Interpreting the Great Commission

As the helicopter rose from the narrow airstrip carved into an overgrown jungle, Brooks Buser peered out, watching the Papua New Guinea village recede below him. Buser, his wife Nina, and son Beau had spent the previous 12 years living with the YembiYembi tribe on the banks of the murky river now slowly disappearing from view.

Suddenly, Buser realized he’d devoted some of the best years of his life to something that mattered: telling the YembiYembi about Jesus. Discipling them and leaving behind the New Testament—as well as some Old Testament translations—in the tribe’s new written language, which he and Nina had developed.

Buser told me he decided right then he could die happy if the helicopter went down.

“Like John says, there’s no greater joy than to know that my children—these are my spiritual children—are walking in truth,” Buser said.

And the helicopter? It thumped safely away, as Buser breathed prayers—that God would keep the now well-grounded, self-­sustaining YembiYembi church spiritually healthy and help villagers continue the Great Commission to neighboring tribes.

That was in 2016. Today Buser heads Radius International, a missions training ­center with campuses in Mexico, Taiwan, and soon Southeast Asia. Its purpose: equipping cross-cultural workers to establish strong, indigenous, reproducing churches among unreached language groups.

That kind of work used to be the foundation of Christian missionary efforts. But over the last decades, attempts to take the gospel to unreached, unengaged language groups—those that have no Bible and no hope of access to the gospel without a committed, long-term missionary—have plummeted.

Buser says most people sitting in pews on Sunday mornings have no idea how few missionaries and how little money goes to these completely unreached people. It’s a misconception he’s devoted to changing.

Buser wants to help alert the Church to changes in terminology and methodology, raising awareness of how missions have veered away from those hardest to reach. He also wants to educate and train pastors and their congregations on how to regain a Biblical perspective on the Great Commission.

Multiple organizations track and categorize people who still need to hear the gospel. Related statistics are imprecise and differ. The Joshua Project estimates the number of unreached people groups—those with less than 2 percent evangelical Christians and no Bible translation—ranges from 6,900-7,400. Of those, 2,700-3,100 are unreached, unengaged language groups in places where no Christians live and no Bible translation exists. It’s believed that about 3 billion people—roughly 40 percent of the world’s population—don’t know of Jesus or anyone who does.

Estimates aside, Buser says the easy places have already been reached. “It’s the hardest of the hard that remain,” he says. “And the price tag is tremendous.”

HISTORICALLY, “MISSIONS” MEANT living in a distant land, learning a new culture and language in order to evangelize and disciple those who would otherwise never hear God’s Word. But missions can now mean anything from spending a week building a Honduran orphanage to starting a conversation about church with a neighbor.

The World Christian Database estimates less than 3 percent of Christian missionaries today go to remote mission fields. And only between 0.1 and 1.7 percent of the dollars given to missions are used to evangelize unreached peoples, according to World Christian Trends.

The term “unreached” keeps changing, too. American missiologist Ralph Winter excited the missions world when he first referred to the unreached as “hidden peoples” in a 1974 presentation in Lausanne, Switzerland. Winter suggested churches target isolated people groups instead of nations. But in 2023, “unreached” might just as easily mean Chinese exchange students housed in UCLA dormitories, or Nigerian NBA players living in Milwaukee.

Winter’s term “hidden peoples” motivated churches and agencies to identify those hardest to reach and ­prepare workers to go and evangelize them.

Before heading into the mission field, Brooks and Nina Buser first completed a year of survival training in Oregon, learning how to live in a place without power or water. They learned to construct solar panels with batteries, build an airstrip, and butcher wild game. They took Bible, marriage, teamwork, and parenting classes. Next, they moved to Missouri and spent another year studying language acquisition and translation.

Finally, they landed in Papua New Guinea and spent months scrunched in a city apartment with geckos, snakes, and power outages, getting acclimated to the heat. Brooks, who had grown up in the country with missionary parents, restudied Melanesian Pidgin, the national language. Nina had to start from scratch.

Meanwhile, the couple surveyed villages by land, air, and water, praying about which one they would move to. After settling on the YembiYembi, they canoed up the Salumei River, a muddy stream that flows out of the mountains and teems with crocodiles. Wild boars roam through mosquito-infested jungles that swelter at 110 degrees—with 90 percent humidity. At long last, the Busers arrived at a primitive village, utterly devoid of any modern convenience, and were greeted by a tribe that spoke an unknown language.

That’s when the really hard work began.

First, the Busers threw themselves into the culture, developing friendships in the tribe. The YembiYembi adopted them into clans and gave each a special name, deeming them family. They built a house on posts 8 feet off the ground with bark walls and an aluminum roof. They ate strange fare, like fat grub worms shared around glowing night fires, a tribal gesture of endearment.

To become a man in this culture, a boy must kill a wild boar at night with a spear. When the tribe learned Buser had never done so, they called him an overgrown boy. But then the YembiYembi taught him how to hunt. When he killed his first boar, in their eyes he became a man.

With the villagers’ help, the Busers also built a landing strip, slashing down tropical trees and tearing out stumps with a bulldozer brought in by barge. All the while, they were learning the language. That took two years—and two more before they could adequately share the gospel.

