosion of people turning to Christ in northern India. There have been a couple of books written about DMM and they open in the same way. They talk about the work of a missionary in northern India who they alleged brought—well, it’s not claimed that he brought over ten million people to Christ, and that number is supposed to still be growing.

Matt Tully
Personally?

Matt Rhodes
Not personally, but through his ministry. In fact, one of the interesting things about this story is that he wasn’t living in India when the movement was supposed to have happened.

Matt Tully
Interesting. Where do you think the emphasis on numbers and speed comes from? Why is that such a priority?

Matt Rhodes
I think partly it’s a very American thing. Americans are disproportionately represented in the mission field. We want to succeed and we want to succeed in really massive ways. Frankly, we see it at home too. When somebody like Rick Warren writes a book about how to develop your church and to make it grow, you’ll see hundreds and thousands of pastors that are buying it because they see how quickly he was able to build his church into an enormous church. Maybe it comes a little, too, from our theology of revival. I think we have this idea that there are certain times when the Spirit just comes in really unusual ways, and we have a sense that there might be keys to unlock that.

Matt Tully
What are some of the specific shortcuts that you see people taking in their pursuit of the speed and the numbers that, for whatever reason, they kind of feel are required or are to be expected?

Matt Rhodes
I’ll name three of them. The first, and probably the biggest one, is that there’s a real lack of preparation. A lot of missionaries get to the field without a very mature understanding of Scripture. I think that lack of preparation only gets worse when they then begin to work, and continue working, without really mastering the language that they’re working in. Partly because the American education system doesn’t focus a lot on learning other languages, it’s really easy for people to underestimate just how well you need to know another language to master it, especially if its not a language that’s much like English. Once you get outside of European languages, it can take an enormous amount of effort to learn a language well enough that you can really participate in spiritual conversations where things are moving quickly and people are emotional and they’re speaking very colloquially. I think a second place where it takes place is that a lot of these newer methods, because they’re so focused on rapid growth, one of the things that they don’t want is in-depth teaching. It’s not that they’re against it, but that just takes too much time. There’s a real push for new churches to be planting new churches which plant new churches, and a lot of recent missions literature has basically stated that every six or nine months churches should be duplicating themselves.

Matt Tully
I would love to go back to that issue of preparation and training. You mentioned that there is sometimes maybe a deficient biblical or theological understanding, on the part of the missionaries, as they go. How common is that? What does that look like in practice? Give us a sense for the things that maybe people don’t know that you think they should know?

Matt Rhodes
Where I am in the Muslim world, one of the things that people really stumble over is the idea of the Trinity. Of course, the Trinity is a mystery. I remember when I was I asked my dad how he understood the trinity, and he looked at me and said With fear. But nevertheless, there are things that we can know and that we need to know in order to help people’s questions. I think at a deeper level, when I was on my way to the field, I was encouraged to not get bogged down in people’s questions—just keep telling stories about Jesus. What that ends up communicating to young missionaries is that people’s questions don’t really matter; they’re just smoke screens. You don’t need to be able to help them through those things. But a lot of times these questions really seize people deeply in their consciences and hearts, and people just can’t get to a place of trusting Christ before their questions are answered.

Matt Tully
Do you feel like for you personally, having experienced an emphasis on telling stories and encouraging people to read the Bible for themselves in groups, did all of that lead to you feeling maybe under prepared in terms of the nuances of theology and of understanding the Bible when you hit the mission field?

Matt Rhodes
I was encouraged on my way to the field not to have any formal theological education. I understand that seminary can be prohibitively expensive for some people, but there are other types of theological education available. I did end up doing some seminary training before I left, and I think it was helpful. I think partly because people who are approaching Christianity from a Muslim point of view have an entirely different set of questions and different set of issues that grip them. I often see younger missionaries trying to share Christ about the same way that they would share with their postmodern friends back home. It just doesn’t generate a response.

Matt Tully
It seems so obvious, at least to me, that you probably need to have a pretty solid grasp of the faith and God’s word yourself before you can teach it to someone else. And not only that, you would probably want to know (and it would be very helpful) to understand the culture and the language of the people that you’re going to. Respond to that. Again, for someone like me coming into this, it feels fairly obvious, and yet that’s not the emphasis and that’s not what people on the field are actually saying. How could they miss that?

