Comparative Strategies
A Cross-Cultural Mission Strategy - This is the traditional strategy for doing missions, whereby missionaries are sent to a nation, people group, or culture outside their own. Example: A North American missionary agency sending and supporting a North American missionary to Eastern Europe.
An Indigenous Mission Strategy - This strategy does not send missionaries from one nation, people group, or culture to another, but works through missionaries that are native to the country in which they are ministering. Example: A North American missionary agency providing the support for a Romanian missionary to work in Romania among his own people.
Cross-Cultural Missions
The Church has a long and glorious history of cross-cultural missions. The apostle Paul was a cross-cultural missionary in that he went outside his own people, the Jews, and outside his own country, Israel, and preached the Gospel to the Gentiles. William Carey and Amy Carmichael in India, Hudson Taylor in China, and David Livingstone in Africa are all examples of cross-cultural missionaries.
It is not difficult to see that cross-cultural mission work is indispensable to the Great Commission. How can a people group who is entirely without the Gospel come to a saving knowledge of Christ unless missionaries from another culture are sent to them? The apostle Paul writes in Romans 10:14-15:
“How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher? How will they preach unless they are sent? Just as it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news of good things!’” (NASB).
Cross-cultural missions are biblical, historical, and necessary wherever there exists a people group completely devoid of the Gospel message or where the Church is still struggling to take root in a culture or people group. In many areas of the world today, there are entire people groups that have no knowledge of Christ. For them to be reached, Christians must leave their own peoples and lands and go to them, bearing the Good News.
Indigenous Missions
After two thousand years of missionary activity, over half the world has still not heard the Gospel. The traditional mission method of only training and financing North American and Western European missionaries is not sufficient in itself to reach the world. There are simply not enough missionaries or available economic resources from the West to reach all the nations of the world! A solution to this problem is to support indigenous or native missionaries to work within their own countries and people groups.
As a result of two millennia of cross-cultural missionary work, there are untold millions of Christians throughout the world. Dedicated to God, knowledgeable of the Scriptures, and with a burning zeal for the lost, they often suffer great hardship, risking life and personal welfare to preach the Gospel to their own people. The indigenous or native missionary strategy recognizes the worth and usefulness of this great body of native believers and seeks to provide the training and financial support necessary for them to reach their own people.