THE SEEMINGLY STRAIGHTFORWARD GOAL of reaching the unreached by building long-term relationships is no longer the consensus in the missions world, according to traditional missions ­proponents like Buser.

In Buser’s opinion, some missions groups place too much emphasis on speed. Groups like Church Planting Movements (CPM) and related ­methodologies, including Disciple Making Movements and Training for Trainers, often eschew what they call Western, colonial, or “proclamational” modes of ­missions—those that focus on traditional methods of preaching and teaching and take many years to make converts and plant churches.

That’s because the methodologies’ goal is exponential replication of converts and churches. They say that’s the key to finishing the Great Commission so that Christ will return sooner and “then the end will come” (Matthew 24:14).

In his 1999 book Church Planting Movements, David Garrison presented the tools most methodology movements still use, though with variations and differing terms. For example, while traditional missions focuses on preaching and teaching, CPM focuses on “sparking” conversions ignited by the Holy Spirit through relationships. Eager missionaries go to a location looking for an indigenous “person of peace”—usually not a believer—who can influence others. That person leads a “discovery” Bible study for the curious. They ask questions, looking together for answers in Scripture, Bible stories, or recordings. (This depends on literacy levels and whether materials are even available in the native language.)

The idea is that those who hear the gospel in this way will receive it as the good soil received seeds in the parable of the sower. These new believers form a church, which is then to plant another church, and so on. Proponents say these methods have converted tens of millions of people, who have in turn planted millions of churches in a very short time. Some of America’s biggest congregations are backing these efforts.

Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., supports CPM methods through an outreach called Finishing the Task. The church’s 2020 global report says 1,376 Church Planting Movements, with about 56,000 believers each, have sparked 4.8 million churches. Finishing the Task aims to help complete the Great Commission. That means engagements with every people group by 2025—and an entire Bible for every language by 2033.

But CPM’s critics say a collection of new believers does not necessarily make a church. And that it’s ­impossible to verify numbers of conversions and church plants, especially if no missionary knows the unreached people’s language and hasn’t lived among them, developing relationships sufficient to ascertain genuine change.

The Busers became so close to the YembiYembi that their tribal father announced he had paid the bride price for two wives for the Busers’ son Beau, who was only 7 at the time. That’s how much the tribe had come to love the family—and they the tribe. Still, that was before the YembiYembi heard the gospel, after which Buser gently told his tribal father to go and get his money back.

The Busers helped develop a YembiYembi alphabet, then taught the villagers to read and write. Nina led a class for older women eager to learn. Some villagers called these women the “stoneheads,” certain they could not learn to read like the others. But at graduation, the women stood and confidently read Bible verses aloud from the blackboard, shattering centuries of tribal paradigms.

Now, as the Busers translated and explained the Bible, the YembiYembi could read for themselves and decide if they believed what it said or would continue embracing their ancestral animistic stories and rituals.

IN 2015, AFTER MANY YEARS of preparation, another missionary couple flew off to a foreign land. World Team missionaries Dave and Stacey Hare went to live with the Kwakum, a people of nearly 20,000 living in about 20 villages at the edge of a rainforest in the East Region of Cameroon.

The Hares learned the Kwakum language and helped create a writing system. They’re now teaching ­literacy and translating Old Testament stories. Stacey wrote a booklet explaining God and the gospel. Together, they’ll soon begin translating the New Testament and eventually the entire Bible.

But to make all this possible, the Hares and their four children first had to earn the trust of the Kwakum, with their violent, angry culture and suspicions of white people. So they moved into a mud-brick home—with occasional visits from venomous mambas and cobras—and started eating Kwakum food. Meals included grasshoppers, snails, and rats, along with snakes, monkeys, and scaly anteaters known as pangolin. Working alongside neighbors, Dave Hare cleared fields with a machete and dug new village wells. The Hares began transporting the sick to distant hospitals and, sometimes, bringing the deceased back to their loved ones for burial.

“It wasn’t until we’d spent about five years that we started seeing people come to Christ and really understanding the Word,” Hare said. Their Kwakum church now has 10-15 genuine believers.

Such slow winning of souls clashes with CPM-like methodologies, and traditional missionaries like Hare and Buser say CPM’s emphasis on rapid replication has both decreased the importance of missionaries themselves and watered down missionary training.

Nick Whitehead grew up in South America, the son of a Mission Aviation Fellowship pilot. He went to boarding school in Ecuador. Shortly after he graduated from college and got married, Whitehead and his wife, Becky, decided to become missionaries. They connected with a sending agency that provided a week or two of training, then signed them up for a two-year commitment. Then the Whiteheads headed to Costa Rica. Once they arrived, though, an opportunity to work with kids fell through, leaving Nick with a lot of time on his hands. So, while waiting for other ministry opportunities, he began reading the Bible 10 hours a day. That’s when he realized he and Becky weren’t ready to be ­missionaries at all.

No local church, U.S. or otherwise, supported them. In fact, they had never even been church members. And though their hearts were in the right place, their theology wasn’t. “While we were supposedly missionaries [in Costa Rica], we got involved in church for the very first time, and I was baptized as a believer,” Whitehead said.

