Courageous, Original, Constructive Leadership-needed today!

Rufus Anderson is known as the Grand Strategist of American Missions.

From 1832 to 1875 he served as the foreign secretary or leader of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.  Anderson was a student of mission policy and strategy. He was (you guessed it) the equivalent of a denominational missions leader – an administrator. Some might call him a missions bureaucrat.  (Oh brother – tell me no!)   How many denominational administrators (bureaucrats) would get the following complement?

Nearly 40 years after his ministry ended, Robert E. Speer referred to Anderson as “the most original, the most constructive, and the most courageous student of missionary policy whom this country has produced, and one of the two most aggressive and creative administrators of missionary work.” (Beaver, 9)

So what was so outstanding about Anderson that he received such accolades? He was not a missionary – he stayed behind and supported them.  And what will it take for the next round of  denominational and mission entity leaders to get the same type of accolades as did Anderson?

A Quick Look At Some of Anderson’s Innovations

Anderson challenged the accepted missionary trends such as viewing “the civilization of the heathen” as the measure of effective missions and evangelism.  Rufus Anderson believed it a grave mistake to make the transformation of civilization the aim of the mission. (Beaver, 13)

Under Anderson the Three Self Strategy (self-governing, self supporting, self-propagating) of indigenous church planting became the norm.   He called the church to a simple spiritual mission of proclamation of the gospel so as to win souls, gather them into churches, and enlist them in the same mission. (Beaver, 13) He challenged missionaries to raise up indigenous leadership and to foster the development of churches on the mission field according to the style of the people, not according to Western models and to do so at their (indigenous population’s) own expense.

He never used the word “Glocal” but he was an advocate of the concept in that he saw foreign and domestic missions as “departments” of the same field. Thus, he said that no special call was needed for the workers in the “foreign missions department.”  Such was  a courageous stance and a diversion from the norm of elevating missionaries to god-like status.

He did not hold missionaries up as some special class but viewed them as volunteers, men and women obeying Christ out of a deep love for the Savior and out of the duty to obey. He highly esteemed missionaries and saw the role of the Mission Board as to provide minimal control and to ease their burden to enable missionaries to spend their greatest possible efforts on reaching the lost.  He saw the “control” of missionaries as largely guided by their consciences and the mutual accountability of missionaries one to another.  He encouraged missionaries to take initiative and to rely upon Jesus.

There was an impatience and passion about Anderson that was palpable.  His was a perception of the fullness of time and the demand of God’s calling upon the church of his day.   He perceived the timeliness of circumstances and opportunities in his epoch which created a unique window of openness, by God’s providence, for Christians to reach and evangelize all nations.

Such leadership is what I’m praying for today.  If we ever needed Courageous, Original, Constructive Leadership- it is needed today!

In fact, my fear is that if an extraordinary level of courageous, original, constructive leadership does not arise to lead us through the current limited openness of this moment, God forbid that we lose the opportunity which is within our grasp to actually see all nations reached, in our lifetimes.

Lord raise up courageous, original, constructive leadership of the ilk of Rufus Anderson.