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The Great Commission
Brokenness
By Frank Decker

“Why was I so angry? I haven’t been that mad in a long time.” Such were the words of a new missionary who had dropped by to talk about something that had happened earlier in the day—a sharp disagreement he’d had with a customs official in the African country in which we were living. The missionary told me that, in retrospect, he was taken aback by the degree of animosity that he had felt in the heat of the moment.

My friend had stumbled upon the reality that living in an unfamiliar new culture can bring out adverse behavior in even the most dedicated Christians. Such pressure can enlarge the slightest predisposition one may have towards anger. Or fear. Or impatience. Or despair. Or moodiness. Or an excessive need for affirmation. You name it. When you begin serving in an unfamiliar land, any emotional propensity that you harbor is likely to become amplified.

So, must we become devoid of any behavioral blemishes to be fit for missionary service? Hardly. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Whether someone prepares to serve cross-culturally for a period of two weeks or two decades, there is an irony at work. On the one hand, missionaries seek to be “fully prepared” before departure. However, the very nature of ministry itself necessitates the perspective that ultimate preparedness requires the daily and utter reliance on Someone Else. That is why, in order for spiritual fruit to flourish, a certain ingredient must be present in our soil. I am referring to brokenness.

Brokenness occurs when I come face to face with the reality of my absolute and complete dependence on God. It occurs during those times when any sense of self-reliance, self-righteousness, self-importance, self-anything is stripped away, allowing me to remember that apart from Christ, I am nothing. I believe that some degree of brokenness must preceed any profound recognition of our need for God’s grace in our lives.

I’ve often wondered why some mission agencies will not even consider the application of someone who has been divorced. When God heals the wounds of a painful life event, can’t those scars be beneficial to one’s future ministry? In fact, isn’t this a central part of what it means to know Christ—to experience restoration as God’s grace puts us on our feet again? In this light, we are able to view ministry from the perspective of a servant rather than a performer.

I once heard the late Bishop Cornelius Henderson tell the story about a talented young preacher who was overly confident in a certain message he had prepared, and this was quite evident as he strode into the pulpit one Sunday morning. But as he was preaching, it became painfully apparent to all that the sermon was a big flop. He finally ended the message and humbly slid back down to his seat. After the service, an elderly woman greeted him at the back of the church and said, “Sonny, if you had gone up into the pulpit the way that you came down, you would have come down the way that you went up.”

Western missionaries often discover that those whom they serve face certain forms of suffering that are less commonplace back home. When my family and I lived in the developing world, a much higher percentage of people whom we knew had experienced such challenges as involuntary hunger, inadequate health care, even the sorrow of losing a child. In his book Second Guessing God: Hanging on When You Can’t See His Plan, Brian Jones indicates that two benefits of experiencing brokenness are that we have wounds that “give us power to feel another person’s pain,” and we “gain credibility with other broken people.”

Americans place a high value on individualism and self-reliance as personal attributes. But Dr. Charles Stanley has pointed out in his little classic The Blessings of Brokenness that these traits are actually obstacles that one must address in order to experience brokenness. This is all the more reason why cross-cultural servants must allow brokenness rather than self-sufficiency to be the platform from which they minister.

Brokenness enables us to be, in Henri Nouwen’s words, “wounded healers” who depend not on our gifts and talents, but on the sufficiency of the Holy Spirit in every situation. Or, in the words of Dr. Randy Healan, former Mission Society missionary to Latin America, “Contemporary American believers whose understanding of the Christian faith has been shaped by Christian celebrities have no idea that brokenness is integral to the Christian walk. Yet, the stories of biblical personalities clearly indicate that brokenness is a prerequisite for ministry.”

I know a carpenter who would agree.



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