When you get right down to it, people can’t really deny the idea of missions in the Bible.
There have been times when people have tried to. Just two centuries ago, when young William Carey challenged his church to missions, he was famously told “If God wants to save the heathen, he’ll do it without your help or mine.” Carey ignored this and went on to help spark the modern Protestant missions movement.
Throughout history, any serious student of Scripture has known the kind of protestations and wiggling Carey encountered are just vain excuses. The Great Commission to make disciples of all nations is repeated in various forms several times in Scripture. Paul made it clear he handed on what was given to him, and he expected those who followed him to do the same. It applies to us as much as to any early disciple. John saw a vision of the end of time, with tribes and tongues gathered around the throne. There have been thousands upon thousands of missionaries who have gone into the world because they believed Scripture commanded them to do so.
We even know the missionary task isn’t just a “New Testament thing.” It has been on God’s mind from the very beginning. In the very first command given in Genesis 1, God desired man to “fill the earth”–the whole of creation was in God’s view, not just the little Garden in which they were initially placed. That same command was repeated after the flood to Noah, showing it was still on God’s mind. The people refused to scatter over the earth, so in Genesis 10 God scattered them by changing languages and creating nations. Then, in his earth-changing promise to Abraham in Genesis 12, God said unequivocally “all of these nations” were to be blessed as a result of what he would do through Abraham.
A blessing beyond God’s people happened in Joseph’s day, when God used Joseph to save not just the House of Jacob and the land of Egypt but also all the surrounding nations from famine. He worked signs and wonders in Egypt not just to rescue his people, but also to spread his glory in the earth (Psalm 106). Time and again in Scripture we read about what are effectively challenges between God and the petty gods of the nations: for example, see the smackdown between God and the Philistine diety Dagon (1 Samuel 5), and between God and Baal (1 Kings 18).
David often wrote “missionary Psalms” that spoke of all the nations giving glory to God. Solomon built the Temple and prayed a missionary prayer, believing foreign nations would come to the Temple and pray, and asking God to hear their prayers. Even after Israel and Judah both fell into the decay of sin and exile, God was still setting about his missionary purpose: using Gentile world rulers like Nebuchadnezzar, Darius and Cyrus to send his glory to the ends of the earth (for examples see Daniel 3:28, 4, 6:26).
Nowhere, to me, is the missionary heart of God clearer than in the writings of the Prophets. Isaiah 2:2-3 promises that in the last days, “People from many nations will come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of Jacob’s God. There he will teach us his ways, and we will walk in his paths.’” Habakkuk 2:14 promises “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.”
From the first command in Genesis to “fill the earth” to the prophetic pronouncement that His glory would cover the earth as the waters cover the seas to the final revelation of tribes before the throne, we know God has been about the business of reaching out to and embracing the whole of our world.
We’ve even come back to a Biblical understanding of the goal: not just geopolitical countries, but nations, tribes and tongues. God is less concerned about our governments and more that every language can hear and understand His Name and His Word.
No–when you get right down to it, where people have a problem is the idea of closure.
“Closure” is a technical term. It is a missiological word used by missionary researchers, missiologists, professors and the missionary “professionals.” It means something very simple, however.
It means the task of missions can be finished.
Many believers seem to have less of a problem with the idea of missions than they have with the idea of closure. For them, “missions” is not a task to be completed but a habit to be cultivated: much like loving our neighbor or giving our tithes. The result of this perspective is unfortunate.
If I tell my child, “You should work on keeping your room clean,” we both know I am referring to a general daily habit. There are certain things that are usually to be done each day: beds made, clothes put away, toys picked up. On any given day, a room may be more or less clean. There could be a variety of reasons, too. For example, I might say, “We don’t have time for you to pick everything up right now—we’re running late for church. Clean up when we’re back.” But then, the pastor’s sermon might go long, and there might be a long altar call, and then we’d spend time talking with friends afterward. We might not get back until very late, and I would further excuse them from the habit of cleaning up: “It’s late. Everyone’s tired. Go to bed, and we’ll do it in the morning.”
