March/April '98

These agencies “go out there and give technical support to the Standard agencies and national churches.” These are the Post-Second World War “service agencies” such as Mission Aviation Fellowship and Gospel Recordings, but the category would certainly include some earlier across-the-board helping agencies such as the American Bible Society, Wycliffe Bible Translators, and the huge missionary radio networks.

In view of the great diversity in this category we asked for two responses. One is from what is probably the world’s largest Protestant mission agency, serving in 90 countries and drawing support and workers from 67 countries—Wycliffe Bible Translators. The other is the Mission Aviation Fellowship, which has been helpful to a very large number of other agencies and has accumulated an insight into the larger cause of mission perhaps like no other. —RDW

Service Missions Represented Response One Arthur Lightbody, Director, Public Relations, Wycliffe USA

Strengths of Wycliffe

Wycliffe’s mission statement makes it clear that Wycliffe is a Service Mission. The statement reads, “Wycliffe’s mission is to glorify God in obedience to the Great Commission through a unique strategy that integrates Scripture translation, scholarship and service so that people will have access to God’s Word in their own language.”

One of Wycliffe founder William Cameron Townsend’s five principles was, “Accept people as they are. Serve them, friend or foe.” Thus, “Uncle Cam” demonstrated this in his pioneering work in Tetelcingo, learning their Aztec language, eating their food and identifying with their needs. Working with local people, he developed vegetable gardens, a water system, and improved roads. Wycliffe strives to maintain that service mind-set today. Along with translation efforts, translators continue to be involved in such community development efforts as literacy, agricultural and health projects.

Singular purpose. Wycliffe’s members work in close association with its sister organization, the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). SIL trains Wycliffe members and others in the tools of linguistic analysis in order to document languages and engage in translation and literacy efforts. SIL and Wycliffe have maintained a clear focus in order to accomplish the language-related goals of Bible translation and literacy for minority peoples. This has helped to make Wycliffe successful.

Broad constituency. Because of not looking to one institution to provide financial support for its members but to God to provide financially through individuals and churches across denominational boundaries, Wycliffe is less affected by particular current focuses of any one church or denomination.

Weaknesses of Wycliffe

Although Wycliffe has a high level of credibility among Christians in the United States, Wycliffe is not always understood. Wycliffe sometimes receives criticism because its translators, as part of the academic community, for example, produce linguistic papers for conferences. These types of activities help to strengthen their credibility as academics and with governments, and also provide better quality in the translation of the Bible.

However, translators are sometimes asked, “Shouldn’t you be preaching the Word?” Or, “Why are they working with non-Christians in academic work?” In the academic setting, translators hear the opposite, “Why are you wasting your time translating the Bible?”

Also, being an interdenominational mission there is no automatic, natural, denominational link. Wycliffe is sometimes perceived as not working under the church. Wycliffe is addressing the issue of being neither a Congregational-Direct Mission nor a Standard Mission. Wycliffe is continually reworking its strategies to work in closer cooperation with local congregations and denominations in their sending force and with national congregations and denominations in the mission fields of the world.

Interdependence With Other Spheres

Wycliffe often relates closely with Standard Missions in a field context. As translations are completed, these groups use them as tools for their evangelization and discipleship efforts. In some cases the Standard Mission missionaries have received our (SIL) training to do translation for the language groups with which their Standard Missions work. In many cases, Wycliffe translators also provide on-going consultant help for their efforts.

Wycliffe also relates closely to national churches. Now that many groups are reached, the resulting national churches often are requesting assistance in translation. In many of these cases the translations are being completed by “mother tongue” speakers or other nationals in that country, sometimes with Wycliffe funding. By now, Wycliffe works in cooperation with national Bible translation organizations in 18 countries, providing training, consultant help and encouragement. This is in addition to long-standing relationships with the older, established global-level Bible agencies.

Wycliffe translators have worked with the Short-Term Missions group YWAM. Around the world YWAMers have been involved in encouraging use of Wycliffe translations. Recently, Wycliffe USA developed a relationship with Teen Mania.

Wycliffe is working with Congregational-Direct Missions in providing a Guatemala tour program and is seeking to provide ways of expanding these types of opportunities. Wycliffe Associates, the support ministry of Wycliffe, works closely with church congregations to provide construction and other opportunities.

Service Missions Response Two Max Myers Immediate Past President, MAF (Mission Aviation Fellowship)

Strengths of a Service Mission

In 1998 Mission Aviation Fellowship reaches the 52-year mark as an organization. Are we “getting old”? Some 52-year-old people are energetic and entrepreneurial, running fast, bright-eyed with the excitement of significance…at the prime of life. Others have settled into a repetitive routine of status quo. They don’t like change, and are increasingly drifting into the background, hardly noticeable any more. The cutting edge of life has passed them by.

So it can be with Service Missions...and even perhaps with the mission movement as a whole.

Beyond the basic and necessary requirement of its people in respect to godliness, commitment and obedience, a Service Mission is its strongest when the service it is providing is vitally needed and strategic, and is provided efficiently and in warm and close harmony with those who are being served! Repetitive, ongoing work of decreasing strategy will be reflected in a lowered corporate morale. A mediocre status quo is not descriptive of a strong Service Mission.

The strength of a Service Mission, then, is in its staying contemporary, in being like the men of Issachar who understood the times and knew what Israel should do!

Mission agencies are often unaware of the various kinds of services which could be offered to them. In MAF’s case we have found ourselves having to “market” new technologies which have potential to multiply the effectiveness of mission work. In this the Service Mission must be pro-active. It will probably have to research, evaluate and “market” new and vital services. Without this pro-activity, the passing of time can render its product and its modality of decreasing strategic value.

