discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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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
245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 35 The Heart of God 35 seeks and sends to seek. That picture emerged immediately after the Fall and was intensified when God made His covenant with Abraham. If God’s people today want to be covenant partakers, they must view global mission as something more than optional or tangential. Passages like Romans 1:14-16 put mission at the very core of what the Church is and does. If the Church is to be truly the Church, it must operate, as Paul said to the Romans, “by the command of the eternal God, so that all nations might believe and obey him” (16:26, NIV). Questions for Reflection 1. Why can it be said that the biblical basis of mission can be defined as the search for the heart of God? 2. What significance does God’s covenant with Abraham have for the entire world? 3. What are the implications of Israel being a chosen people? 4. What does gôyim mean and what makes this often-used Hebrew word critical to understanding what the Bible says about mission? 5. In what way does Jonah’s attitude toward Nineveh mirror Israel’s reluctance to engage in mission? 6. How does Jesus reveal the missionary character of God? 7. How does the Gospel of John explain mission as sending? 8. What statements by Peter and Paul show their understanding of the missionary character of the Abrahamic covenant?
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discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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