Matt Rhodes
I think there are a few things going on. I think part of it is that people get worn out. People initially come and they really do want to master the language, but then after two or three years of hard studying day and night, you’re still struggling to keep pace with your friends when they’re just talking and hanging out. It gets very demoralizing. I think a second thing is that people start to give up on thinking that questions can be answered, especially in the Muslim world. Anywhere you go on the mission field there will be some things that are really going to upset people. In the Muslim world, one of the things that’s very taboo to do is to compare, for example, the Koran with the New Testament. It’s very hard to speak about the Koran in negative or questioning terms without people getting upset, and it’s especially hard to speak about Mohammed in that way. I think people sort of retreat from addressing the things that people already believe and are bringing to the table because they just don’t know how to do it and they assume that maybe the Spirit just isn’t working in that person.

19:48 - Does God Work Differently on the Mission Field?

Matt Tully
One of the things that you note in your book is that sometimes—and maybe even oftentimes—we think that missions is fundamentally different than secular vocations. What do you mean by that, and why is that an issue here?

Matt Rhodes
I think people have an idea that somehow missionaries are on the front line of God’s work in a way that Christians back in the West aren’t, so maybe the Spirit is going to be doing things on the mission field that you wouldn’t expect him to do back home. Back at home if you had maybe just planted a church and these people are six months old in their faith, you wouldn’t be encouraging them to plant another church and to take control of it and to start shepherding people on their own. Actually, we would probably be really scared to have someone who was only six months old in their faith shepherding our youth as a youth pastor because we know what can go wrong. But I think one of the things that people feel happens when you get to the field is there is just something different, that the Spirit is moving there in a way that he’s not back at home.

Matt Tully
Is there any truth to that notion, or do you feel like that is pretty much wholly misguided when it comes to how we think about God’s work on the mission field?

Matt Rhodes
I don’t know if it’s wholly misguided; I would say it’s primarily misguided. Historically, even in the Bible, God works in different ways in different places and different times. God is a God who you can’t put in a box, but whether you’re on the field or back at home, God’s primarily going to be working through what theologians call ordinary grace. It could be that there are times when God answers more prayers or when he’s doing more miracles. Even in the book of Acts Peter does this incredible miracle (Acts 4), but it’s not until he speaks and explains what’s happened that people answer. It’s just this ordinary sharing of information—This is what it means to believe in Jesus, and this is what God has done—that ends up leading people to Christ. I think that especially in field settings people expect that won’t be the case.

Matt Tully
That connects to something I feel like I’ve observed, both related to missions and related to all kinds of other things, whether it’s how you go about preaching or teaching in the context of a church, or just sharing the gospel with a friend. It’s that response that people can point to a specific example, maybe an anecdote, where God did work in a powerful and big way, and then they can say that method or that approach that someone is criticizing as not being very biblical or not being very wise, they’ll say that it is fine to use and maybe even preferable to use. How do you think about that kind of argumentation? Again, I’m sure that many people can point to examples from the mission field of some of these strategies or methods, or maybe a de-emphasis on learning the language—and still say Look, this guy had so much success. God used him in such powerful ways. What would your response be to that?

Matt Rhodes
I think that absolutely happens. We don’t want to fall into thinking that just because something worked once that it’s the right way because God works through good and through evil. He works through wisdom and through foolishness. God can work through Jonah, who is a disobedient prophet. He is able to speak through the mouth of a donkey. I’m not trying to compare people to donkeys. What I’m trying to say is that the fact that something happens once, that doesn’t mean that this is a way that we should be choosing to operate. A lot of modern missions literature is suggesting that people primarily come to Christ now through miracles and through visions, and we have to be read to preach, as Paul says, in season and out of season. What if your miracle doesn’t happen? What are you going to do? Because you still carry a message.

Matt Tully
Some of this conversation about preparation and even just the way that we think missions work is different from other kinds of work that we as Christians do, it connects to this idea of whether or not we should view missionaries as professionals. Should they approach their work as professionals? This kind of implies a level of intentionality beforehand and training beforehand and the development of some skills that they would need on the field—just like a doctor would need or a teacher might need in another context. What do you think about that conversation? Should missionaries be professionals?

Matt Rhodes
There are two things that I want to say in favor of professionalism. The first is that throughout the Bible we see God working in human things. Even in Jesus’ ministry, we’re told that he took on human form, and it’s through his human touch and his human words and his human relationships that people find healing and that people are brought to faith. We can’t despise these human parts of ministry. Actually, to do that it leads us somewhere close to an early Christian heresy called Gnosticism. So, we, as missionaries, need to have the ability to explain things really clearly.

