A Close Shave with Missions
CLOSE SHAVE?How Do We Do It?
There’s no other way but to go out beyond our own cultures and share the Good News with others. That is what it takes. Missions is a cross-cultural movement aimed at helping people stop making much of themselves and start making much of their Creator.
Okay, so you’re sitting in church and this lady comes in. At first glance, she looks just like everyone else but on closer inspection you notice she is very tanned. After a word of prayer and a short video, you discover she’s a missionary home on furlough. Then, with the aid of Powerpoint, she starts talking about unreached groups, cross-cultural evangelism and indigenous people. Forty minutes later, she’s left the building and you’re left feeling very challenged and inspired but not sure exactly what to do about it all!
It can be exciting to hear about the amazing places that missionaries go but is that as close as you can get? Just how can you be involved? What exactly is a missionary and more to the point, what is missions?
Missions is calling the world to do exactly what it was created to do, namely, to enjoy making much of God… and to do it forever! Failing to share that Good News is a failure to glorify God. He is dishonoured…and people will be lost.
How Do We Do It?
There’s no other way but to go out beyond our own cultures and share the Good News with others. That is what it takes. Missions is a cross-cultural movement aimed at helping people stop making much of themselves and start making much of their Creator. It’s a cross-cultural effort to transform people's hearts so that God is felt to be more praiseworthy than sports stars or military might or artistic achievements or anything else that God has made. Missions is a cross-cultural endeavour to help people forever experience God as their Treasure above all earthly treasures. It is a life and death struggle to give people eternal life, which consists in knowing and enjoying God forever.
Who’s It For?
Wake up! It’s for You! The Great Commission might have been a command given by Jesus to all Christians everywhere and through all generations but thousands of years before, a promise was made by God to Abraham and repeated to Isaac and then to Jacob – that through their descendants all peoples on earth will be blessed! That includes you! Through faith in Christ, we have become children of Abraham. That ancient blessing given in Genesis is the foundation of the missions task, a confirmation that the undeserved favour you received when you become a Christian isn’t for you to keep to yourself; it’s to share with all mankind.
There is a tendency to define “missions” as any Christian work that takes place somewhere far away. To make things clearer – it's sometimes better to understand a missionary to be someone working hard to reach people of a significantly different culture. By contrast, an evangelist is one who works hard to reach others of their own culture – the work of evangelism may have a lot of missionary intentions. But to best distinguish the different roles, it is best to reserve the term “missionary” for those doing, mobilizing for, or working hard in direct support of those doing cross-cultural work.
