Is "missionary" actually a job?

Welcome back to this blog after a break caused by holidays, it's summer down here, and general lack of time. I thought we would start again with an important question: Is "missionary" actually a job? Well, maybe we have to rephrase that, because I obviously get paid for something! Maybe better: Is "missionary" a job description? Does it describe what a person actually does, like doctor, engineer or teacher?

I meet this quite a lot. There seems to be a kind of generic "missionary", a type of person that people automatic associate with the word. Perhaps the most common is the "pioneer-evangelist". Evoking a picture of a gentleman dressed in khaki hacking his way through the jungle to preach the gospel to some tribe for the first time. Or the modern equivalent. Today we would attach "church-planter" to this person as well. While a lot of missionaries do work with this it's worth remembering that the days are mostly over when you step off the boat as the first Christian person in the land. These days the missionary steps out of the air-plane and meets the local pastor.

Let me mention a few different lots of missionaries I've met the last few months:

•  Mags and Gwen are missionaries with SAMS, an Anglican missions agency based in Ireland. They've been in Paraguay for over 20 years dedicating themselves to the St Andrews school. Gwen is the principal for the school and Mags is vice-principal for the older students. 

• Ken and Christie spent their first few years in the south of the country starting youth clubs. The were very clear that they didn't want to start a church. In fact, when they came to the country their idea was to help out at a local camp site. They just moved to the city of Encarnacion where they want to start, you guessed right, another youth club.

•  Emivaldo and Ewa our new pastor colleagues in another CIBB church in the nearby town of San Lorenzo. They came from Brazil about 20 years ago and has worked mainly as pastors, but also other jobs in that time. Missionaries? They would definitely fall in that category.

Our own denomination, Interact, sends out doctors, nurses, economists, journalists, engineers and even pastors! Actually it's quite rare these days to send out pastors for a local church as its considered better if nationals do that job.

So it doesn't seem like a missionary is such a clear category after all. Maybe "missionary" really is something else, like a form of employment or a background motivation or perhaps as simple as the old definition, "someone who goes through salt waters for the gospel" (Sweden is surrounded by sea, so to get abroad you really have to cross a sea, hence the salt) I don't have a killer definition just yet, but I do have an advice:

Next time you meet someone who is introduced as a missionary, ask them what they do!