Editor’s Note: This article is a condensed version of the original. The original version is available for free on Amazon Kindle and as a PDF download (link pending).
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Healthy ecclesiology fuels healthy missiology. How a church practices membership, conducts discipline, and trains elders shapes how that church engages in missions. If your church wants to plant God-glorifying, effective churches in foreign lands, then it must first understand and model a biblical understanding of the church. Flawed, dysfunctional churches at home send out missionaries who plant flawed, dysfunctional churches abroad.
In my experience, most American evangelical churches rarely consider how their ecclesiology shapes their missiology. That’s because we’ve separated two things that should never be separated: a biblical understanding of what an elder is, and our commitment to the Great Commission.
Let me illustrate what I mean with two examples: one from abroad and one from North America.
ECCLESIOLOGY AND MISSIOLOGY: TWO CASE STUDIES
Asia
From 2006–2016, I served as a missionary in a closed country in Asia. During that decade, I encountered a disturbing number of unqualified missionaries. Some didn’t know their Bible; some thought they knew their Bibles, yet taught doctrines contrary to Scripture. Believe it
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