Your Church Doesn’t Need a Missions Pastor
PLUMB LINE:
“Every Pastor Is Our Missions Pastor.”
While I lived in Southeast Asia, an older man there told me about an incident that took place when he was young. A group of Japanese fishermen, he said, had been found floating off one of the islands in the Pacific Ocean, clinging to the debris of their small, wrecked fishing vessel. When questioned, they claimed that “a cow had attacked them from heaven.” The authorities assumed they were smugglers of some kind who had had their ship destroyed in an altercation, so they held them in prison pending further investigation.
A week later a group of American servicemen rather sheepishly came forward and explained that they had been guiding their B – 24 bomber down the airstrip of a small nearby island when a cow meandered across the runway. They thought, “Free steak tonight!” and loaded the cow into the bomb bay. After the plane took off, however, the cow began rampaging and kicking around the plane. They couldn’t calm it down, so they assumed it had mad cow disease or something. So they placed it over the bomb doors and pressed the little red button.
You can probably figure out the rest of the story.
I cannot verify the authenticity of that story, although the old man who told it to me swore that it was true. Regardless, I have often thought of that cow as a picture of what it’s like to get swept up into the mission of God. There you are, a normal ol’ rambling cow, thinking only about where to get your next bite of grass, when you get whisked up into something that takes you high up into a new world with a force you never even knew existed. When you become a follower of Jesus, God sends you back into the world immediately with a mission.
Disinfecting Versus Discipling
Jesus launched a global mission, and when he saves a person, he sweeps them up immediately into that mission, global dimensions and all. He doesn’t just sanitize us and put us on his sanctified shelf; he sends us on his saving mission. Or, as David Platt says, the goal is not to disinfect Christians and separate them from the world but to disciple them and send them back into the world:
Whereas disinfecting Christians involves isolating them and teaching them to be good, discipling Christians involves propelling Christians into the world to risk their lives for the sake of others. Now the world is our focus, and we gauge success in the church not on the hundreds or thousands whom we can get into our buildings but on the hundreds or thousands who are leaving our buildings to take on the world with the disciples they are making.1
Discipleship is going from “mission field” to “missionary.”
In the Bible we find no gap between the call to follow Jesus and the call to engage in mission. God’s promise to bless Abram included the promise to make him a blessing to all nations on the earth as well (Gen. 12:1 – 3). When God called Paul, he commissioned him to be a messenger to the nations at the very moment he called him to faith (Acts 26:16).
Follow me, Jesus said, and I will make you fishers of men (Matt. 4:19 ESV). To follow Jesus means to become a fisherman.
As I said at the beginning of this book, God is like a spiritual cyclone: he never pulls you into himself without hurling you back out into mission. Jesus doesn’t pull you in to stay and soak; he pulls you into salvation to send you out as a part of his global mission. When Jesus sent the Holy Spirit, as told in Acts 2, he filled every believer in the room. The Holy Spirit came into the room like a mighty, rushing wind — blowing each believer out to the uttermost parts of the earth.
In this chapter, I want to discuss why that coming of the Spirit in Acts 2 ought to reshape every ministry of the church. Specifically, I want to show you that your church doesn’t need a slate of full-time mission pastors in order to be effective in the mission, because every pastor is your “missions pastor.” Every ministry is a “missions” ministry.
The Light That Shines the Farthest . . .
Early in my pastorate, a well-meaning pastor told me that we should not think that much about international missions during our first ten years of ministry; we should focus on building up our church locally. I know he meant well, but I have come to see this as very bad advice. Inherent in the call to follow Jesus is a call to the nations. The Great Commission, given to every disciple says:
“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations. . . .” (Matt. 28:19)
Some have said that this commission was given to the apostles and is not the prerogative of “normal” Christians. But consider the verse that follows the Great Commission:
“And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matt. 28:20)
I have yet to meet a Christian who hesitates claiming that part of Jesus’ statement. But how do we claim the promise in 28:20 and ignore the command in 28:19?
Furthermore, Jesus commanded his first disciples to teach others “everything” that he had commanded (Matt. 28:20). Everything would include the command to make disciples of all nations. Jesus did not say, “Teach them all that I have commanded, except this command to make disciples internationally . . . that’s only for you.”2
In The Mission of God, Christopher Wright points out that God’s promise to use Abraham and his descendants to bless the nations rushes like a river through every chapter of the Bible. Scripture, he says, is not just a collection of theological truths to learn and moral lessons to master. Scripture is an announcement about a rescue mission God has come on for us, and an invitation to join that rescue mission (2 Cor. 5:14 – 20).
