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From Luke’s Journal February 2024 | Vol.29 No.1 | Missions and Sacrificial Service

I always thought that if I wanted to be a good little Christian girl, then I would have to become a missionary.  I envisaged living in a foreign country, learning a new language, wearing clothes that I might not normally choose to wear, frequently feeling out of my comfort zone, yet all the while serving in this new culture with a beatific smile.  When God led me to study medicine (after a few years as a computer nerd), I added a stethoscope to my beatific picture.  It was a thrilling dream, filled with glamorous visions of how service-minded and self-sacrificial I was going to be.

In proactive pursuit of this missionary dream, during my internship I undertook Intermed South Australia’s three-week International Health and Development course¹ – an intensive course designed to upskill developed-world Christian health professionals to go beyond their normal scope in developing-world contexts.  A few months later, I went on my first short-term medical missions trip to Indonesia and Timor Leste with Intermed.  The following year, I began specialty training in Australia, but also co-led the next Intermed short-term team to Indonesia.  Over the next several years of specialty training, I continued to co-lead the Intermed teams on short-term trips to places like Vanuatu and Timor Leste.  I really enjoyed spending two weeks of my annual leave every year doing missions.  It was often the pinnacle of my year!

In the course of my co-leading responsibilities, however, I came across some preparatory resources for short-term missions trips called The Next Mile: Short-term Missions for the Long Haul².  They pointed out that short-term trips are usually treated like a climactic event that ends once the trip ends.  Participants prepare hard, are filled with anticipation before, have an amazing time during, are deeply impacted and changed by the experience, but then they return home and it all eventually fades into nothing much more than a precious memory.  The Next Mile’s emphasis, instead, was on ensuring post-trip follow-through and continuing discipleship in the back-home lives of the short-termers.  They introduced me to this concept of ‘living missionally’ in my everyday life.  They challenged my attitude that ‘mission’ was something I did once or twice per year and only when I went overseas!

I began to realise that traditional church lingo on ‘missions’ always conflated it with ‘overseas missions’.  It was so deeply presumed that ‘mission’ was always overseas, that people stopped specifying.  Which is fine, except for the subtle messages it tends to send.  Such that you are only ‘on mission’ when you are not in your home country… and that you don’t have to do missionary things until you go…and that if you are planning to go, you must prepare for it like it is a pinnacle event…and when you come back, you will go back to ‘normal’… and when you come back you will frequently be asked to speak of your overseas experiences because your ‘normal’ life is just not glamourous enough to inspire people to greater kingdom living. 

“They introduced me to this concept of ‘living missionally’ in my everyday life.  They challenged my attitude that ‘mission’ was something I did once or twice per year and only when I went overseas!”

It was challenging to recognise that I was conflating my intermittent medical missions trips with being a good little Christian doctor.  What about in my own backyard of Australia, which is where ninety percent of my life is?  I began to understand that living missionally is about ALWAYS being on mission, to whomever happens to be at my elbow, regardless of whether I am travelling or not.  The principles I learned through the Saline Process³ helped me resolve this conundrum for my life in Australia, but this is a story that I already shared in another Luke’s Journal article⁴ (On Becoming Salty and Shiny, 2020), so I won’t share it again. 

The conundrum that I now face is that church folk continue to put overseas mission on a pedestal.  Sadly, there is not enough exhortation to live missionally all day, every day, wherever we are.  I was at a CMDFA gathering recently, where the conversation began to revolve around who had served overseas and where and what they did while they were there.  The students in the room were suitably impressed and were keen to emulate these kinds of experiences.  I was acutely aware that we were subtly perpetuating myths about what it means to serve God as a Christian doctor or dentist.  I was embarrassed that my own story of a recent trip to Vanuatu was what precipitated this vein of conversation!

Wikipedia helpfully summarises missional living as “a Christian practice to adopt the thinking, behaviors, and practices of a missionary in everyday life, in order to engage others with the gospel message. … Traditionally, Christians have seen mission as either a special event (e.g., a one-week series of meetings, or a conference) or as a full-time job for a few individuals (e.g., sending a missionary to a foreign country for several years to convert new people to Christianity).  Missional living is seen as a way of life for all Christians at all times … emphasizing that all Christians should be involved in the Great Commission of Jesus Christ” ⁵.

“In the Great Commission⁶ of Matthew 28:18 – 20, we tend to emphasise the word ‘go’, but in the original Greek, the imperative phrase is actually ‘make disciples’”! 

In the Great Commission⁶ of Matthew 28:18 – 20, we tend to emphasise the word ‘go’, but in the original Greek, the imperative phrase is actually ‘make disciples’!  When we meet a doctor or dentist who has gone overseas as part of their career for Christ, we often immediately think of them as a potential speaker for CMDFA meetings.  But, when was the last time we got excited about someone who stayed at home and quietly got on with the task of making disciples?  Do we even know what making disciples looks like for Christian doctors and dentists?  Has anyone ever shown us how?  Maybe that is why overseas missions gets the recurrent limelight – it is visible, tangible, doable, and commonly celebrated as exciting and adventurous.  My own life, with its current count of twenty-two overseas medical missions trips, is certainly guilty of sensationalising the overseas aspect of service to Jesus!

Most of us are NOT called to long-term overseas mission.  Some of us might be called to one or two short-term trips.  Others (like myself) might be called to several decades worth of short-term stints to various countries.  But ALL of us are called to live missionally all day, every day, wherever we are.  Figuring out what that means in our current circumstances is a conversation that I think Jesus is very excited to have with each of us, all day, every day!

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References

1. Intermed SA.  Intermed update – November 2022. Available from: https://intermed.org.au/
2. The Next Mile. The Next Mile: Short-term missions for the long haul. 2020. Available from: http://thenextmile.squarespace.com/
3. Christian Medical and Dental Fellowship of Australia. The Saline Process. 2023. Available from: https://www.cmdfa.org.au/saline-process
4. Kirubakaran S. On becoming salty and shiny.  Luke’s Journal, 2020, 25(1): 21 – 22.  Available from: https://lukesjournalcmdfa.com/2020/12/23/on-becoming-salty-and-shiny-dr-sneha-kirubakaran/
5. Wikipedia contributors. Missional living. Wikipedia. 2023. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Missional_living&oldid=1156858422. Accessed November 20, 2023.
6. Matthew 28:18-20 (New International Version): “Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age”.”