To the Regions Beyond

Our hope is that . . . we can preach the gospel in the regions beyond you. For we do not want to boast about work already done in another man’s territory.
—2 Corinthians 10:15–16 (NIV)

It is then only reasonable to seek the work where the need is most abundant and the workers are fewest.
—James Gilmore, missionary to Mongolia (1872–1893)

There are no other missions that will send us to Mongolia. Will you, Mr. Fletcher?”

The young couple standing before me explained that they had a deep burden for Mongolia, but every mission agency they spoke with told them there was no way they could go there because the country was “closed.” At that time, Mongolia was one of the most restricted countries in the world, but this couple felt the Lord calling them there.

We encouraged them that God had an “open window” and helped them put together a team of like-hearted new missionaries. While they waited for the window to open to Mongolia, they went to Budapest, Hungary, where one of the universities had a visiting professor from a university in Mongolia. It was the best place to start learning the Mongolian language—even though they had to use an old language book written in Czechoslovakian to do so!

In 1989, when the Iron Curtain fell, there was only a handful of believers in all of Mongolia—possibly as few as ten. Our team was among the very first foreign missionaries to enter the country. It certainly helped that they already knew some of the language, and God used them to win and disciple Mongolians.

A few years later, this same couple prayed, “Lord, You’ve raised up so many missionaries here now. Where else do You need us?” They felt the Lord calling them to Libya—a country that seemed completely closed at the time, but that only made the need to go all the greater. They spent the next few years working with Libyans elsewhere in the Middle East and are still praying for the door to open for them to reside in Libya. They are the epitome of pioneers; they just won’t give up!

There were more young people like this couple who were ready to go wherever the Lord called them—and Peggy and I didn’t want to turn away any of them. We didn’t want a single potential missionary to conclude, “I can’t go there.” That’s why we decided from the start to recruit for quantity and screen for quality. We knew that a lot of young people who talked with mission agencies were exploring God’s will for their lives, and when they came to us, we wanted to be sensitive to where they were and not rule them out immediately for reasons that were not biblical. There will always be some applicants who “don’t make it” for any one of a thousand reasons, but we wanted to cast the net very wide. We took every inquiry seriously and encouraged each person as much as possible. The application process itself is a natural screening process—filling out forms, being interviewed, taking a Bible test, undergoing psychological testing and more. Furthermore, we work with applicants in partnership with their local churches, and send out only those who have been fully endorsed by a home sending fellowship. The entire process allows plenty of time to look at someone’s calling, training, gifts, personality, temperament, aptitude, interests, ministry values and more. We knew applicants would hear from God during that time, as would we.

We didn’t want a single potential missionary to conclude, “I can’t go there.” That’s why we decided from the start to recruit for quantity and screen for quality.

Many of our first recruits came from Washington Bible College, and later from Columbia International University in South Carolina, one of the top mission schools in the country. Two of our children had become students at Columbia, and because they were headed for the mission field, they knew everyone else on campus who was, too. Many of the 1,000 students enrolled there wanted to go into missions full-time. When Peggy and I made recruiting trips to the college, they approached our display booth in the student center and asked about possibilities for reaching the unreached areas of the world.

Instinctively, I began saying things to them that I wished people had said to us when we applied to be missionaries 20 years earlier: “So you want to be a missionary? Great! It’s no problem that you don’t have all your training yet. We’ll work with you and your church to get that taken care of, and before you know it you’ll be out on the field. The harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few. Be one of the few! We’ve been praying for people just like you who are willing to forsake all and follow Christ.”

I liked the can-do attitude of Rick Clark, who was our director of mobilization at the time. He would say to students, “Don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t get into India. India is wide open to the gospel and we can get you there.”

Many of the young people we met back in those days are still serving on the mission field with Pioneers today. One student we met, for example, told us after her summer trip to China, “I have to get back to China.” There was a sense of urgency in her words, as if she really understood the monumental size of the harvest field in that country. We had an open door there, so we were able to send her right away. She is still in China, now with her husband and children.

Another student we met at Columbia was a young man named Steve Richardson. Steve grew up in Irian Jaya, Indonesia, where his parents were missionaries. His father, Don Richardson, wrote the classic mission books Peace Child, Lords of the Earth and Eternity in Their Hearts. Steve was one of the mission “visionaries” on Columbia’s campus. President of the Student Mission Fellowship, he had a passion for the unreached Sundanese Muslim people on the island of Java in Indonesia. At the time, they were considered the largest unreached people group in the world, numbering 33 million.

Our board had been praying about launching a new outreach to the Sundanese, so it was a natural match. Steve put his administrative and leadership gifts to work and built a team to match the task—including our daughter Arlene, whom he married in 1983. Within a few years, Steve and Arlene helped to assemble a team of 40 enthusiastic missionaries. Among them were our daughter Carol and her husband, Gary Franz. It was our largest team at the time.[5]

The team initiated an array of creative ministries including English schools, literature publication, relief work and theological training for national workers. Arlene started a self-help program called Agape Craft, which employs local workers who make and sell quilts, wooden crafts, stuffed toys and other items. Not only does Agape Craft provide jobs and training for the unemployed, but it is also an excellent witness of how Christians can apply godly principles to business endeavors. One of the other members of this team, John Fain, was involved in a theological school that trained national workers. Many years later, John became our director of international ministries.

