This article is not abstract for me. It comes from the deepest wound of my life and ministry. It is the story of how my family was sent to the Netherlands to reach the Turkish-speaking population with the gospel and how, in the process, we were abandoned by the very church that sent us.

We were abandoned not because we rejected our mission, but because we refused to sacrifice the fundamental Christian loves that make foreign missions possible.

Before we ever left the United States, there was complete agreement between us and our previous pastors: if we were going to minister long-term among Turkish Muslims in Europe, we needed a healthy international church for our family, for our spiritual stability, and for local believers in the Netherlands. Everyone understood and affirmed this. It was part of the official sending plan. It was part of the visa sponsorship. It was part of the pastoral counsel we received. And it was, we believed, part of the Lord’s wisdom.

But the church we joined upon arrival soon drifted into theological error, and the pastor fell into deep sin. The environment became spiritually unhealthy, not only for us but for the Christians already there. With no healthy international church option available, we urged our pastors in America to support the planting of one—not as a shift in calling, not as a new direction, but as a necessary step back to keep going faithfully in the same direction we were sent.

Their answer stunned us.

They told us they agreed that our family needed a healthy church. They agreed that the local believers needed a healthy church. They agreed the Netherlands needed a healthy church. But they did not believe it was “best” for reaching Turkish Muslims.

Their sentence haunts me to this day: “We believe these things are important, but they are not the best thing. The best thing is staying focused on the Turks.”

In other words, remain in an unhealthy church. Ignore the theological drift. Pretend the sin is not there. Don’t think about the believers around you. Don’t think about the spiritual oxygen your family needs. Don’t think about the long-term presence of gospel witness in the Netherlands.

Just “stay focused on the Turks.”

And in that moment, I realized: a false hierarchy of loves had formed. A missional value system that placed “the unreached” above Christ’s church, above the health of missionaries, above the spiritual needs of Christians, and above the basic order God himself commands.

This is the effect of something I have previously written about: Gospel-Onlyism. I’ve defined this as “a mindset that treats anything beyond the message of personal salvation as a ‘distraction,’ encumbrance, or even a danger to the mission of the church.”

And it is the silent engine driving many unhealthy decisions in missions today.

How Gospel-Onlyism Distorts Missions

Gospel-Onlyism is not an overcommitment to the gospel. It is an underdeveloped understanding of how the gospel works in the world. It insists that reaching the lost is the only priority that really matters, and everything else is a distraction. Even the very means Christ has ordained to sustain the mission, like the local church, the health of Christian families, the cultivation of stable Christian communities, and the long, slow, generational presence of believers.

When this mindset dominates, “the unreached” becomes a category so revered that anything already reached can be neglected, dismissed, or sacrificed. This is precisely what has happened to Europe, and is what happened to us. The “best” thing was defined as whatever was hardest, most extreme, most sacrificial, most dangerous, most “focused on the lost,” even if it meant ignoring the very conditions necessary for long-term faithfulness.

This is not biblical. This is not our historical Christian mission. This is not the Great Commission. It is a disordered love.

Three SBC-Formed Errors That Make This Problem Worse

My story is personal, but it is not unique. It is symptomatic of three structural flaws that have come to shape large parts of the Southern Baptist Convention and a strong part of our mission culture.

1) Missiological Misunderstandings

There is a persistent idea in the SBC that anything “reached” is no longer worth serious effort. Europe has been functionally conceded to Islam and secularism because it is not considered “unreached.” The United States is treated as a secondary concern because it already has churches, even as Christianity erodes at every institutional level.

This is not the Great Commission. This is naïveté.

It still baffles me that the last strongholds of churches in Europe weren’t waving their white flags and calling upon the American church to send its cavalry of resources, pastors, and missionaries to her aid before slipping into secular chaos and Islamic invasion. I feel similarly towards what’s happened in Minneapolis, MN. I can’t recall any prominent SBC pastor in that area standing tall against the Islamification of its communities and local government. It was all just seen as an “opportunity for gospel witness.” But before too long, as stated by a mullah a few weeks ago, they’ll “come to your doors, come into your homes, and your children will be Muslim.”

I think many are waking up, but we need whole-hearted conviction that healthy churches, healthy families, and healthy Christian societies are not obstacles to mission; they are the fuel of mission. When you neglect them or are willing to compromise them, then the “product” we put out on the field will reflect that.

