discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 196 196 Future Church Throughout history, great missionary outreach, like great revival, has begun after people have prayed. David Bryant noted the relationship that exists between local spiritual revival and world evangelism: In any prayer movement, dynamic tension must always be maintained between church renewal and world evangelization. Each thrives on the other and drives us to the other, if kept in proper balance. Renewal prevents “burn-out” on the task of missions and missions challenges “cop-out” on the fruits of renewal. If we maintain this tension, the ministry of intercession will be our most effective step in pioneering faith for Christ’s global cause. 7 New Inspiration from Pastors Through the ages, God has raised up leaders to provide vision and inspiration for lifting the world mission enterprise to new levels. Those key inspirational leaders have often been pastors. Britisher Charles Spurgeon was a promoter of world missions in the last half of the 1800s. Following on his heels was New York pastor A. B. Simpson, who promoted global missions even more heavily than Spurgeon. Simpson went so far as to say that a Christian “is not obedient unless he is doing all in his power to send the Gospel to the heathen world.” 8 Not long afterward, Oswald J. Smith boosted mission support in Canadian and U.S. churches through the faith promise system of giving. Singer Keith Green, who had his life cut short in a plane crash, was a mission motivator for a generation of Americans. Baptist pastor and prolific author John Piper wrote Let the Nations Be Glad, a best seller expounding the biblical foundations of world evangelism. More recently, California pastor and author Rick Warren has emerged as a very visible promoter of world evangelism. The World Around the Corner You all will forgive me, I trust. I have been primarily concerned with our little corner of the world when I should have been concerned with the world around the corner. 9 —Jerry Gass, pastor Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life has been very influential among Christians in the first years of the 21st century. Originally written in English, that book has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide, influencing believers in both hemispheres. Recently, people arriving for services in a 6,500-member church in Campinas, Brazil, were greeted with a huge Forty Days of Purpose banner in Portuguese. The Purpose-Driven Life, which was on the New York Times best-seller list for months, stressed that global mission passion is a necessary component of the Christian life. “The Great Commission is your Com-
245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 197 Future Church 197 mission,” Warren wrote. He urged believers to “shift from local thinking to global thinking.” That is powerful stuff from a pastor most known for taking a church of 3 members and building it into a megachurch of 20,000 people. In The Purpose-Driven Life, Warren called on Christians to “read and watch the news with Great Commission eyes,” and concluded that, “if you want to be like Jesus, you must have a heart for the whole world.” 10 Some indication of the fascination people have with the concept of global mission can be found in the level of participation in short-term mission. Such participation in and support for world missions in local churches reflects how well pastors have been developing members of their congregations into world Christians, a phrase that means almost the same thing as missionary-minded. Though world Christian has been widely used only recently, it was coined by Daniel Fleming in his 1919 book Marks of a World Christian. World Christians, said Fleming, are disciples whose life directions have been inspired and transformed by a divine vision of the world. For world Christians, God’s global cause is the integrating, overriding priority of their life. New Questions Throughout this book several strategic questions have been raised. There are others that need answering. How does the Church get the Bible into all of those languages that do not yet have it? How does the rest of the global Church interface with the huge house church movement in China? Will leaders in the West be able to cleanse themselves of vestiges of paternalism? In a changing world, can the missionary enterprise be proactive as opposed to reactive? Will the Church hear Rick Warren’s cry for believers to become passionate about global evangelism, or will that cry get submerged in a cafeteria approach in which global mission is just one of many good things the Church does? Will what looks like fruitful evangelism in the Islamic world continue and can we do things to help it accelerate? Can tomorrow’s missionaries be the strategists, catalysts, and facilitators that the mission enterprise needs? As the Church grows rapidly in some world areas, will it find ways to quickly develop the needed mature, reflective leaders? New Expansion The last decades have seen an acceleration of global evangelization initiatives. There are more missionaries than ever before deployed around the world, with the total expatriate missionary force from all branches of Christendom (Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox) now numbering about 443,000. 11 Mission budgets have grown to new records, including a nearly 22 percent increase in one recent three-year period. According to the editors of the Mission Handbook, that jump represents “the greatest [percentage] increase ever seen from one edition . . . to the next.” 12
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