Yesterday I got an email from a confessional Reformed Christian in Germany. It’s a “big deal,” because there aren’t very many Reformed folk left in Germany. His letter was a plea for help. It’s his impression that the confessional Reformed churches in North America don’t really care about “old Europe” as the Bush administration put it.

Is that true? Well, not entirely. To their credit, Mission to North America, the foreign missions arm of the PCA, has a vigorous mission to Europe and Germany. WSC alumnus David Stoddard is working in Berlin, helping to establish a Reformed seminary there (search the MTW site for “Berlin”). There are other Reformed folk working in Germany too, but Sebastian’s post was troubling. I pointed him to the excellent missions program of the OPC and to the efforts of the RCUS on the African continent. The RPCNA has missions to Japan and Cyprus. The ARP has missions to “Mexico, Pakistan, Germany, Russia, Turkey, Wales, and the Persian World.” I didn’t, however, have a lot to say about the mission of my own federation, the URC. Why not?

It’s not that the URC doesn’t have anyone planting churches overseas (the best, narrow definition of “mission” – Christ ordained the visible, institutional church to preach the gospel, administer the sacraments, and exercise discipline), we do. Pastor Steve McGee is church planting in the West Indies and Pastor Bill Green is working in Costa Rica and Pastor Neal Hegeman is training ministers for Spanish-speaking countries. There may be others, but these are all I could find.

It’s not just that the URC does not have many ministers in other countries planting churches, which is a shame in and of itself, but its the way we go about fulfilling our mission. Our Church Order (the document by which we govern our practice) does not use the word “committee.” We have, however, at least one standing Synodical Committee: The Committee of Ecumenical Relations and Church Union which seems to have three sub-committees. Presently we are engaged in ecumenical dialogue with several fellow NAPARC denominations and federations, most seriously with the Canadian and American Reformed Churches. I understand the ecumenical imperative of John 17 and I also understand that there is an explicit divine imperative in Matthew 28:18-20, to preach the gospel and to make disciples the world over. This task, however, heretofore, we have left to individual congregations. There have been informal attempts to coordinate missions across the URCNA, but to what effect?

The URCNA is reluctant to form committees out of fear of Synodical tyranny. That reaction would be more understandable if we did not have a CERCU pushing what sometimes has seemed a shotgun marriage between the URCNA and the CanRC despite misgivings and even expressions of doubt and concern about the procedure and the goal. Clearly, if we can have a synodical committee to help us fulfill the mandate of John 17 (accepting for the sake of discussion that John 17 is about the organizational unity of the visible church) then why not a synodical committee to coordinate the foreign missions of the URCNA,  to raise funds, to communicate the needs of the field and the misisonaries to supporting churches?

There are very important questions which need regular answers if we are to prosecute our mission faithfully:

• Who are our missionaries?
• Where are they?
• What are their needs?
• What are the opportunities for new missions?
• Who is willing to go?
• How well prepared are our future missionaries to plant churches in other cultures?

I’m not a missiologist, so I can only guess at these, but I suppose there are lots of other questions that should be asked and answered on a regular basis. The local congregation, and even a classis (a regional assembly of delegates from congregations) is not equipped to answer these questions in regards to foreign missions. This is clearly a Synodical, cooperative enterprise. What is the sense of every classis having a missions committee (do ANY of our classes have missions committees?).

There are a couple of ways of doing this. The most likely model is to staff the committee the way we staff the CERCU, with delegates from each classis. If that is objectionable, then perhaps we could assign the work to a consistory and rotate it every few years? The first seems preferable to the second, but some effort is better than no effort.

Reformed people are often caricatured as disinterested in missions. I know this is a slander because I’ve seen Reformed people pray, work, and prepare to fulfill the Great Commission. I agree with my colleague, Danny Hyde (our pastor at OURC) who said recently:

Finally, we must also become a missional people, that is, we must have a sense of evangelistic purpose to the world. Our faith is a treasure which most of our culture has never heard of. We must be zealous to work together in local evangelism, regional church planting, and foreign missions.

What are our local congregations doing to advance the mission? Who knows? How would anyone know? Meanwhile, there are Macedonian men calling us to come, preach Christ and plant churches across the globe. Are we doing the best we can? I don’t think so.

We have a commendable zeal for Reformed ecumenicity, but do we have a similar zeal for mission? Our church order says nothing about committees, but we have a CERCU? Why not a Committee on Foriegn Missions (COFM)? If Synodical tyranny is the concern, then we must dismantle the CERCU at Synod Palos Heights and leave ecumenicity to the local congregations. We cannot have it both ways. The mission is too important to left to ad hoc efforts.

This essay first appeared in 2007.