From that Sundanese Team have come additional teams that are now bringing the Good News to other unreached groups in Indonesia, many also numbering in the millions.

As our staff on the field grew, our headquarters staff grew as well. God would bring us people in the most remarkable ways. For example, Barb Snyder, from York, Pennsylvania, where my brother Harry was a pastor, heard about an opening for a job as my secretary. While I was interviewing her, we needed to send out some receipts, and since there was no one else to help, I asked Barb if she wouldn’t mind typing them. That was in December 1984, and Barb has been with us ever since. She came to us without promise of support and just trusted the Lord to provide for her. She is the equal of the finest secretaries I worked with in the business world and also became like another daughter to Peggy and me.

Other key staff came at a time when we were expanding and needing the right people. One of them was Jerry Knisley, our first full-time accountant. Jerry and his wife, Mary, were a great blessing to us, and we felt a tremendous loss when the Lord called Jerry home a few years later after a long battle with cancer.

God sent us more and more young people who wanted to blaze new paths to the unreached. In fact, we decided to change our name to describe more accurately the call that the Lord had given us. We also needed a name that would be more security sensitive—one that didn’t sound like a Christian mission, so that we could protect our missionaries in restricted-access countries. I remembered hearing that only one out of every ten missionaries is pioneering in new frontiers. We wanted a mission in which ten out of ten were pioneering, so we chose the new name “Pioneers” to reflect our desire not to follow the worn paths, but to blaze new ones.

Our board also defined our focus of ministry. At the time, there were thousands of unreached people groups around the world, so we asked the Lord on which groups within the six unreached blocs He wanted us to focus our efforts. We felt He directed us to these unreached peoples: the Kurds in Turkey (part of the Muslim bloc); the Fulani in Mali, West Africa (Muslim); the urban Buddhists in Bangkok (Buddhist); the Hindus and Muslims in Mauritius; the Sundanese in Indonesia (Muslim) and the Pokot in Kenya (Tribal). One of these groups, the Fulani, was considered so difficult to reach that one mission had pulled out their workers. After 40 years of missions work there, they had two converts; one was killed, and the other disappeared. We were sobered by the task ahead of us, but not overwhelmed. If God would help us to raise up a team, we determined to focus on those with the least opportunity to hear, regardless of how dangerous or how difficult the task might be.

Armed with a new name and a defined focus, we began aggressively recruiting a new breed of missionaries who were looking for a pioneering approach to reaching the unreached. We moved forward by faith and trusted that God would open doors and windows, and give us the strategies we needed.

As God sent young people our way—first baby boomers, and then baby busters after them—we saw them as a unique force for world evangelization. These teenagers and young adults thought about their faith and life in more relational terms. We were drawn to them, and they to us. In time, the Lord also attracted older, second-career missionaries to us, who were young at heart and full of zeal.

They all liked our flexible approach and what we today call our core values. Our number one core value is passion for God. In everything we do, our heart is to glorify God among the nations. Two, we focus on unreached peoples. There are many good mission boards doing excellent work, but we don’t want to duplicate what they are doing. Our maxim is, “Do not go where the path may lead; go where there is no path and leave a trail.” We want to go to those who have never had an opportunity to hear the gospel, and that means focusing on peoples with the greatest need and least opportunity to hear and understand the gospel.

Three, we work in partnership with the local church—the key to sending as well as receiving missionaries. We stress to our missionaries that they need to have a strong relationship with their home church as their “senders.” Once on the field, we partner with local national churches and ministries (where they already exist) to accomplish the task. Four, we initiate church-planting movements, resulting in dynamic, self-perpetuating and multiplying churches that also have a missionary vision so that they, too, become missionary-sending churches.

Five, we’re team centered and accomplish our mission through teams of people who use all their combined gifts to get the job done. Six, we believe in participatory servant-leadership. Our team leaders are there to serve the people under them. That’s why we base our area leaders on the field (unlike some mission agencies who base their field leadership in the home office).

Seven, we try to use innovative approaches to reach and minister to unreached peoples. Most of the countries we work in don’t welcome missionaries, so we look for outside-the-box creativity to get our teams to these places. One important way is through bi-vocational workers—doctors, nurses, builders, engineers, teachers, administrators and business people. They have legitimate non-religious jobs that grant them work visas, but their primary purpose is to make Christ known and, however possible, work toward starting a church.

Finally, we believe in the ethos of grace, meaning that God’s grace operates uniquely in the lives of all believers, enhancing our personal and cultural diversity. In all our relationships, we try to cultivate an atmosphere of mutual acceptance, which encourages each of us to attain our full potential in Christ. Our Statement of Faith affirms all essential evangelical doctrines while leaving secondary, less consequential issues as matters of personal conviction. As a result, we have a broad-based membership and partnership, which we think reflects the heart of the gospel and the mind of Christ.

