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The official representative from Saddleback Church had just finished his powerful presentation of Rick Warren's P.E.A.C.E. plan. Afterwards, I told him that I use The Purpose-Driven Church in a doctoral-level course, and also how much I appreciate Warren's impact on the church. But when I mentioned the critical omission of missions in the book, this rep grinned in agreement. That's why he and I welcomed the P.E.A.C.E. plan (CT, October 2005, p. 32), which outlines a holistic approach to the church's responsibility to the world, conquering the "giants" of poverty, illness, and ignorance. The plan is marketed as a wholly new paradigm for doing missions.

Warren's well intended, helpful, and increasingly popular approach, however, is not fundamentally new. It tackles the Great Commission with methods that have been wending their way through the evangelical missionary movement for at least two decades: using (1) short-term teams and money via (2) church-to-church ministry (the local church "here" partnering with a local church "there"). Let's look at them before we examine an equally troubling theological shift.

1. Short-term teams and money. This "new" approach to doing the evangelistic part of missions began to emerge in the 1970s, especially with Calvary Chapel and other megachurches. And it has been wildly successful, at least in terms of raw statistics. While the number of long-term missionaries from North America has stayed basically static, the number of American laity involved in short-term projects grew from 22,000 in 1979 to more than a million today.

Of course, the appeal is irresistible for a generation wanting personal involvement now in something significant, but which does not require a long-term commitment. That cultural/generational base for the shift would seem to guarantee its permanence, assuming continued American affluence to fund this very expensive approach.

So what's the problem? Simply put, the 1.8 billion people who have not heard the gospel and who have little or no opportunity to hear it. People living outside the reach of present gospel witness, it stands to reason, cannot be reached by short-term "amateurs," as missions strategist Ralph Winter identifies them. These out-of-reach peoples must have a witness who will cross geographical and cultural boundaries and live among them long enough to understand them and win their confidence. If completing the Great Commission is the churches' assignment, short-termers can't do it.

Proponents may answer that short-term teams can partner with indigenous pioneer missionaries who live near the unreached to win the unreached. Perhaps this is true in theory, but it is extremely rare or even nonexistent in practice. We must face the fact that most career missionaries from the younger churches in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have yet to penetrate these out-of-reach areas in significant numbers. Sadly, our million-plus North American short termers minister not among the unreached, but among the reached, where the church already exists.

2. Church-to-church ministry. We encounter similar problems with this second emphasis. The central issue is this: When it comes to those who are not within reach of a gospel witness, by definition there are no churches for our churches to partner with. To reach the unreached, we must cross boundaries, and for about one-third of the world's people, there is no receiving church on the other side. Stan Guthrie, a CT senior associate editor, notes in his book Missions in the Third Millennium that cross-cultural ministry remains essential to the Great Commission:

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July 2006, Vol. 50, No. 7