Is There Still a Future for Missions?

God’s Call to Global Mission

Is there a continuing place for deliberate attempts by Christians to reach across cultural and religious boundaries and seek to bring others to faith in Christ? For most of the past 300 years, the church’s answer has been a resounding yes. From William Carey to David Livingstone to Jim Elliot, the evangelical church has been passionate about the task of world evangelism and has responded by sending out people devoted to communicating the gospel to those who have not heard it.

Is There a Future for Missions?

Yet we live in an era when the whole idea of world missions suggests to many a kind of cultural imperialism that is out of place in our global economy. Western culture is troubled by exclusive claims to truth and dismissive of the idea that those who are followers of Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism need to come to Christ to be saved. In mission circles, the focus is shifting from ministering to the lost to ministering to the needy, seeing the call to help supply people’s material needs as just as crucial as the call to share the good news of Jesus. The impact of pluralism and materialism has taken a deep toll on the missionary vision of the Western church, while at the same time, mission sending from the majority world is rapidly on the rise.

Yet the Biblical mandate for the church to take the good news of the gospel to the ends of the earth has not yet either been rescinded or fulfilled. Acts 13 provides a good context in which to think through the call to missions, because here we see the beginning of the world missions movement. Before this point, the missionary mandate had been given (Acts 1:8) and individual Christians went to other places spreading the gospel as they went (Acts 8:4). Yet in Acts 13:1–3, we see a paradigm shift as the Spirit set apart Paul and Barnabas for a lifetime of cross-cultural ministry. Strikingly, that transformative shift occurred not in a Western Colonial setting but in cosmopolitan Asian Antioch.

Bringing the Gospel to the Nations

Iain M. Duguid

Following the progress of the gospel and the perseverance of the saints, Iain M. Duguid draws practical lessons from the life of the early church and encourages believers toward gospel-driven mission.

Not coincidentally, world missions started in a worshipping church (Acts 13:2). The heartbeat of missions is always a big view of God and of the gospel. If you believe that the God who created the universe sent his only Son to die on the cross to redeem us from the depth of our depravity and sin, that this is the only way that we can be delivered from sin, death, and hell, and that in Christ we have a glorious inheritance prepared for us in heaven, then—and only then—will you catch the vision for missions. This is why pluralism and materialism have had such a devastating impact on the Western missionary movement. Pluralism cuts God down to the size of other deities. Christianity becomes simply one way among many to live a life of moral achievement, while sincerity rather than truth becomes the measure of authentic religion. How imperialist and arrogant it would be for us to take our little corner on the truth and proclaim it to others from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, if they can serve God equally well within their own religious traditions! On the other hand, materialism exalts our wants to the status of priority needs: I need to have a car, the latest phone, a secure career, a family, a house . . . and if God’s call can fit with those things, well and good. Otherwise, I’m not interested.

Worship, however, reorients our view of everything. It reminds us of God’s glory and of the beauty of the gospel, confronting us with the overwhelming need of our lost neighbors and the transitory nature of all the material things in which we get so invested. It drags our reluctant eyes away from ourselves and our own interests and refocuses them upon the glories of Christ. In this way, worship opens our ears afresh to hear God’s call.

The Call to Missions

God’s call is the factor that initiates the missionary movement at this point in the book of Acts. It doesn’t start with Paul and Barnabas wanting to travel more, or even with them feeling the burden of the needs of a lost world. Mission begins with God calling Barnabas and Paul to that task, because the mission is God’s before it is ours. God has a deeper passion to see men and women brought to faith in Christ than any of us ever will. As the church at Antioch was worshipping God and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them” (Acts 13:2). God had called Paul to the task of bringing the gospel to the Gentiles in Acts 9. This was the same ministry for which Barnabas had sought out Paul to assist him in Antioch, the first place where the gospel was deliberately preached to Gentiles and the first place to have a predominantly Gentile church. This was the ministry that God had already prospered and blessed in that place, until it reached the point where it had no fewer than five prophet-teachers in leadership over it.

This shows us that God’s call to service typically takes place in the context of gifts that are already being exhibited. It is unlikely that God is calling you to be an evangelist in Africa if he has not already gifted you to be an evangelist right where you live. On the contrary, those whom he typically calls to a cross-cultural ministry are those who are already serving in a similar ministry in their home contexts. Saul and Barnabas had already honed their leadership and teaching gifts among the Gentiles in Antioch before they set out on their mission to the world.

Gifts are not enough, though. There were five teachers in the church in Antioch and the Holy Spirit did not tell the church to pick any two from the five. Rather, the Holy Spirit specifically called Saul and Barnabas to their new positions. This aspect of calling is particularly important for those called to serve in difficult and challenging environments. When you labor in fields that are hard, or the soil seems rocky and unresponsive, it is important to have a clear sense that God has assigned you this task to do for him, whether or not anyone around you seems to appreciate your work. Certainly, Paul and Barnabas would need that assurance in the difficult ministry that lay ahead of them.

