discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 34
34 The Heart of God
commission its first cross-cultural missionaries: “So after they had fasted and
prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off” (13:3). The last
half of Acts tells how missionaries originating from the church in Antioch took
the gospel northward to Turkey and westward to Macedonia, Greece, Cyprus,
Malta, and even to the Italian peninsula.
Paul’s Life and Writings
Paul of Tarsus, whom many consider the greatest missionary of all time,
set the pattern for missionary strategy in his willingness to:
• Suffer for Christ’s sake
• Learn the local culture
• Look for receptive people
• Contextualize the gospel
• Plant churches rapidly
• Immediately empower local leadership
• Expect new churches to be self-sustaining
• Infuse churches with his own missionary vision
In his first letter to Timothy, Paul repeated Peter’s thought about God
wanting “all people to be saved” (1 Timothy 2:4). Paul felt specifically called to
the cross-cultural missionary task that most Israelites had ignored (Ephesians
3:1-8). As was noted earlier, Paul reminded the Galatians that global mission
had been God’s plan all along (Galatians 3:8).
Romans is often thought of as the major theological treatise of the New
Testament. Paul began that letter by saying he had been asked “to call all the
Gentiles to faith and obedience” (Romans 1:5). Galatians 2:7-8 echoes the
same thought. In 2 Corinthians 10:15-16 Paul announced his desire to preach
to the “regions beyond.” As Paul took the Good News into the Gentile world,
he told those non-Jewish believers that they, too, had become children of Abraham
(Romans 9:22-24; 15:27-28; Galatians 3:7, 28). This would imply that
because they were being blessed, they had a responsibility to be a blessing.
Spreading Fire
Where there is no mission, there is no Church, and where there is
neither Church nor mission, there is no faith. . . . Mission, Gospel
Preaching, is the spreading out of the fire which Christ has thrown
upon the earth. He who does not propagate this fire shows that he is
not burning. He who burns propagates the fire. 15
—Emil Brunner, theologian
Both Old and New Testaments portray Yahweh as a missionary God who