The Importance and Complications of Polycentric Mission: 24:14 Goal – Movement engagements in every unreached people and place by 2025
by Justin Long
In September 2024, YWAM (Youth With A Mission) convened a gathering of 4,500 folks from 110 nations. The article “The Great Transition” cites this encouraging event as emblematic of the dynamic growth and vitality of the Majority World church. The now-common phrase “from everywhere to everywhere” describes what has more recently been termed “polycentric mission.”
As the Church spreads into new places, new kingdom workers of all sorts are being raised up from those places. This includes pastors, teachers, evangelists, and missionaries who go to other nearby places. This is one way in which we can see the Great Commission being completed.
The Lausanne Covenant eloquently sums it up: “Evangelism requires the whole Church taking the whole gospel to the whole world.”2 I see three aspects to the “requires” idea:
- We must “pray to the Lord of the harvest for more workers.” Workers are needed, we don’t have enough, and they must come from somewhere. If not enough existing Christians will go, God will send workers from somewhere else.
- All Jesus’s followers and all churches have a responsibility to obey the Great Commission, and so we should see missionaries sent from Afghanistan and Albania and Argentina and Australia.
- This idea contains an element of becoming family along the way. As we work together in the Great Commission, we learn to be family with each other, and we represent in part the final reality: all languages, tribes, nations, and peoples before the throne.
That is all important to pursue, but it’s messy, and involves growing pains. I can categorize some of the growing pains in big buckets.
First, as the work of missions grows more complex, it becomes harder and harder to track and measure. It’s impossible to know the precise number of cross-cultural missionary workers in the world, and it’s hard to know even an accurate general number. It was getting more and more challenging after 2001 due to the global security environment. However, as the YWAM article indicates, cross-cultural mission has exploded: YWAM alone probably has something in the neighborhood of 100,000 people, but it’s changing all the time.
Mission directories were never able to track all the mission agencies. Now, tracking even “most” or a “substantial minority” is nearly impossible. Thousands of Majority World mission-sending structures exist. Some look like traditional mission agencies; more do not. As it gets harder to track and measure the work of mission, it becomes harder to know the true picture of evangelization and reachedness.
Our instrumentation on evangelization may become somewhat blunter in the years to come. Alternatively, instruments may look very precise, but actually give a limited view of just a few evangelistic forces. So, we should treat our lists and dashboards with much caution. But this is a critical question. It’s not just that some places have a low percentage of Christians. It’s that where no work is being done to address the problem, those places won’t magically have a higher percentage of Christians later.
Second, as the work of mission grows more complex, security dynamics become more severe. Many workers are laboring in places with significant security issues. But more complicated than that, different workers have different perspectives on security and thresholds of risk.
- Some will willingly work in high-risk places, but don’t want to be known or talk about their work. Others are willing to work in the same high-risk places but are—in the view of the first group—too free in their communications. If the second group can be more easily seen, how does their work impact the first group?
- Some will not readily work in high-risk places but may fund others who will. This can lead to an “outsourcing of risk” dynamic in which some shirk any responsibility for bravery in the face of risk, and just send money. On the other hand, those willing to go (and who can go, as some passports are more acceptable in some places than others) are worthy of their hire. How should they be funded?
- Security is exceedingly messy, and perhaps best handled in the spirit of “honor the concerns of others, whether you consider them real or imagined.”
Third, as the work of mission grows more complex, authority issues will become messier. These issues have already been messy for a long time and are growing increasingly so. To take the example in the previous paragraph: If group A thinks security should be x, and group B thinks security should be y, who decides? Neither is functionally in charge of the other, so both make their own decisions, but the decisions can impact collaboration, relationships, and even existence.
To take a different example, who decides what Bible translations to undertake? Previously, translations were done by translation workers and agencies. They were huge tasks, and the agencies assessed which languages needed one and undertook those. Some translations could take the entire career of a worker. Now, translations can be done much more rapidly, and by local workers. Some groups are deciding a translation is needed into a language that the bigger agencies don’t think needs to be done. If the local group does the translation without an outside agency’s oversight, will the translation be widely accepted? This may or may not be a factor in the local workers’ decision to undertake the work.
In all of these issues, the role of the outsider (often a Western mission worker) and the (Majority World) insider is becoming increasingly complex. Westerners generally feel they shouldn’t be in charge, but they often functionally wield heavy influence—either intentionally or unintentionally. We often hear that efforts should be field-driven, but unless we take great pains to make it that way, the reality will consist of “do as I do, not as I say.” Money issues are especially sticky. But family relationships are always somewhat messy.
I offer no easy answers. However, it seems to me that a good way forward is to have fewer grand policies and philosophies of Western management, and more praying together, eating together, and collaborating as much as possible. Through this, we have a better shot at growing to love each other more, and out of that love, shifting our behaviors toward others in line with 1 Corinthians 13.
Polycentric mission can be complex and messy, but God is at work in the midst of the complexity to accomplish even greater things for his glory among all peoples.
This article was first published in Mission Frontiers in the Mission and Migration Issue #47-1, January 2025, page #33
About the author: Justin has spent the last 30+ years developing and contributing to various missions efforts including: the World Christian Encyclopedia, the strategicnetwork.org, the Ethné network, and the Movements Database. His research findings and missions articles have been published in several places, and currently publishes a weekly newsletter at justinlong.org.
