Rethinking Missions with Steve Saint

The latest book I read is by Steve Saint, the son of Nate Saint, who was one of the missionaries killed by Aucu people many years ago. The book is entitled “The Great Omission,” a play on words about the great commission. The book is based upon his work among the Aucu people and various other groups worldwide. His main point is to challenge the way we do missions and to suggest that some of our missionary tactics are unhelpful and downright contradictory to our goal of evangelizing the world.

            The main tactic that Saint does not like is giving money and lots of “stuff” to believers worldwide. He said he noticed this when he was with the Aucu people. He lived with them twice during his life: once as a teenage and once when he was middle aged, bringing his family to live with them. What struck was that the Aucu people were more spiritually advanced the first time, not the second time. One of the main reasons for this, he decided, was that the Aucu people had gotten a flawed view of Christianity. A prime example was the church. The church building had been built by foreigners using non-native tools and construction materials. Hence, the Aucu felt that the building was not theirs and they did not fix it. Also, they thought that this was the way a church building had to be built, so they never built another church building anywhere.

            So one of Saint’s main points is that Christians need to be very careful about giving money and stuff to other peoples. What he advocates is helping them develop ways to run church that are commercially feasible for them. We should not go in and build churches for them, we should teach them how to build a church that is appropriate for them. Another idea that Saint had was in the area of dentistry. A dentist from the States came with a lot of modern equipment, but was only able to help a small number of people. So Saint began to advocate teaching the Aucu Stone Age people to do dentistry work using a solar powered drill.

            The other contention of Saint is that evangelism and church planting should be done by nationals. Instead of being concerned with bringing in church planters from America, we should be training the nationals to do this kind of work. Saint says that this is the only possible way to reach all the unreached people in the world.

            Overall, I found the book a fascinating read. It isn’t often that a missions book tells Americans that they are giving too much money! He doesn’t actually say this, though. He just says that the money is being used in the wrong way. It is certainly a challenge to the way missions is currently done.

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