God formed the church for mission, Wright says. He didn’t come up with a mission for his church as much as he formed a church for his mission.3 Thus, to separate any teaching of Scripture from its context of global mission is to misinterpret it. In other words, you can’t teach any text of Scripture properly if you don’t teach global missions out of it. Any ministry that is not formed in light of the Great Commission is erred from the start.
If a church is not engaging in mission, it really has no point in existing. And if a church has not embraced the global dimensions of the Great Commission, it has not understood the mission of Jesus. John Piper says that God creates a yearning in every believing person to see the nations worship. We want to see God’s glory extend wherever there are sons of Adam.4 Some of us may never be able to go to foreign lands ourselves, but deep in our hearts is a desire to see his glory cover the earth the way the waters cover the ocean floor (Hab. 2:14).
Can an emphasis on global missions unhelpfully distract a church from its local responsibilities? It can, and I have seen that happen sometimes. More often, however, a focus on the nations increases passion for mission at home. When believers are exposed to another culture, their myopic view of the world is exploded. If God is doing this around the world, they ask, why is he not doing it among my friends? Why would I be passionate about God’s work here and not at home? Furthermore, they see how transient and small their “kingdom” is in light of God’s.
Every dollar you spend getting your members engaged in overseas missions will return to you fourfold. When believers see with their own eyes what God is doing around the world, their hearts open, and so do their pocketbooks. The first year I was pastor we sent forty people to care for missionary families in Asia. All told, the trip cost nearly $100,000. The next year, however, we gave an astounding and unprecedented amount in our annual Christmas missions offering. The International Mission Board told us we were the “highest missions giving church per capita” that year in the Southern Baptist Convention. The money we spent on the trip generated new money for missions.
Going overseas helped teach our people that multiplying and sending is what we do, even when it’s inconvenient and involves leaving a place you’re comfortable with to set up chairs in an elementary school gym across town. This past year we gave a half-million-dollar gift to start a new urban city center that will reach at-risk teens in our city. Giving money has become part of our DNA, and that happened as we exposed ourselves to what God was doing around the world. As Keith Eitel, my seminary missions professor, used to say: “The light that shines the farthest will also shine the brightest at home.”
The Heresy of Sequentialism
David Garrison, who served for many years as a church planting catalyzer for the Asian world, talks about “the heresy of sequentialism.” Sequentialism is separating into components what really ought to be embraced all at once.5 You shouldn’t eat a cake, for example, one element at a time: flour, eggs, vanilla, and then baking soda. The real enjoyment occurs when every element is present in every bite. Global missions is part of God’s essential recipe for discipleship, not something you get to only in Christianity 401. It ought to be present in the first bite.
On the local front, a new convert’s most evangelistically effective season is usually their first year post-conversion. That’s typically when they know the most unbelieving people and when their friends are most aware of the change that is happening. When Jesus cast the demon out of a man, the man wanted to join Jesus’ band and “do seminary” with him. Jesus would not let him, but said:
“Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.” (Mark 5:19)
Thus, from the very beginning, new believers should be taught to engage their neighbors and the nations in the mission. To that end, every ministry in the church — and not just the “missions department” — must ask: “How is our ministry leading people into God’s global mission?”
Global Missions as a Goal for Every Ministry
Larger churches often hire a “missions pastor” to spearhead the missions thrust of the church, and that is fine, but quite often the presence of a pastor “responsible” for the missions of the church can distract from the fact that every pastor is a “missions” pastor, every ministry a global missions ministry. We should not confine “missions education” to a single program; it must saturate every facet of every ministry, just as it saturates every chapter of the Bible.
No blessing that God gives his people is separated from the responsibility to become a blessing to the nations. For example, at the Summit church we build a global missions thrust into the first stages of our family ministries. Psalm 127 teaches us that our kids are given to us “like arrows in the hands of a warrior” (v. 4), and (to use the words of Jim Elliot), what are arrows for but to be pulled back on the bowstring of faith to be launched into God’s global battle?6 We quit doing “baby dedications” and now hold “parent commissionings,” in which parents covenant with the church to raise up their children for the mission of God and to release them freely into that mission whenever and wherever God calls them. I make the parents promise, “If God calls my child one day to a difficult mission field, I promise not to stand in the way, but to bless and encourage my child to follow God.” We don’t need to dedicate a baby — the baby already belongs to God. It is the parents who need to dedicate themselves to raise up the child for the mission of God.