25:48 - The Importance of Language Learning

Matt Tully
In your book you share a story of your struggle to learn Arabic, and even the pressure that you started to feel to stop focusing on the language learning. Can you share a little bit about what happened there and how that all played out?

Matt Rhodes
When I went to the field, because my missions pastor had a lot of field experience, he really camped on the benefit of language learning. Something that I would love to say for people who don’t buy what I’m trying to say here is that whatever your approach is, a little bit of extra fluency probably can’t hurt. Even if you do think that most of what happens—mostly that the Spirit is just going to work through dreams, or mostly the Spirit is just going to work through miracles—it still can’t hurt you to have really strong language. I was near the end of my first year on the field, so my Arabic wasn’t strong. Because Arabic is so different from English, it will usually take somewhere between two and five years for people to really master it. My team leader’s overseer told me that he thought it was wrong for me to be spending so much time learning Arabic because there were English speakers in the city that we were living in and I could be sharing the gospel with them. Ultimately, I told him that I couldn’t do that because my sending church would object. He had the respect to bow to the wishes of my sending church, so I was allowed to continue. But I’ve also seen missionaries in the same place who were asked to leave teams, or who were pushed off the field.

Matt Tully
How do you strike that right balance? Just taking the devil’s advocate side here, and not to paint anyone as a devil in this conversation, but I could see someone saying that there is a danger or temptation for someone to spend so much time just in their study—learning from their books—that they’re not actually out there engaging with real people and they kind of lose sight of the ultimate call of a missionary. The ultimate vision of a missionary is not to learn a language, it’s not to learn about a culture; it’s to actually make disciples and see people come to faith. So, how do you figure out where that balance is?

Matt Rhodes
It’s not an easy balance to figure out. I think nobody going to the field is going to acquire the kind of fluency that native speakers have until they’ve been there for probably over seven to ten years. You can definitely enter into ministry before that point. In fact, the term apostle existed in Greek even before Jesus was born. The word isapostolos, and this was somebody that would be comparable to an ambassador. So when Jesus is sending them out, he’s basically telling them On behalf of my kingdom, I want you to go out and share my message. What you’re looking for as a language learner is at what points do I have the facility with the language to be able to share that message in a compelling way? Once you’re able to do that, than absolutely; you need to start pulling back from language learning, even if you’re not perfect. But that point takes a lot longer for people to get to. I think in our own lives when we think of pastors who have affected us, or books that have affected us, these tend to be highly articulate people. I can’t think of how many of my friends have been touched by the work of a C. S. Lewis or a John Piper, but we forget that these are people who are not just fluent, they’re articulate. The words are a part of the message, and the words really do matter.

29:48 - Thoughts on the State of Ministry to Muslims

Matt Tully
Maybe as a final couple of questions, reflect on the context that you’re ministering in primarily—the Muslim world. What is it right now that makes you feel a little bit discouraged or is maybe really difficult in the broad Muslim missions endeavor? What are some things that are really exciting and encouraging right now?

Matt Rhodes
I think probably for the two things that discourage me—one would be how short term people’s approach is. People in the Muslim world—and maybe especially where I am in the Muslim world, because I know that there’s a lot of variety in the Muslim world—they face enormous pressure coming to Christ and there is enormous fear. Specifically with the tribes I work with, if you were to become a Christian, it’s likely that your family will be taken away from you. That’s a huge burden for people to bear, and it’s not an easy thing for them even to begin looking at another way of thinking about things. So I think just the short-termness of people’s time on the field is discouraging. And, frankly, it is discouraging to me just to see the challenges that people face as they begin looking at the claims of Christ and asking Can I really imagine that this thing is true even though everybody I’ve known and respected says that it’s not? What encourages me—I think I have been so encouraged by the faith of people who I work with. Even when people are ministering in ways where I would say that’s maybe not the wisest way to minister, I just run into some incredible saints on the field. It also encourages me to see that God is at work, and despite all the challenges, you see people who do come to Christ and who do have just a beautiful, vibrant faith, and they hold onto it with everything that they’ve got. It’s a reminder that the God that we serve is a real God and he’s living and he’s active.

Matt Tully
Matt, thank you so much for taking some time today to speak to us from the field and to help us understand a little bit better the state of modern missions right now and ways that we can all be praying and supporting you all in your important work.

Matt Rhodes
I’m so glad to be a part of this. Thank you for making the time to talk to me.

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