Get Missional

Shift Your Focus… Are you a missions-minded Christian?

I thought I was. I grew up in the church where the occasional missionary would come, and if we were lucky, show slides of his work in Africa, or some other far off place that I’d only heard about in geography lessons at school. Then I grew up and became a pastor, and again, the occasional missionary would come and tell the church of what God was doing somewhere far away, and I would feel good that we were a missions church. I would even give occasionally to support the church’s missions effort around the world. I thought I was a missions-minded Christian.

But that began to change. Periodically, I was sent oversees for short-term missions projects by the various churches I served, and my heart begin to get reshaped by what I saw God doing among people who had never heard the name of Jesus before. The signs, wonders and miracles in the missions context (Paul talks about that in this missions context in Romans 15:19) blew my mind. I had never seen such things in the U.S, and experiencing it abroad, I longed to see the supernatural back home in my church, too. God was shaking and reshaping my heart for missions.

Then a few years ago, God completely dislocated my heart, and gave me a passion for missions, for reaching people who’d never heard the Gospel of Christ. I have a notion now that I have become a missions-minded Christian.

It all happened when I reluctantly got involved in a church-planting project in a remote, unreached region in Africa. I was reluctant because I knew that my involvement would require a lot of my own personal resources, and to be successful, would require significant resources from my church. Figuring our resource pie was stretched, and limited, I secretly feared that the finances we dedicated to this project would flow away from other worthy projects; that we would simply be “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

Then, as I was stressing over this likely outcome, something wonderful happened. God spoke to me. Not in an audible voice or through writing on the wall or some other sensational sort of way (wouldn’t that be cool!). He simply and clearly spoke to me through an undeniable and unmistakable inner impression in my spirit. Addressing my stressing, he simply said, “Ray, if you will take care of the things I care about, then I will take care of the things you care about. I care about a lost world. I care about people who have never heard my name. And I want you to care about them too!”

That was good enough for me. I jumped into this project up to my eye-balls, and true to his word, God turned on a miraculous flow of resources, not only for the church planting project, but for those other projects I had been so concerned about as well. Best of all, our obedience keyed a revival in this region of Africa that was beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. In a region where only a few believers attended a handful of churches before this missions effort, 10 years later nearly thousands of churches have been planted and hundreds of thousands of believers have been added to those churches. And the revival is showing no signs of slowing.

What God has done in Africa through the obedience of that church changed my heart forever, and has given me a growing, if not consuming passion for missions. I still have a passion for my local church (that’s missions, too), but I have an added ambition now: To keep God’s people focused on reaching people who have never heard the name of Jesus Christ.

That was Paul’s ambition, according to Romans 15:20. That is God’s ambition, according to Romans 15:21. I hope that you will open your heart and let God make it your ambition as well. I hope that you will travel with me down the path to becoming a missions-minded Christian. If you will, I will make you the same promise God made me:

“If you will take care of the things God cares about—a lost world, God will take care of the things you care about—your world.”

What a deal! That’s an offer you can’t refuse.

“The spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to Him, the more intensely missionary we become.” ~Henry Martyn

Prayer… God, you so love the world that you went on a missions trip to it, giving your very best to save it by giving your Son to die for it. Love was the root of your mission, and sacrifice was its fruit. I am the beneficiary of such extravagant love and costly sacrifice.  In truth, I am a product of missions.  Today, make me a loving and sacrificial extension of your mission to reach a lost world.