Some of these core values must have appeared radical at the time, and not surprisingly, caused some concern. For example, when we applied to join the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association (IFMA), a national association of more than 100 mission boards, our reception from some of the members was, frankly, less than enthusiastic. We had been encouraged to pursue membership so that we could network with others and learn from them, which we were pleased to do. When we met with the board, however, the leadership of some of the older, established mission agencies seemed to view us as the “new kids on the block” who for various reasons were encroaching on their territory. One leader looked at our brochure that mentioned a people group in east Africa to whom we were hoping to minister. He bluntly told me, “We have been working with this people group.” Although that was true, nonetheless, there were 180,000 still totally unreached people, and no one was working with them. He and others insinuated that we were being competitive, and they implied that our entering the scene was not “constructive” to the unity of their fraternity.

Others didn’t like the “distinctives” mentioned in our brochure, which they felt were arrogant. For example, we emphasized a “simplified lifestyle” for our missionaries, a team approach to working on the field and a policy that left decisions up to parents regarding the education of their children. At the time, most missions required that missionaries send their children to mission boarding schools, but we felt if parents wanted to keep their children with them and rely on home schooling, it was their prerogative.

We also came under fire for stressing what we called “personal sensitivity” to the needs of the individual missionary—trying to follow a flexible approach to each situation. To us, it made more sense to accommodate our policies to our missionaries so that they could achieve their greatest potential, rather than expecting our missionaries to accommodate themselves to our policies. We believed (and still do) that this would result in a higher morale for them and a better relationship with mission leadership.

We also developed our own policy on furloughs, which we felt was more flexible. At the time, most missions required missionaries to work on the field a set number of years before taking their home assignment (furlough). We felt it should be up to the individual missionary in consultation with their team leader and home sending church. Some people can go five years without going home, while others, particularly single missionaries and those working in difficult situations, might need more frequent and shorter breaks.

Still others felt we shouldn’t send young people to the field to start new teams; they said missionaries, especially the leaders, needed to be experienced. It always amazed me that as a country we didn’t think twice about sending teenagers to war, but apparently sending them into spiritual battle was a different matter.

The reaction we received from our peers in those early days was mystifying, and it could also have been discouraging had the Lord not sent key people to stand with us. Among them was Dr. Robert Alderman, who was our chairman of the board. Bob was a stabilizing force, someone who could balance vision with the structures and policies needed to support it. I’m sure many of my responses to these mission leaders may have seemed naïve, with a “corporate” edge to them, but Bob was able to guide us through the meetings. He saw beyond my weaknesses and genuinely wanted to be part of building our mission into a godly and credible movement.

Bob earned his doctorate in ministry from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and wrote his dissertation on church/mission relationships. As pastor of Shenandoah Baptist Church in Roanoke, Virginia, he emphasized our need to nurture strong partnerships with local sending churches. Bob’s heartbeat, and ours, was that the local church should be actively involved in the sending process. Many local churches simply delegated foreign missions to their denomination’s mission board, but we felt that a missionary should be sent by his or her local church, not by the mission board. This process would involve the local church not only supporting its missionary but also making important decisions affecting his or her ministry, thus giving the church joint ownership of the work being done on the field. I met Bob during a strategic time at Pioneers when we were experiencing internal growing pains. He moved into a place of leadership on our board and emerged as the spokesman. Bob was a real defender for us and what we stood for.

Among the other “encouragers” whom the Lord sent us were Dr. Edwin L. (Jack) Frizen Jr., who was executive director of IFMA, and his wife, Grace. It was Jack who encouraged us to apply for membership in IFMA, and he upheld our merits to the board, which did finally accept us as full members. The Frizens seemed to recognize that Peggy and I were going against the tide, but saw a genuineness in our spirits and a readiness to get on with the task of world evangelization. They could see that our pioneering effort flowed with the stream of missions history and God’s continued pursuit of the lost, the least and the forgotten.

God used the challenges that we faced in those days to clarify who we were and where He was calling us. Someone once said, “Trials are just trails to the overcomer.” Opposition showed us that we were blazing new paths and didn’t fit into the mainstream mold. God continued to bring us qualified, dynamic people who didn’t fit the mold, either—people who were willing to risk their all for Him, pioneers who wouldn’t quit, and who wouldn’t do things the old way just because “that’s how we’ve always done it.”

Right behind these baby boomers were the baby busters—and behind them the Gen Xers, the Millennials and the Gen Yers. We realized that to effectively mobilize the missionary force of the next generation, we have to observe the current teenage culture because they’re the ones we will be recruiting in seven to ten years—and they will always be different from our current missionaries. What was “cutting edge” to the baby boomers seems dull and rusty to the next generation. We must be willing to change and adapt, to allow each generation the opportunity to own the vision and move forward without being weighed down by the past.

No matter how effective and innovative we’ve been in the past, we have to remain pioneers—or we’ll be in danger of becoming like the people who thought Peggy and I were “misguided radicals.” A new breed is always just around the corner!