Popular Myth No 4: Mercy Ministries are the Best Way to Reach People

I fell for this one as well.

In the 1980s I was inspired by a nationally known evangelical speaker who challenged churches to get involved in their communities through a whole host of ‘good works’ ministries as a means of winning friends, changing hearts and showing unbelievers that Christians care and don’t just want to convert them.

And so it is that churches up and down the land are spending precious time, money, energy, skill, effort, blood, sweat, tears and toil doing good deeds for unbelievers. Lets call it Mercy Ministry.

Is this all wrong? No. There are schools, orphanages, drug rehabilitation centres, food distribution programmes, homeless shelters that are very much gospel centred, and people are coming to Christ as a result. Praise the Lord for this.

But there are also many that have long ago stopped preaching the gospel and they really are ineffective. Well-meaning Christians are working hard making sinners more comfortable, well fed, skilled and educated without turning them from their sins and eternal damnation.

Some Christian churches involve themselves in good works ministries for decades, who haven’t seen a single person saved through their efforts.

I want to suggest that these ministries are a waste of time if:

*We are neglecting our families
*We are neglecting our own brethren
*We are neglecting the gospel

These ministries particularly attract people who:

*Don’t really know how to share their faith, how to guide a conversation, how to articulate the gospel
*Don’t want to upset people and want everyone to like them
*Want to get state funding for their schemes

I have a lot of sympathy with the first of these groups - that was me! If it’s you, get onto the Way of the Master website and start learning from them and using their materials! Our primary calling in relation to unbelievers is to preach the gospel.

I have a couple of scriptures for the second category:

Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their fathers treated the false prophets. Luke 6:26

If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes with the holy angels. Mark 8:38

Some people are simply ashamed of Jesus’ words - and don’t want to use them!

We need to repent of being people pleasers! Trying to win people to Christ with good deeds but no words is a subtle form of bribery!

Let me quote from KP Yohannan’s book “Revolution in World Missions”, P.135.

Several years ago, 40 Indian villages, once considered Christian, turned back to Hinduism. Could it be that whole villages that had experienced the liberating gospel of Jesus Christ would turn back into the bondage of Satan?

No. These villages were called “Christian” only because they had been “converted” by missionaries who used hospitals, material goods and other incentives to attract them to Christianity... In missionary terms they were ‘rice Christians’. They never understood the true gospel of the Bible. After all the effort, these people were as lost as ever.

Thirdly, some Christian ministries get public funding for their activities. This often means that they have to ‘dumb down’ and not speak the gospel. I could give you a long list of Christian ministries that started out effective, but ended up losing their power by being ‘bought out’ when government agencies offered irresistibly large amounts of money.

Just so that you don’t think these are just my rantings, I am going to quote extensively from the book “Revolution in World Missions” by KP Yohannan. I cannot recommend this book too highly! He puts the point across more eloquently than I could. KP Yohannan is the founder and director of Gospel for Asia and every Christian leader should read this book! It can be obtained very cheaply from amazon. You can download a .pdf copy from the Gospel for asia website. I have been given permission by GFA to quote from the book.

You can tell the humanist gospel because it refuses to admit that the basic problem of humanity is not physical, but spiritual. The humanist won’t tell you sin is the root cause of all human suffering. The latest emphasis of the movement starts by arguing that we should operate mission outreach that provides “care for the whole man,” but it ends up providing help for only the body and soul—ignoring the spirit. Because of this teaching, many churches and mission societies now are redirecting their limited outreach funds and personnel away from evangelism to something vaguely called “social concern.” Today the majority of Christian missionaries find themselves primarily involved in feeding the hungry, caring for the sick through hospitals, housing the homeless or other kinds of relief and development work... This is done in the name of Jesus and supposedly is based on His command to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature. The mission of the Church, as defined by these humanists, can be almost anything except winning people to Christ and discipling them. History already has taught us that this gospel—without the blood of Christ, conversion and the cross—is a total failure. In China and India we have had seven generations of this teach- ing, brought to us by the British missionaries in a slightly different form in the middle of the 19th-century. My people have watched the English hospitals and schools come and go without any noticeable effect on either our churches or society.
P106-107

As much as we want to see hundreds and thousands of new missionaries go into all the dark places, if they don’t know what they are there to do, the result will be fatal. We must send soldiers into battle with the right weapons and understanding of the enemy’s tactics. If we intend to answer man’s greatest problem—his separation from the eternal God—with rice handouts, then we are throwing a drowning man a board instead of helping him out of the water. A spiritual battle fought with spiritual weapons will produce eternal victories. This is why we insist upon restoring a right balance to Gospel outreach. The accent must first and always be on evangelism and discipleship.
P 109

I met poor, often minimally educated, national brothers involved in Gospel work in pioneer areas. They had nothing material to offer the people to whom they preached—no agricultural training and no medical relief or school program. But hundreds of souls were saved, and in a few years, a number of churches were established. What were these brothers doing right to achieve such results, while the others with many more advantages had failed? The answer lies in our basic understanding of what mission work is all about. There is nothing wrong with charitable acts— but they are not to be confused with preaching the Gospel. Feeding programs can save a man dying from hunger. Medical aid can prolong life and fight disease. Housing projects can make this temporary life more comfortable—but only the Gospel of Jesus Christ can save a soul from a life of sin and an eternity in hell!
P 113

When God changes the heart and spirit, the physical changes also. If you want to meet the needs of the poor in this world, there is no better place to start than by preaching the Gospel. It has done more to lift up the downtrodden, the hungry and the needy than all the social programs ever imagined by secular humanists.
P114

Just before China was taken over by the communists, one communist officer made a revealing statement to a missionary, John Meadows: “You missionaries have been in China for over a hundred years, but you have not won China to your cause. You lament the fact that there are uncounted millions who have never heard the name of your God. Nor do they know anything of your Christianity. But we communists have been in China less than 10 years, and there is not a Chinese who does not know . . . has not heard the name of Stalin . . . or something of communism. . . . We have filled China with our doctrine. “Now let me tell you why you have failed and we have succeeded,” the officer continued. “You have tried to win the attention of masses by building churches, missions, mission hospitals, schools and what not. But we communists have printed our message and spread our literature all over China. Someday we will drive you missionaries out of our country, and we will do it by the means of the printed page.” Today, of course, John Meadows is out of China. The com- munists were true to their word. They won China and drove out the missionaries. Indeed, what missionaries failed to do in 100 years, the communists did in 10. One Christian leader said that if the Church had spent as much time on preaching the Gospel as it did on hospitals, orphanages, schools and rest homes— needful though they were—the Bamboo Curtain would never have existed.
P115

Jesus was compassionate to human beings as total persons. He did all He could to help them, but He never forgot the main purpose of His earthly mission: to reconcile men to God, to die for sinners and redeem their souls from hell. Jesus cared for the spiritual side of man first, then the body. This is illustrated clearly in Matthew 9:2–7 when He first for- gave the sins of the paralytic, then healed his body. In John 6:1–13, Jesus miraculously fed 5,000 hungry men plus women and children. He fed them after He preached, not before to attract their attention.
P135-136

The apostles did not fear to tell the beggar that “Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee . . . ” (Acts 3:6). Then they preached the Gospel. I have had similar experiences all across India. I have yet to meet a person who was not willing to hear the wonderful news of Jesus because of his or her physical condition.
P136