Review of "Let the Nations Be Glad"

John Piper’s book, Let the Nations Be Glad, has long been a source for thinking deeply about missions. It first came out in 1993 and was revised and expanded in 2003. I assigned the first and the last chapters to my class in Zambia, since they have to do with the subject of worship, and they remain my favorite chapters in the book. Here you will find the familiar Piper themes, mostly famously: “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” Reading or hearing Piper expound upon that theme is always worth your while.

In addition to worship, which he calls both “the fuel and the goal” of missions, Piper also addresses the roles of prayer and suffering in missions. The chapter on prayer will make you want to pray more; the chapter on suffering will make you want to prepare more.

As he moved into “the necessity and nature” of missions, however, I would have preferred more thorough treatment of a few themes, or less dogmatism in the absence of more thorough treatment.

Regarding the chapter on the necessity of the saving message of Christ, I think he could have used better engagement with the views of John Stott and Millard Erickson since he chose to reference them. Piper provides helpful critiques of those who don’t hold the same conclusions he’s reached on eternal torment for those who have never heard the gospel message. But the careless reader may assume that Piper has lumped Stott and Erickson into the same group as liberal theologians such as Hicks and Pinnock. I’ve read Stott and Erickson on these matters and their views deserved better treatment. And to say that Stott’s view of divine punishment (wherein the unrepentant are “destroyed” and not eternally tormented) “cuts the nerve” of missions urgency--well, I find that difficult to believe when I see the global outreach of Stott’s ministry, particularly through the Langham Partnership.

I read the debates among conservative evangelical scholars about whether the unrepentant will be in eternal torment or eternally destroyed, and frankly it seems like a debate on whether it’s better to be seated in first-class or coach in a 747 that’s destined to crash. Our job is to persuade people from boarding the damned plane! (And that was not a vulgarity.) It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God: That is motivation enough to evangelize.

And then, as to the nature of the missions enterprise: while Piper is persuasive in showing that our job is to reach “people groups” and not simply “nations” or regions, I wonder if he goes too far with his conclusion. Surely, it has been a needed corrective in missions thinking across the last 20 years to focus on penetrating “people groups” and not just geographical regions. The task of missions, Piper correctly concludes, is not simply to reach as many people as possible but to penetrate into as many people groups as possible. It is “every tribe and language and people and nation” who will be represented around the throne (Revelation 5:9). Once a church is established in a people group, it becomes the task of that church to evangelize its community while the missionary, Piper says, is to move on to other people groups that must be engaged.

This thinking is not unique to Piper: it could fairly describe the assumptions of most mission agencies today. However, I wonder if we haven’t “overcorrected” bad thinking in the past by now defining “missions” too narrowly.

Compare missions to the work of a military campaign. (I admit this could be a dangerous analogy, but follow me for the sake of my argument.) In a military campaign--in Afghanistan or Iraq, for example--there’s the work of invasion but then there follows the work of occupation. Both phases are part of the military campaign, not just the invasion. No one wants foreign forces to occupy Afghanistan or Iraq for long: the local people have to take on the work of developing and defending democracy. But if there isn’t a period of effective occupation immediately after invasion, the sacrifices required in the invasion will have been for naught. The forces under a period of occupation don’t receive nearly as much glory as the forces that led the invasion--and perhaps that is as it should be. But if the occupying forces aren’t successful, it dishonors the hard work of the invading forces.

Now, to compare that to missions: Piper and many others want to define missions exclusively as the work of invasion and not occupation. In fact, under this conviction, some mission agencies (including, perhaps, the IMB that our church supports?) are re-routing resources used for occupation toward new invasions. I hope our missions leaders do not weaken the work of occupation in our commitment to invasion in other places. Certainly, eventually local believers must pick up the work: the “occupation” by foreign missions agencies should not last forever. But my point is that the work of “occupation” is as much a part of missions as the work of “invasion,” just as it is in a military campaign.

(Once again, I may regret my analogy of a military campaign. A blog post is more of a journal entry than an academic paper. But, with caution, I think the illustration applies.)

Despite these two complaints, I believe Piper’s book deserves its established place on the “must-read” list. For anyone thinking through the subject of global missions, this is one of the books to engage with.