2) Weak Leadership

This is not just about temperament. It is about men who are willing to compromise, who view risk as unnecessary, who fear conflict with a few loud voices, who distrust strength in their young men, who silence opposing voices, who can’t make adjustments, and who seek to please people rather than do what’s right. The result is a leadership culture that is reactive, risk-averse, and unwilling to confront dysfunction.

And the SBC is rife with weak leaders.

Men like this will not protect missionaries. They will not confront toxic mission environments. They will not seek understanding. They will not honor their fathers and preserve what they inherited. They will disable young men. They will quietly choose the path of least resistance, even if it wounds the very people they sent. We all know we have a masculinity problem. What we need to admit is that it’s affecting our mission efforts.

3) Abandoning the “Reached” for the “Unreached”

Driven by gospel-onlyism, many Southern Baptists seem entirely unconcerned about the well-being of our home nation, America, and the need for missions work and church planting here on our own soil. Yes, we have NAMB and the Send Network. But there is still a narrow, reductionistic mindset that creates the illusion of a “best” category defined solely by urgency and extremity.

The more “unreached,” the more “dangerous,” the more “sacrificial,” the better. That’s what’s “best.” Prioritizing the well-being of the political and cultural environment here in America that actually empowers us to be a force for global missions is, again, a “distraction.” We use the term “gospel centered” too often this way. If I can convince you that it’s more “gospel-centered,” it must be the best. What we usually mean by that is anything evangelistic, for the lost, or maxing out our witness! And anything that looks like care for existing Christians, families, cultures, societies, or institutions looks like a “good thing” but is actually a distraction. It’s all mission drift.

This creates a value system where the already-reached can be abandoned in the name of reaching the unreached. And that’s precisely what happened to me.

But Christ never told us to pick one or the other. He gave us an “order of loves.” These orders have provided balance for the church throughout church history, and Vice President J.D. Vance may have a better grip on it than our pastors today. Love God, love your family, love the household of faith, love your neighbor, and love the nations. Christ’s teachings don’t teach us to invert this.

When you try to love the nations while neglecting your family or your church, it is not sacrificial. It is sentimental. And it collapses. Both at home and abroad.

A Way Forward: Reordering Our Loves to Restore Our Mission

If we want to correct these errors, the answer is not to retreat from missions. It is to return to the Ordo Amoris, a rightly ordered love that strengthens mission rather than distorts it.

We must build a church culture where the Great Commission is not reduced to a single direction but understood as a double mandate: to advance the gospel outward to the nations and to fortify the gospel where it already stands.

The church must recommit to sending missionaries boldly and sacrificially but also to guarding, strengthening, and expanding the influence of the gospel in our own culture, cities, institutions, and public life. Reaching the nations and rebuilding Christendom are not competing tasks. They are mutually reinforcing.

Where the gospel is already established, we must preserve it, defend it, and grow it. Where the gospel is absent, we must proclaim it, plant churches, and send laborers into the harvest. The Great Commission requires both a rooted people and a sent people; a nourished church at home and a bold church abroad.

When we honor the order of loves: family first, then the household of faith, then our nation, and the world, our cup is full. And when the cup is full, it overflows. That overflow is where mission power comes from. That overflow is where the nations are reached. That overflow is where missionaries are sustained in the long term. That overflow is what allows us to stand firm at home and push outward to the unreached at the same time.

But when we invert those loves and demand that missionaries sacrifice the very things that fill the cup, the result is burnout, abandonment, broken families, unhealthy churches, and a hollow mission field. It also creates an apathetic Christian in our own society. Reformers said things like, “The civil magistrate is the highest calling of man.” Pastors and Christians today say things like, “politics, our government, and its leaders don’t matter.” These inverted loves create empty missionaries abroad and lazy citizens at home. Both are bad for the advancement of the gospel.

We cannot continue compromising the health of our missionaries, the needs of their families, the well-being of local believers, our own nation, or cultures or places the gospel flag had been planted by those before us, for the “best” and most “radical” form of mission.

A biblical church does both. It sends. It guards. It reaches the unreached. It strengthens the reached. It fights for the health of its own society while proclaiming Christ to societies far away. It loves in the order God designed. The order of the Christian family, the order of responsibility for churches, and the order of Nations working to procure blessings for their people. 

Our mission statements need to be rooted in the understanding that when a church loves in order, the nations will be reached with greater power, greater stability, greater longevity, and greater joy because the sending base is strong, the church is healthy, and the missionaries are sustained.

This is the vision we must restore. And this is the lesson my family learned through great pain: you cannot neglect the already-reached in order to reach the unreached.

But if you strengthen what is already Christian, your love for the lost only grows. The cup doesn’t drain. It overflows.