Models of Missions and Ministry

Listen with Love

In line with the last post, I am writing about the need to promote world and national missions with a model that unleashes the ordinary Christians in churches. Any other model sets up a system that causes the target audience to be dependent upon outsiders. For example, I have a book titled, When Charity Drives out Dignity, written by a missionary named Glenn Schwartz. It lays out example after example of failed attempts of outside missionaries with pure motivation who came in to rescue the nationals. Many of these efforts failed because the nationals were overly dependent upon Western dollars and ideas.

The Western model of Professionalism and Schoolization has led us to deny the biblical model of Socialization through spiritual communities and empowered Believers with little education. St. Paul was a brilliant and well educated man. However, he consistently down played his credentials to emphasize the power of faith and the Holy Spirit.

I have a Doctorate in Counseling and I have learned some things that are important to treating people with severe problems. However, what I know and what the research from the past forty years shows is how powerfully helpful ordinary people can be when they love and listen to those in emotional pain.

Yes, I have spent the last thirty years training lay care givers to be more effective. However, I carefully avoid teaching all the psychological theories from Freud, Jung and their offspring. I recently listened to the tapes of a Professor at a Christian College and Seminary. He spent 90% of his time teaching a beginning group of ministers and lay volunteers about the in depth psycho-spiritual models of counseling and psychotherapy. I listened in alarm. It was unhelpful and even harmful.

This is one reason it may be dangerous to ask Clinical Therapists to train ministers and Christian laity to care and counsel. Most have been trained to look as "Clients and Patients" who are mentally ill. These folks do need expert intervention, but that is not enough. Research from the past forty years of clinical practice shows deeply hurting people need more than medication and psychology. They also need love and prayer and biblical truth.

There are several people who train lay volunteers to do intensive healing interventions such as inner healing, prayer therapy, formation prayer, theophostics, etc. I am thankful for those interventions and know they can be helpful. However, the techniques are often taught to men and women who are emotionally fragile and unstable. These techniques can never replace listening in love, renewing the mind and mutual support.

The Most Important Factors in Emotional Healing
1. Expert Interventions: A small factor
2. Hope of the Seeker that we can help them: The same as the expert intervention
3. Helper care, empathy, respect: As much as the first two put together
4. Seeker Motivation and Support: More helpful than anything else.





Learn to listen. Learn to pray. Learn to encourage.