We have mapped out for parents a “family ministry plan” that identifies key milestones in their kids’ lives and explains how to engage them in mission during those times. Ideas, for example, about how to serve together as a family among the underprivileged in our city, or how to take a short-term mission trip together as a family.
Reggie Joiner, in the book Parenting Beyond Your Capacity, talks about how crucial it is for kids to encounter mission early, otherwise they adopt a warped view of the gospel or are discouraged from faith altogether. He tells the story of a dad concerned as his daughter cooled toward the faith in her early teen years. She began to date a boy the dad described as “bad news,” started to dress Goth, and showed a general disdain for church. He confided to a pastor, “I just don’t know what I am doing wrong! We have always been faithful at church, making it a priority. We’ve had her memorize the verses. We’ve sent her on the youth activities.”
“What ministries is your family involved in?” replied the pastor. The father couldn’t name any. “That might be your problem,” said the pastor. “The world is offering your daughter a more compelling story than you are. In the world she sees adventure and purpose. Here at church you have treated her as a receptacle of information.”
The father found a small orphanage in Central America that his family could adopt. After dinner one night he pulled out a white board and asked the family to brainstorm how they might bless the orphanage. Ideas began to flow, and even his daughter got involved. The family began taking trips to this orphanage, raising money together, and praying together for the children. Soon, Joiner says, the bad-news-boy had faded from the picture, and his daughter’s dress and demeanor had changed.
Joiner says, “When there is nothing challenging or adventurous about your style of faith, you begin to drift toward other things that seem more interesting and meaningful. Mission helps your faith.”7
When God has designed kids to be arrows, and instead we treat them like pieces of art to decorate our home, we are not only stunting their development but discouraging them from faith altogether.
We challenge our high school students to serve for one month of one summer on one of our global mission teams, and we encourage all students to give one entire summer of their college career to serve in one of our mission projects around the world. That’s how our kids’ pastors, student pastors, and even parents are our “missions pastors.”
We encourage each small group to adopt both a city service-evangelism project and an international missionary. We urge them to go on mission together — taking short-term international trips to see their missionary. Small groups are the frontline prayer, supply, and support teams for each missionary. A couple of times we have seen entire small groups move together to plant a church — to new cities in the United States and even a few times overseas. Sometimes small groups are even formed for that purpose — that is, rather than being a group that goes on mission, they come together for mission and form a group. Sometimes it’s better to send people and group them rather than group them and send them.
We foster church planting multiplication principles in the way we start new small groups. Each year we encourage small groups to identify a prospective leader in their midst and to ask that leader to pray about starting his or her own group. When it’s time, that small group “sends out” the new leader. In our opinion, that’s better than the church always recruiting new leaders to start independent new groups, because in that model, existing small groups never think about mission. They become cliques instead of multiplying small groups.
This approach is also better, in our view, than the “cell” model — in which a group gets to 16 and then divides into two smaller groups of 8, which again grow to two groups of 16, and splits again, and so on. (That model works in some places — but we decided it was a bad idea for us. We had encouraged our people to work hard at establishing enough trust to really open up to each other, and just about the time they were starting to do that, we would tell them they have to split into two. They felt that they had been sucker punched!)
Sending out a new leader from the group to start a new one is painful, of course, too, but it feels more like birthing than forced division. Birthing is a more joyous — and frankly, a more biblical — process. Furthermore, such a multiplication process inculcates the principles of multiplication, the core competency of any sending church, into the smallest organized unit in the church. Small groups should be taught to understand, by their very design, that they are born to reproduce. This is how our small groups pastor is our missions pastor; and, for that matter, how every small group leader is our missions pastor, too.
I am not against a designated “missions pastor.” We have a few of them, actually. But their jobs are primarily to catalyze the other pastors to lead in global mission through their ministries. Our missions pastors should not do missions for the church; they should catalyze missions in the church. Big difference. They should not be leading in missions as much as creating opportunities for others to lead in missions.
Building a Mission Ethos That Pervades the Church
We want excitement about global missions to pervade the very air that we breathe. New people should not have to wait for the “annual missions series” to know that the Great Commission defines who we are and what we do. They should sense this from the first time they step foot on one of our campuses.