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The Cost of Missions

There was a cost both to Paul and Barnabas and to the church in Antioch for them to heed God’s call. It would have been easy for Paul and Barnabas to settle down in the safety and comfort of the church at Antioch, where they were preaching to the converted. Yet God had plans for a bigger—and far more challenging—calling for Paul and Barnabas, a ministry to the Gentiles that would fill the rest of the pages of the book of Acts.

It was also a costly call for the church in Antioch, which at a stroke was asked to send off 40 percent of their gifted leadership team to bring the good news to other places. It would have been easy for the church to have clung on to the gifts that God had given them in these men, arguing that they were necessary for the health and growth of their young church. Yet they, too, recognized God’s calling and released these men to a new sphere of ministry. It was probably also financially costly for them, because we don’t see Paul and Barnabas raising their own support. Likely, the church in Antioch funded their travels out of their own limited resources.

We, too, need to reckon with the cost of missions. We should give generously to assist God’s work around the world, as well as in our own back yards. We should joyfully embrace the cost of sending people out from our own congregation, men and women whom we love, whose gifts and faithful service are needed to bring the good news elsewhere. We ourselves may need to heed God’s call to serve the worldwide church, whether in a long- or short-term capacity.

The heartbeat of missions is always a big view of God and of the gospel.

The Confrontation of Missions

Just because Paul and Barnabas were called to their ministry by God did not guarantee them a smooth ride. Their initial mission target of Cyprus brought them into direct conflict with a Jewish magician named Elymas, who sought to dissuade the proconsul from coming to faith in Christ (Acts 13:4–12). There was nothing timid about Paul’s response to Elymas. He didn’t say, “Well, you have your religious beliefs and I have mine; what really matters is that we are both committed to being good people.” Rather he challenged him directly: “You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord? The hand of the Lord is upon you and you will be blind, unable to see the sun for a time.”

What is striking here are the similarities and differences between this encounter and Paul’s own conversion. Paul also opposed the gospel; he, too, was struck blind in the middle of the day, so that he needed to be led by the hand. In the New Testament, the Greek word occurs only in references to these two events (Acts 9:8; 13:11). Yet Paul was brought to salvation by God, while Elymas persisted in his rebellion. How can we account for this difference? Out of his missionary grace, the Lord softened Paul’s hard heart to hear the truth about Jesus and opened his blind eyes to see the gospel, while Elymas was left to perish in his blindness.

The same grace is determinative for us as well. We will not be prepared to hear the call of missions until we appreciate that our own understanding of the gospel is a profound gift of God’s grace. The Father called the Son to the task of missions in eternity past, sending him to bridge the enormous cross-cultural gulf that separates a holy God from his sinful creatures. Jesus did not cling on to his status, possessions, or glory. Instead, he paid the greatest cost any missionary has ever paid. His first bed on earth was a filthy feeding trough; his last, a stone slab in cold tomb. He made himself vulnerable to the foul hatred of those he had come to save. They mocked him and ridiculed the sacrifices he endured out of love for them. Jesus confronted Satan in the wilderness and refused his seductive temptations (Matt. 4:1–11); he remained faithful to his Father through the dark hours in Gethsemane, even to the point of death on the cross. In that awful darkness, he gave up life itself for the sake of his mission to rescue his people out of this broken world.

This gospel is what will empower you to hear and answer God’s call, whether his vocation for you is to be faithful where you are or to go and bring the good news where it has not been heard before. We are all to strive to see others brought from blindness to sight, from death to life, summoning them to join us in singing our Savior’s praises. As we pray and serve, we may have confidence that since the mission is God’s, not one of his children will be left behind. On that last day, when Jesus’s reign is acknowledged from sea to sea, all those who are his will join in his eternal praise. Then, at last, missions will be over and the joyful eternal worship service will reach a new crescendo of praise.

Iain M. Duguid is the author of Bringing the Gospel to the Nations: Lessons for the Church from Acts 9–18.

Iain M. Duguid (PhD, University of Cambridge) is professor of Old Testament and dean of online learning at Westminster Theological Seminary. He is the author of numerous commentaries and articles, including Turning the World Upside Down. In addition to his academic work, he has been a pastor and church planter for over thirty years, having planted churches in England, California, and Pennsylvania.

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Iain M. Duguid

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We cannot and should not always do what Jesus did. Jesus healed the sick and raised the dead, exceptional gifts which we have not been given. We live in a different period of redemptive history.