These church-planting missionaries minister by planting the first churches, nurturing new Christians to maturity, and training lay leaders for ministry. These developing movements should then select, under God's mighty hand, their own local leaders who have proven themselves through Christian ministry. In this age of international contact missions leaders' vision is frequently skewed by their experience with the poor. What frequently grips them on these first forays into poverty-stricken areas is not the lostness of people without the Gospel or the power of the Gospel to overcome the bondage of sin but the great disparity between the rich and the poor. Missions thus is increasingly driven by a response to poverty rather than by an understanding of lostness.
Money then becomes the tool by which Western control is superimposed over missions churches.
Increasingly, missions leaders operate as superintendents of missions workers, making decisions about issues that they can only partially understand from afar, while leaders in new churches learn to be subservient to those who pay them. The Western temptation is to conceptualize and organize the missionary task on an economic level that can only be sustained by Western support and oversight. Peter Pan is a story of a boy who never grew up. Receive the Monthly Missiological Reflections by e-mail. See the complete list of Monthly Missiological Reflections.