On the other hand, I might call my children together one day and say, “Tonight, we have company coming for dinner. They will be here sometime after six o’clock. Make sure your room is completely clean.” They might not know precisely when our visitors will arrive—“some time after” can cover a fairly large timespan—but they know what my expectations are. The best thing is to have the room clean before six o’clock arrives.
Habits are things we do off and on throughout our daily life—rather like cleaning, or budgeting, or paying tithes, or going to church. Some of us may be very diligent about a particular habit, and others less so. We might even go through up and down “phases”. We can be tempted to lessen the frequency with which we practice our “missionary habit.” We might be waiting for the right moment—perhaps when it’s not too painful, when we’re sure of success, and when we’re likely to receive some glory.
Moreover, when a habit does not represent a task that can be finished, it generally becomes something done in the context of daily life, but it doesn’t drive daily life decisions. You can have a habit of cleaning your house, knowing that you will always be cleaning the house—you will use and re-use dishes, and they will have to be washed and re-washed. You will use and re-use clothes, and they will have to be washed and re-washed. Of cleaning there is no end, so it doesn’t drive your life decisions (other than perhaps make you buy books about time management or invest in cleaning tools). There are many habits like this: making charitable contributions, making smart shopping decisions, budgeting, balancing bank accounts, and the like. They don’t represent a task that defines your life, a task that could potentially be completed, and so they don’t drive decisions about where you live, what job you take on, what church you attend, what friendships you cultivate.
When mission, as a habit, is lived out in the context of daily life but doesn’t drive life decisions, then it typically becomes all about the guy next door, the colleague at work, or the rebel cousin who needs Jesus. Our neighborhood is our mission field. This may seem like a good thing—after all, my family, neighborhood friends and work colleagues all need the love of Christ. The fellow next door is surely just as important as a Saudi halfway around the world. But we can say the reverse is true, too—Saudis are as important as your neighbor. When mission is a habit and not a life-defining task, we end up defining who our habit will serve based not on God’s desire for the nations but on our desire for a steady salary.
If missions isn’t something that can be finished—if mission is just a habit to be done where we are—then we are rarely willing to go somewhere else, somewhere difficult. We leave that for those people whom God has struck with a blinding vision (and perhaps thrown in a burning bush to boot). We say, “I’m not called.”
The problem with this is that it reduces the vast majority of believers to a mission that is nothing more than home evangelism. Most Christians are found within the walls of Christian languages and cultures. We stick to our neighbors, who are like us, and live near us, and speak our language. We remain inside the walls of our language and culture, where things are known, where things can be expected and understood, where things are safe. Eventually we come to a point where “I’m not sure he’s a Christian” simply means “He doesn’t go to my church.”
When most Christians remain inside Christian languages and cultures, few Christians are found in non-Christian languages and cultures, being salt and light. This is why the Saudis and Sudanese are not Christians: not because they have rejected the Gospel, but because when we make missions a habit where we live now, we don’t go to the hard places and do the hard work. It’s not just the persecution–we can ennoble that. No, it’s the difficult task of learning a new language, a new culture, eating new foods, using strange toilets, enduring diseases, living without our favorite television shows, and sometimes living in hard, smelly, people-packed, poor places.
Yet if we don’t do the hard work of putting ourselves in the way of difficult-to-reach opportunities–because we think the task cannot be finished–it never will be.
On the other hand, if we really, honestly, truly think of the Great Commission as a God-given task that can be finished, then the way in which we make decisions must change. The drive to finish the task will shape the course of our daily life: both our big decisions and our small ones. Missions will be about the whole world–including both the guy next door and the Saudi halfway around the planet. Our ministry actions must “scale”—they can’t be limited to our own local context. Difficult tasks will be contemplated from the default position of “we should try and go unless God tells us specifically to stay where we are.” Most of all, we as Christians will intentionally place ourselves “in the way” of cultures—at places where we will most likely intersect those who have no knowledge of Christ, Christianity or the Gospel (and not just people who simply don’t attend our church).
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