The Missionary Heart

And how shall they hear without a preacher? and how shall they preach, except they be sent? ROMANS 10:14–15

Simpson wanted to go to China. His family circumstances prevented it, and he never went anywhere as a missionary. So he spent the rest of his life sending other people, and by the time he died there were several hundred of them scattered across places he had prayed for by name and never seen.

The obligation is the whole church’s

His starting conviction was that the Great Commission was not addressed to specialists.

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. MATTHEW 28:19

In Simpson’s day, foreign missions was largely the concern of denominational boards, staffed by highly trained men, funded through official channels, and regarded by most ordinary church members as something other people did. He thought this arrangement had no scriptural basis and was producing a fraction of the workers required. His alternative was to make missions the business of the whole church — every member either going, sending, or praying, and none exempt.

Practical machinery

What distinguishes Simpson from other men with the same burden is that he built the machinery. He founded a training school in 1882 — the first Bible institute in North America — on a deliberately unconventional principle. Seven years of classical education was an insuperable barrier for most people with a genuine call, and Simpson judged that it was not necessary. Give ordinary believers a thorough grounding in the Scriptures and practical training, in about two years, and get them to the field. The idea was widely criticised as lowering the standard. It has since been copied by nearly every Bible college in the world. He also organised the sending. The Alliance operated on faith lines — no guaranteed salaries, no debt, no appeals for money in the ordinary sense — and it prioritised what Simpson called the neglected fields: places where no one else was working.

Yea, so have I strived to preach the gospel, not where Christ was named, lest I should build upon another man’s foundation. ROMANS 15:20

That verse governed his strategy. Where the gospel had already gone, others could build. The Alliance would go where nobody was.

The cost, stated honestly

It should not be presented as a romance. It was not. Workers went to regions where the mortality rate for foreigners was appalling, and a significant number of them died within a few years, some within months, of disease. Others returned broken. Families were separated for years at a time, and children were sent home to be raised by relatives. The graves are real, and they are in the places Simpson prayed for. He knew the arithmetic and kept sending, and the workers kept going. Whatever one makes of that, it is not the record of people playing at religion.

And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death. REVELATION 12:11

Everyone is in one of three categories

Simpson’s practical challenge to a congregation was that there is no fourth option. You are going — taking the gospel yourself to a people who do not have it, whether across the world or across your own city. You are sending — funding, at a level that affects how you live, the people who go. You are praying — specifically, by name, for workers and for countries, and continuing when nothing appears to happen. Most of us, examined honestly, are doing none of the three and assuming we are covered by general approval of the enterprise.

Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me. ISAIAH 6:8

There is one more thing worth noticing about Simpson’s missionary passion, and it connects back to the first chapter of this book. It was not fuelled by guilt, or by statistics, or by a sense of Western obligation. It was fuelled by the conviction that Christ is worthy — that a Person this glorious ought to be known everywhere, and that any nation which does not know Him has been robbed.

Missions, on that understanding, is not chiefly rescue. It is worship extended.

The nearest field

Simpson’s missionary vision began at his own door, and the order in the commission is worth attending to.

And ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth. ACTS 1:8

Four circles, and the first is the city you are standing in. Simpson never treated the last as a substitute for the first. The same conviction that sent workers to inland China opened rescue missions a few streets from his own pulpit, and he would have regarded a congregation that supported missionaries abroad while ignoring the neglected nearby as having misread the verse. He also noticed the middle term. Samaria, for a first-century Jerusalem believer, meant the people group next door that one avoided — close in geography and distant in sympathy. Every place has its Samaria, and it is usually the field the local church is least willing to enter, precisely because proximity makes the prejudice harder to disguise. There is a development of this that Simpson saw beginning in New York and that has since transformed the picture. The nations were arriving. Immigrants from countries closed to missionaries were living within walking distance of churches that were praying for those countries and ignoring their citizens.

And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord. ACTS 17:26–27

Paul’s argument is that God arranges where peoples live, and does it with a purpose. If that is true, the presence of a diaspora community in your town is not an accident of economics. It is an assignment.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Determine which of the three you actually are — going, sending, praying — and be honest if the answer is none. 2. If you send, examine whether the amount affects how you live. If it does not, it is not yet sending in the New Testament sense. 3. Adopt one unreached people or one worker, and pray by name for a year.

4. Ask whether anything prevents you from going that is a preference rather than an obstacle. 5. Let the motive be Christ’s worthiness rather than guilt. Guilt does not last; worship does.

A PRAYER

Lord of the harvest, I have approved of missions and contributed almost nothing to them.

I am not going, I am barely sending, and I do not pray for anyone by name. Forgive me for calling that a missionary heart.

Show me which of the three You are asking of me, and let me not negotiate.

And let the reason be Your worthiness — that You are too glorious to remain unknown among any people on earth. Amen.