MISSIONS
What's it all about?
Missions is calling the world do what they were created to do, namely, to enjoy making much of God forever. If missions does not reach a people with the gospel of the glory of God in the face of Christ, God will be dishonored, the people will be miserable-for ever.
How do we do it?
There's no other way but to go to different cultures and share the Good News with them. Missions is a cross-cultural movement aimed at helping people stop making much of themselves and start making much of their Creator. Missions is a cross-cultural effort to transform people's hearts so that God is felt to be more praiseworthy than sport stars or military might or artistic achievements or anything else that God has made. Missions
is a cross-cultural endeavour to help people experience God as their Treasure above all earthly treasures forever. It is a life and death struggle to give people eternal life, which consists in knowing and enjoying God forever.
Where are we at?
It all began a long time ago, in fact, a very long time ago. From the word go God has been calling people to recognise and worship Him. Missions throughout history has taken all kinds of twists and turns but, for us, the most crucial happened in the 18th century, a time when lots of change was happening all around the world.
That historical moment—the sending of William Carey and his team—marked a fresh new start for world missions.
Carey was the morning star of modern missions movement. Between 1793 and 1865, a missionary movement never before seen in the history of the world reached virtually all the coastlands on earth. It was a phenomenal period that John Piper describes as “a great Christ-exalting, gospel-advancing, Church-expanding, evil-confronting, Satan-conquering, culture-transforming soul-saving, hell-robbing, Christian-refreshing, truth-intensifying missionary movement.”
Then in 1865, Hudson Taylor founded the China Inland Mission, and from 1865 until 1934, another wave of missionary activity was released so that by 1974 virtually all the inlands—all the geographic countries of the world — were reached with the gospel. In 1934, Cameron Townsend had founded Wycliffe Bible Translators which focused not on geographic areas or political states but on people groups with distinct languages and dialects and cultures—and gradually the church awakened, especially at the Lausanne Congress in 1974, to the biblical reality of “every tribe and tongue and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9; 7:9)—and the missionary focus of the church shifted from unreached geography and to the unreached peoples of the world.
What next?
We are in the midst of this third era of modern missions. Today the great reality is that the centre of gravity in missions is moving away from Europe and the United States to the South and East. Places we once considered mission fields are now centres of Christian influence and are major missionary sending forces in the world.
If the twentieth century has seen a great recession from the Christian faith in the West, there has been an equally massive movement towards that faith in the non-Western world. At the beginning of the century well over 80% of those who professed Christianity lived in Europe or North America. Now, close to 60% live in the southern continents of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific, and that proportion grows annually. Christianity began the twentieth century as a Western religion; it ended the century as a non-Western religion, on track to become progressively more so.
We are not at the centre. God may or may not be done with us in our self-absorbed prosperity in the UK but he certainly is putting others on the Christian map to humble us and call us to confess and rejoice that others may play a big part in finishing the Great Commission. However, what was once an almost one-sided effort in the second era of missions should not be repeated in these final days. Others from what used to be the 'receiving nations' are now taking the lead. The church in the west needs to re-awaken to the missions challenge and the vision behind historymakers is for the huge task of global evangelization to be completed. Believers the world over need to unite in prayer and effort to take the gospel to the unreached.
Whatever happens in the future, the dynamics of church and missions will never be the same. Many await the return of Christ expectantly - and rightly so. But is it only a matter of time? If so, how long? God only knows - but according to Matthew 24:14, Matthew 28:19 - we can know one thing for sure; it will be as long as there remains people groups who have never been discipled.
Want to get involved? Go to the 'Disciple' page and see where God wants to take you...