Weaknesses of a Service Mission

Inherent in traditional Service Missions is the fact that, to a significant extent, the work is non-participatory in the primary sense of mission. For example, pilots can see themselves as simply delivering freight and mail, transporting people, evacuating patients, etc. The front line work of mission, to which they felt called, is done by others. The service provider is often far from the front line. The blessing is “vicarious” or indirect and second-hand. When pressures come, the question inevitably comes to mind, “Is it all worth it? Is it worth the cost we are paying?” The generation of today wants (or demands) direct, personal participation, not simply indirect contribution.

It is urgent that we realize what we are really doing. Thus, it was a significant day some years ago when Art Glasser said to me, “Max, you must realize that MAF is not really a ministry in aviation. It is a ministry in technology. It just happens that aviation has been the technology which has been so strategic in the past 40 or so years.”

Another significant day was when one of the country’s major funding personalities said to me, “The flying of expensive foreign missionaries in very expensive airplanes over mission fields which are 100 years old...just doesn’t cut it with us any more.” Such comments, if not altogether correct, have been helpful stimuli for the changes we have initiated in recent years.

Thus, our recent expansion into Information Technology with its E-Mail connectivity, electronic conferencing and web page provision has markedly increased our service to mission agencies.

On this well-established foundation we are now hard at work developing a service to provide a delivery system for “distance” non-formal education and leadership development. These things are new and exciting products in mission. There are more to come.

MAF’s traditional work in aviation has been interestingly described as a “taxi-rank.” We establish a service for people who want it and can afford to use it. Relationships within this type of operation could become more “business/client” than “mission.” Not so the work of today and of tomorrow.

The present day contains for us a move away from pure service to “alliances” and close interdependent co-operation...far from the taxi-rank mode of operation. We are, for instance, in a new formal relationship with Development Associates International and Global Mapping International, an alliance which will make a strategic contribution to leadership development within the church in the majority world. Is this the role of Mission Aviation Fellowship? It is the role of the MAF of today...and tomorrow.

Our aviation programs continue in their vital significance in mission, some of them in a mode not significantly different from past years. Others show marked change. But in our newer work we will lower our flag over the taxi-rank, “business/client” mode of operation to become more a “participant” in strategy-setting, in actual ministry, in the thrill and joy of the first-hand blessing of tomorrow’s mission.

Service Missions should be thinking long thoughts, always researching new “products,” refining old products and methods, closely scrutinizing everything traditional. In a resource-limited arena, they should be prepared to close old doors, to transition out of some programs, to celebrate with wonder what God has allowed us to do over many years and to move on to different, equally challenging, even more strategic things.

We try to keep squarely in the center of our minds that to be in service, to be servants, particularly in a ‘relational’ mode, sounds a lot like the earthly role of the One who called us into the privilege of following Him.

Editorial Comment on Service Missions

I would say that Wycliffe classifies as a Service Mission for reasons in addition to those stated. Sure, it is out to “serve” God and man. But, specifically—especially in its origin—it is and was set up to serve the Standard Missions. Only where the latter have been uninterested in or unaware of the need of Bible translation has Wycliffe gone ahead on its own, hoping that some Standard Mission will come along and make good use of the newly translated Scriptures—which is Wycliffe’s unique contribution to the cause.

The Standard Missions thus can lean on Service Missions whose specialized services aid and abet their all-purpose work. Likewise, local congregations in this country constantly lean on specialized service organizations which offer them new English translations of the Bible, specialized training for their various ministries, Sunday school literature, edifying radio and television programs, etc.

One difference between the home front and the foreign fields is that “the church” on the mission field may start out barren of many of the luxurious features of the U.S. church. I speak of women’s fellowships, youth groups, Sunday Schools—and the essential literature undergirding such acitivities. Few missions, for example, are big enough to do for themselves what the major missionary radio ministries do. SIM is big enough to sponsor its own major radio station, ELWA, which for many years has served many other missions as a Service Mission in its own right. Gradually, however, even interdenominational seminaries have appeared in most mission fields. Gradually, many of the technical aspects of broad-service Standard Missions are being provided by jointly operated institutions or other service entities.

It is worth noting that the Standard Agencies can do their work to some great extent with or without the specialized Service Missions. But it would be unwise for most Service Missions to suppose they could operate without other agencies involved in planting and nurturing churches.

For example, Child Evangelism Fellowship would be wasting its time winning children if other agencies were not making sure that those children—and their parents—were able to join a local church in their area. It is not good enough simply to go out and “feed the children,” whether you are feeding them food or Bible knowledge. Reality is more complicated than that. Sometimes, unfortunately, literature missions or technical services are presented in the light of being “all that is necessary.” Thus, the Standard Missions can often helpfully lean on specialized agencies, while specialized agencies must depend on the existence of church-planting agencies for lasting impact.

One of the greatest “services” being rendered to the mission fields of the world today is the Jesus Film ministry of Campus Crusade. But without the existing local, accountable fellowships of believers there already, or formed afterward, that ministry would have a far less lasting impact. Campus Crusade does not need to be a church to help create small fellowships which grow into churches.

In a similar way the immense missionary radio ministries (which are Service Missions, and not churches in themselves) have become greatly skilled in both planting churches and building existing churches rather than assuming that all you need to do is to preach the Gospel to masses of individuals “out there” in the radio audience. U.S. domestic radio ministries are not as far along in this regard as are HCJB, TWR (Trans World Radio), FEBC (Far East Broadcasting Co.), and ELWA overseas—four highly sophisticated technical ministries which work together as a single global “air force” to accompany the ground troops of the Standard Missions and their related church movements. —RDW

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