What’s happening in China these days has astounded missiologists in their academic cloisters from coast to coast. It has demonstrated the need for a complete reformation of our concepts and practices in foreign missionary operations.

I did not come to this conclusion overnight. It took almost ten years of wrestling with evangelical church traditions to turn me around.

In 1946 I shared a leadership role in a big missionary conference at the University of Toronto. I was on the staff of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, which sponsored the conference. (Similar conferences have since been held at the University of Illinois in Urbana.) In my workshop I gave an impassioned plea for volunteers to give their all to Christ by going out to "the mission field."

I didn’t know any better then than to use the term “mission field” to mean anywhere outside the USA. Even England. Or Germany. Or Korea (where aggressively evangelistic churches were more active than in many parts of the USA).

I was more successful than most in recruiting volunteers because I was young (24) and had committed to go out to "the mission field" myself.

Less than two years later I arrived in China as a gung-ho colonial missionary, ready to "train the Chinese" for Christian service. It never occurred to me at that time that I was partially motivated by a deep seated prejudice absorbed at missionary meetings like the one in Toronto or picked up from books on "missions." Or which I had heard at Christian schools like Moody Bible Institute and Columbia Bible College.

What we really assumed was that we were superior and Chinese (or Indian, or Nigerian or Brazilian) Christians were inferior. Therefore we had to go out and “train the nationals” in an effort to bring them up to our standard. Of course they would never actually reach our level of competency. Fifty-four years later we still hear talk of sending out our superior missionaries to train those inferior Asians and Africans.

Needless to say, it came as a shock to me to discover, soon after my arrival in China, that many Chinese Christians were actually superior to the proud Americans who worked among them. They had a much more mature understanding of the local church being the body of Christ in that locality. Of charisma (grace) being a spiritual empowerment which God gives by measure to every believer (Ephesians 4:7, Romans 12:6) and which determines our role and function in a local body of believers.

I had been personally taught by some of the greatest evangelical leaders and teachers of my generation including Billy Graham, H. A. Ironside, Harold Ockenga, Charles E. Fuller, Lewis Sperry Chafer, W. B. Riley, Bob Jones, Robert McQuilken, Louis Talbot, Harry Rimmer, A. W. Tozer, and Wilbur Smith, to name a few. But not one of them, as far as I was able to determine, had a clear understanding of the charisma which God gives by measure to every believer to equip him or her to minister within a local body of believers. All seemed to take for granted our cultural tradition of conducting church "services" in a theater-style auditorium or medieval-type "sanctuary."

I had to go to China to find Christians who shared corporate life within a body of believers with no "ordained minister" involved. Rather, each one contributed to the life and growth of the body according to the measure of charisma which God had given him (as explained in Ephesians 4, Romans 12 and I Corinthians 12-14.) Chinese Bible teachers understood these things immediately when reading the epistles of Paul because they did not have to unlearn a lot of church traditions inherited from the dark ages. And many Chinese Christians were more zealous in worship and service than the missionaries who had come to work among them.