I remember hearing my former pastor’s loud, unaware voice coming straight through the thin office walls speaking to one of the pastors he had just given me a referral to call earlier that morning. This was right at the end of my initial support-raising journey. To this day, I doubt he knows I heard him tearing me down to the very pastor he had just had me call. I guess he wanted to wait until I was a “proven” investment before fully endorsing me in ministry.
Apart from his glaring character problems, what else was missing? There was an unspoken expectation in me. When we peel back the layers of opposition we face in ministry, we often find something nasty and dark disguised within ourselves, calling out for “innocent clout,” legitimate influence, or ministerial camaraderie, but is it really just that we want to be liked? If we wait for everyone to get on our side, especially those who already should be, we will never get anywhere in life or in ministry. But there is still a weird feeling of unmet expectations even in this niche ministry, even when it comes to East Asian-focused gospel work.
A recent biography on Robert Morrison leaves readers wrestling with takeaways and applications to fight that appeal of popularity.1 Two lessons from Robert Morrison: The Life and Works of the First Protestant Missionary in China help ward off the myth of “popularity in church leadership“.2 Let’s consider Morrison’s lifestyle and ministry of sacrifice and his singular subversive obedience to God.
Sacrifice
Caneparo desires to help readers join modern heroes like Wang Yi in emulating folks like Morrison. We should pay closer attention to a few highlights that may not always rise to the top in casual conversations. He is well known for his sacrifice through translation achievements, but he was also a powerful mobilizer, a networker, and a fixture in the public life of the place where we might be prone to think he should have tried to go undetected.
Morrison, like many missionaries of old, sacrificed daily necessities, let alone luxuries. He was a well-educated linguist who could have chosen to take a completely different career path at any point. Yet he chose to spend months of his life on boats, burying family members, including a wife, and enduring the hostilities of foreign life in his era.
This example of a cruciform life denies modern ministers the false sense that others will appreciate or even acknowledge the personal costs one invests in ministry. Don’t get me wrong, people don’t typically go into missions, particularly missions among East Asian populations, for the sake of popularity or platform-building. But when our self-denial defies such a falsehood rather than feeding into it, we are taking good care of our own spiritual health. We may want to have a level of credibility even among co-workers, but unfortunately, they get little to no traction. How will we handle these situations?
Our emulation should aim higher than Morrison, but we follow a good example in Paul when we call on others as models to point us to Jesus’s perfect example. In Philippians 2, Paul begins with himself, then turns to Timothy and Epaphroditus and in effect, he is saying something like “Look how they are living and dying for you as Christ did. Look at them, see Jesus, and worship God so that you too might do the same by the power of His Holy Spirit.”
Subversive Singular Obedience
Popularity might just be more noticeable when it is scarce or absent. Morrison faced criticism from folks who were unimpressed with what God had chosen to accomplish through him. Interestingly, these dissenting parties were not from those he sought to reach, but from brothers within the church. Morrison quietly kept his head down and kept being productive.
3 John gives us a powerful sentence to help combat this inner war. We are called to be like Demetrius and allow “the truth itself” to be our testimony (3 John 1:12). We don’t have to defend ourselves. We already have someone who does that for us (1 John 2:1-2). Others who did come to Morrison’s aid recounted the ways that even the unbelieving society acknowledged his uprightness and the accuracy of his work. It wasn’t until a particular line was crossed that Morrison responded publicly and with great care.
We all have engaged in this type of calculus. When do we spend the time and energy to respond to critics? To what end? What are the means? The questions go on, but they must be answered. We will face pushback in every single decision in life and ministry at every level. We may think that this ministry is so niche that no one would dare take the time to work at tearing it down, but that is not the case (Matthew 16:18).
The fact that Morrison was there in this hostile country didn’t get him any basic foundational level of liberty from such nitpicking. Consciously going into that place at that time was not based on need alone. Although the need plus the weight of the Bible and the obligations of the Great Commission would be enough, it wasn’t all that drove him there and sustained him through the battles. No, Morrison, like all of us, had to be ready to make further sacrifices because of the direct opposition that the offensive gospel we bear and proclaim demands (Matthew 16:18–19).
Conclusion
We should be more prepared for subtle attacks both from within and without. We need to be more resolved to fight our deep, displaced people-pleasing desires. We need to read about and learn from heroes of the past who point us to Jesus. We need to intentionally carve out time in our calendars for living mentors who are actively killing this desire for popularity in themselves.
There is a lot we can do. What we must do and cannot afford to skip or diminish in any way is leaning on and trusting in what Jesus has already done. No, it’s not a Jesus juke. It’s the gospel.
Jesus went ahead of you in this task. He was there at Babel confounding, confusing, and contriving this amazing tonal language we all hate and love. He was there at Pentecost, granting the Spirit and using the disciples’ tongues for them, filling their mouths with previously unknown tongues. (Do it again, Lord–for me!) He is the slain lamb around whose throne some from every tribe and tongue will be gathered once and for all, fully worshiping him and giving him his due honor.
But he is here with us now, too. He is right there with us in our closet-sized offices, helping us grasp what we can’t shortcut in language as we overhear unexpected slander. He is there with us on the field we never thought we would get to. He is there when we are misunderstood by language partners or falsely accused by teammates. He was there with Morrison when he held his wife in his arms, and she took her last breath.
Our Jesus abandoned the ultimate popularity position on the throne, listening to, agreeing with, and obeying only God in the face of hostile powers and indeed even rebellious humanity, to be sacrificed on our behalf. He is both on the throne and by our side now. May we (through his power) be killing sin deep within until we rise again with him!