Here is a handful of ways (in addition to the examples above) by which we attempt to infuse this global missions ethos into the air that we breath:
• In every sermon I preach, I ask myself, “Have I connected this text to God’s global mission? How does this passage advance that mission?” If God’s promise to make Abraham a blessing pervades every chapter of the Bible, I want it to feature prominently in my preaching. Preaching is not merely bringing a refreshing cup of water of life to people, by which they slake their thirst and go back to the pastures of their self-centeredness; good preaching shoves people into a rushing river that not only quenches their thirst, but carries them to the nations.
• We decorate our campuses to communicate the value we place on mission. The pictures in our lobbies and the verses we put up on our walls emphasize the Great Commission. We designed the kids’ area at our main campus like our local airport. At one point we only served coffee from regions in the world where we had planted churches, with a little coffee coozie that said, “Like this coffee? Want to see where it’s grown? Sign up today for a mission trip to (wherever that coffee was from).”
We have designed our facilities to feel “minimalistic.” This is not just to save money; it is to communicate a message. At the time of this writing, our largest (“main”) facility is a flat-floored, renovated warehouse with a concrete floor and metal roof. We may get into something more substantial one day, but it will never be anything grandiose. We want our facilities to communicate that Jesus’ commission was not to build a gigantic monument to him made out of bricks and mortar. He commissioned us to reach the world. Buildings are only facilities. Facilities facilitate the mission. They are only tools — means to the end — not the end itself. We have no problem with facilities being spacious, functional, comfortable, and even attractive, but we insist they be facilities and nothing more.
• We highlight mission testimonies in our services, on our websites, and in our publications. As I said earlier, what you celebrate, you replicate, so we choose to celebrate mission advance. Any chance we have to platform a missionary or church planter, we do it. When they return home, we greet them with a standing ovation.
• During the offering, we often explain how giving is connected to mission. If you ask us how much of our budget is dedicated to missions, we’ll say “the whole thing.” Every penny of our offering goes to advance the mission. I want the church to know that everything they give goes to advance a mission.
• We build sending into our baptismal confession. We ask each person before they are baptized: “Are you willing to go wherever he sends you, and do whatever he asks you?” Sometimes we show baptism video-testimonies from our church planting teams during our baptisms.
• We “preach” the announcements. Church announcements ought to offer specific ways by which people can engage in the mission. In many churches, the announcements only inform. We want our announcements to provide ways to apply the sermon. We try to find other ways besides “church announcements” to communicate information that doesn’t serve a missional purpose.
• We end every service with the phrase, “You are Sent.” We call it our “missional blessing.” We got this idea from two places in the Bible. First, in Psalm 67, Asaph takes the traditional priestly blessing of Moses:
The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. (Num. 6:24 – 26 ESV)
and transforms it into a missional prayer:
May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us, that your way may be known on earth, your saving power among all nations. (Ps. 67:1 – 2 ESV)
Second, at the end of Luke’s gospel, Jesus gives what we see as a pattern for worship services, and it includes commissioning. He celebrates Communion with his disciples, expounds the Word to them, raises his hands, bestows on them the power of the Holy Spirit — and then commissions them to reach the nations (Luke 24:35 – 52). What better pattern for our worship services?
Most church services end with simply “You are dismissed.” But does the church ever really “dismiss”? Don’t we just gather for a few hours on the weekend so that we can scatter for mission throughout the week? In our view, “You are sent” communicates that better than “You are dismissed.”
• We often get international church planters to lead us in Communion (via video), or get them to record a “You are sent” missional blessing that we show at the end of a service. Sometimes we flash up shots of our church plants doing Communion during the worship songs we sing while we are doing Communion. It helps our church connect what we are doing here to what they are doing there.
Missions is not a 401 class for mature saints ready for premium membership in Club Jesus. Missions is the very substance of our call to follow. When we separate mission from discipleship, not only do we thwart the mission, but we keep some from faith altogether.
If you are a pastor or church leader, I explain a little bit more in appendix 1 how you can set up an international missions strategy in your church. But the big takeaway in this chapter is this: If we want to be sending churches, we cannot relegate “missions” to a specific department in the church. Being a disciple means being sent; so sending should pervade every aspect of discipleship development. Everything we do and learn in the Christian faith ought to be in the context of the Great Commission.