Until then, he’d never thought about how he should contribute to a local church, and never fully understood what baptism meant. Francisco, a pastor at a local Costa Rican church, started mentoring him. That’s when Whitehead and his wife developed a love for the local church, finally understanding how vital it was.

Whitehead’s desire for theological training grew. With letters of recommendation from Francisco that had to be translated into English, the couple returned to the United States, where they joined a strong local church, and Whitehead enrolled in seminary. He now heads global missions at the North Church in Mounds View, Minn.

Today, Whitehead and others commend the newer missions movements for their love of Christ and heart for the lost, but disagree with their methods and theology, including the preoccupation with speed. They say God alone plans and knows when Christ will return. And taking shortcuts that don’t assure genuine conversions, grounded disciples, and mature churches isn’t Biblical or helpful.

“Let’s not be motivated by finishing the task. Let’s just be motivated by being faithful to it,” Whitehead said. He’s concerned that many new church plants don’t follow New Testament doctrines for a healthy church.

Whitehead says he knows missionaries who’ve gone into previously evangelized areas and found no churches and no believers—or found people with false beliefs. Reports are prevalent of indigenous people simply ­adding Jesus to their religions—for example, Muslims who keep attending a mosque and reading the Quran so they aren’t ostracized. But methodology movements still count them as new believers.

THE BUSERS’ AND HARES’ EXPERIENCES are reminiscent of classic missionary journeys such as those of Hudson Taylor in China, Amy Carmichael in India, and Adoniram Judson in Burma. All spent their lives evangelizing the unreached in challenging locales. Like them, Buser says he and Nina tried to follow Paul’s mandate in Romans 15: “And thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation.”

Buser calls it “pixie dust theology” to simply introduce the Bible to a village or region and hope mature believers will result. And he warns that quick methods to translate the New Testament in mere weeks are ­theologically dangerous.

For example, after living with the YembiYembi, the Busers learned the tribe valued treachery and sneakiness. Without bringing that understanding to their translation, the villagers would have viewed Judas as the hero and Jesus as the goat. The Busers had to make sure the tribe knew—and the translation showed—Jesus wasn’t tricked but went to the cross willingly.

Hare tells a similar story about the concept of grace, for which there is no word in the Kwakum ­language. In his translation, Hare almost used another word that would have made salvation seem earned. Instead, he found a story within the Kwakum oral ­tradition that perfectly illustrated grace. That was ­possible only because he knew the people and had ­listened well.

Ultimately, traditional missionaries say you can’t reach the unreached without first identifying them and deciding to do whatever it takes to make not just new believers, but disciples. “Everybody recognizes the Great Commission … but they don’t like the idea that means our sons and daughters are going to be gone longer,” Buser said.

Looking back, Nick Whitehead compares what he and Becky tried to do in Costa Rica to a doctor treating patients when he’s never studied medicine. Now he’s convinced missionaries must not only sense God’s call to the mission field, but also that a local church must endorse and support their preparation and their sojourn.

Whitehead wants to see those hardest to reach evangelized by that type of missionary. That can happen either by sending well-trained Western believers or by preparing indigenous believers to go to places difficult for Westerners to reach. (Although, remote peoples sometimes listen more readily to Westerners than to one of their own because of outsiders’ uniqueness.)

“Whoever goes must be able to devote themselves to preaching and teaching the Word—communicating it clearly and boldly … and to leaving behind healthy local churches, mature in Christ,” Whitehead said.

Each missionary I spoke with hopes to help indigenous believers evangelize indigenous unbelievers. Organizations like Radius International, Reaching & Teaching International, and HeartCry Missionary Society train to that end. Whitehead’s father has flown Papua New Guinea believers to evangelize unreached tribes in other areas of their own country. The new believers are usually excited to share their faith.

Two weeks after the Busers presented the gospel to some YembiYembi, seven new believers hurried to their house. “Our sister tribe across the river—they’re going to the place of fire if we don’t give them the gospel!” they exclaimed. “When can we go?”

Buser had to explain they weren’t yet ready to share but someday would be. He didn’t want the tribe to begin by proclaiming to their neighbors a fiery end. His goal, he says, wasn’t to count converts, but to plant a strong church with fully equipped disciples who could then teach other tribes correctly.

Today, that goal is a reality. The YembiYembi church is established, led by its own mature elders. Despite—or because of—persecution and struggles, it’s rooted and growing. Buser returns annually to encourage and teach.

In April, he and Nina plan to fly into the village for a celebratory gathering of 12 churches from around New Guinea. The churches will host a first-ever ­conference for pastors’ wives. The YembiYembi planted gardens two years in advance to feed the anticipated crowd.

“We certainly didn’t do everything right, but by God’s great, great grace, there’s some really good leadership, and the YembiYembi are getting stronger every year,” Buser says. And the best news: The village is now raising the next generation in the faith. The first marriages between two Christians are taking place, and the tribe is teaching the gospel to neighboring villages.

A smile slowly spreads across Buser’s face: “The YembiYembi know the God of the universe. And no one can ever take that away.”