What is missions?

Question 11021.

Christian missions is the deliberate sending of people across barriers of geography, language and culture so that Christ is made known where He is not yet named. That is the working definition I use, and each part of it is doing something.

The word itself comes from the Latin for sending, which is a fair translation of the Greek behind apostle. Everything that follows in this article is an unfolding of what it means for a church to send rather than only to gather.

Where Christian missions begins

It begins with God rather than with us. He is the One who sends: the Father sends the Son, the Son sends the Spirit, and the Son sends His people. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you (John 20:21).

It also begins earlier than most people assume. God told Abraham that in him all the families of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 12:3), and Israel was set among the nations as a witness. The book of Jonah exists because a prophet objected to God’s interest in a city outside Israel.

So Christian missions is not a New Testament innovation bolted on at the end. It is the outworking of a purpose that runs from Genesis to Revelation, where a great multitude from every nation, tribe, people and language stands before the throne (Revelation 7:9).

What distinguishes it from evangelism

All Christian missions involves evangelism, but not all evangelism is missions. The difference is the crossing of a barrier. Telling your neighbour about Jesus is evangelism. Learning a language in order to tell people who have no church, no Bible in their tongue and no believer within reach is missions.

Paul described his own ambition in exactly those terms: to preach the gospel not where Christ had already been named, lest he build on someone else’s foundation (Romans 15:20). He was drawn to the places without a witness.

That distinction matters when a church allocates its money and its people. Both tasks are necessary, and the second is the one most easily neglected because its results are furthest from view.

Who sends, and who goes

The local church sends. At Antioch, while they were worshipping and fasting, the Spirit directed the setting apart of Barnabas and Saul, and the congregation laid hands on them and sent them off (Acts 13:1-3). They went out from a body of believers who knew them and remained accountable to it.

That is the pattern I would defend. A missionary sent by a congregation that has watched their character over years is a different proposition from an individual who felt something at a conference and raised support online. Christian missions works best when it runs through real churches rather than around them.

And the sending church has ongoing obligations. Paul reported back to Antioch, and his letters are full of thanks for churches that supported him. Prayer, money, correspondence and practical care for the people who go are not optional extras of Christian missions; they are how most believers actually participate in it.

The task is not finished

Roughly a third of the world’s population lives in groups with no meaningful access to a church or a witness. That figure is not an argument for panic, but it is an argument against the assumption that the work is essentially done and we are now in the tidying-up phase.

Paul’s logic still applies. How are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard, and how are they to hear without someone preaching (Romans 10:14)? The chain has a link in it that requires somebody to move.

I have written separately on the situation of those who have never heard, in what about unreached peoples, because the question of their standing before God sits underneath the whole enterprise.

What missionaries actually do

Evangelism first, but rarely alone. The New Testament pattern moves from preaching to gathering converts into congregations to appointing elders. Paul and Barnabas revisited the towns where they had preached, strengthened the disciples, and appointed elders in every church (Acts 14:21-23).

So Christian missions aims at churches rather than at converts scattered across a map. A believer without a congregation is desperately vulnerable, and a work that leaves no local church behind has left nothing that will outlast the missionary.

Bible translation belongs here too, along with training national leaders, and a great deal of unglamorous work with medicine, education and clean water. Compassion is not a bribe or a strategy; it is simply what love does when it arrives somewhere with needs.

What it costs the ones who go

We are sentimental about missionaries in retrospect and careless with them in the present. The people who go leave families, bury children abroad, learn languages in middle age, and come home on furlough to churches that cannot quite remember why they support them.

Paul’s own catalogue is sobering: beatings, shipwreck, hunger, danger from every quarter, and on top of it all the daily pressure of anxiety for the churches (2 Corinthians 11:24-28). He was not describing an unusually bad decade. He was describing the work.

There are quieter costs too. Loneliness, marriages under strain, children caught between cultures, and the particular ache of returning to a home country that has moved on without you. Christian missions asks a great deal of ordinary people, and the sending church’s job is to notice.

So ask your missionaries what is actually hard rather than only what is encouraging, and be the sort of congregation that will hear an honest answer without treating it as a lack of faith. Some of the most faithful workers I know spent years unable to tell anyone at home how close they were to the end of themselves.

Doing it without doing harm

There is a version of Christian missions that exports culture along with the gospel, and it has done real damage. The message is not Western, the hymn tunes are not sacred, and a congregation in another country should not have to become English in order to become Christian.

There is also a version that creates dependency, where foreign money keeps a work alive that could never sustain itself and local leaders are permanently juniors to visitors. Paul appointed elders quickly and moved on, which suggests rather more confidence in the Spirit than we usually display.

A third danger is treating the work as a competition between agencies, or as a marketing exercise in which results are inflated for the newsletter. Numbers reported from the field have a way of growing in transit, and a sending church does nobody any favours by preferring exciting reports to accurate ones.

And short-term trips deserve honest scrutiny. Some genuinely serve a long-term work; others cost more than they contribute and exist chiefly to benefit the visitors. Ask the people on the ground what actually helps, and then do that.

How ordinary believers take part

Pray by name. Get a letter from a missionary your church supports and actually read it, then pray for the things they ask for rather than the things you imagine they need.

Give, and give steadily. Paul thanked the Philippians for partnership in the gospel from the first day until now (Philippians 1:5), and standing orders keep people fed when enthusiasm has moved on.

Go, if that is where this leads. Somebody has to, and the people who eventually went almost always describe a long period of ordinary faithfulness at home first, followed by a growing sense that they could not settle. Talk to your elders about it early rather than sitting on it for five years. The same principles apply here as in any other question of guidance.

Welcome the nations who have come to us. A great many people from countries closed to Christian missions now live in British cities and study in British universities, and hospitality in your own front room is a form of missionary work requiring no visa at all.

So, now what?

Find out who your church actually supports and where in the world they are. A surprising number of members could not name a single one, which tells you how much of the congregation’s giving is going somewhere nobody is praying about.

Then take one concrete step: a monthly amount, a name prayed for daily, or a conversation with your elders about whether the church’s involvement in Christian missions is a line in a budget or a living relationship.

And if the thought of going yourself has ever crossed your mind and been dismissed, why was it dismissed? Isaiah heard the question ‘whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ and answered it before he had been told a single detail of where he would be sent.

And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.

Matthew 24:14, ESV