discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 192 14 FUTURE CHURCH Objectives Your study of this chapter should help you to: • Understand the changes affecting mission today • Evaluate the need for strategic partnerships • Identify the vital importance of prayer in the Christian world mission • Be aware of the amount of persecution of Christians • Develop a theology of suffering • Reflect on the relationship between suffering and receptivity • Develop a personal response to God’s call to mission Key Words to Understand panta ta ethnē futurology world Christian International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church 192 persecution suffering
245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 193 As Christianity’s third millennium gets underway, God’s people are facing a rising tide of global changes that has the potential to lift them to a new level or else render them irrelevant. This is a critical time for global outreach because the world is moving through a significant hinge point, a hinge that is opening doors to entirely new worlds. Christian futurist Leonard Sweet put it this way: Events that have happened in the aftermath of the postmodern earthquake have generated tidal waves that have created a whole new world out there. In your lifetime and mine, a tidal wave has hit . . . The Dick and Jane world of my ’50s childhood is over, washed away by a tsunami of change. 1 It is difficult to forecast in detail all that this tsunami of change will mean for the Church. However, what does happen and how the Church responds is extremely critical in terms of whether God’s yearning to see the globe blanketed with gospel proclamation will be honored. The Greek phrase in Matthew 28:19-20 rendered as “all nations” is panta ta ethnē, a phrase with the same nuances as the Hebrew word mishpahoth or “all peoples” used in the Abrahamic covenant in Genesis 12:3. How all those peoples living in today’s changing environment will be reached is the challenge the Church faces. Looking Forward Future Church 193 Trying to predict what the future holds is risky business, as can be seen in how far off the mark IBM founder Thomas Watson was in 1943 when he said, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” 2 Those in the past who tried predicting where the mission enterprise would be today rarely did much better than Watson in their forecasting. In terms of missionary work, no one predicted the Theological Education by Extension movement that revolutionized the delivery of leadership training. No one foresaw the huge shortterm mission movement that now involves more than 1.5 million people each year. Who could have foreseen the phenomenal evangelistic and church planting results of the JESUS film? In Hudson Taylor’s day, who could have predicted missionary communication tools like e-mail, Web pages, and Internet voice communication? For that matter, no one envisioned in the 1700s that William Carey would come along to mobilize Protestantism for global mission. In the beginning days of the Pietist movement, no one thought that historian Gustav Warneck would one day evaluate its missionary impact with the words, “In spite of [Pietism’s] ‘fleeing from the world,’ it became a world-conquering power.” 3 A hundred and fifty years ago, who would have predicted the mobility that today’s global air traffic system could give to those involved in world mission? On the other hand, just because futurology is risk-prone does not mean that one should shy away from it. While Christians cannot change the past, they can help shape the future and the more those involved with global mis-
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discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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