The Origin and End of Missions
What Is a Missions-Centered Church?
A missions-centered church recognizes that its mission begins with the Great Commission:
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. (Matt. 28:19–20)
A missions-centered church takes the Great Commission seriously. Such a church doesn’t simply pay lip service to Jesus’s command to make disciples of all nations. No, a missions-centered church rolls up its sleeves and gets to work.
Our Savior spoke these words to men who had been with him for three and a half years. They’d seen his ministry, heard his message, and witnessed his miracles. Many of them concluded that he was the Messiah they’d been waiting for, even if they didn’t fully understand what that meant. They expected an earthly king to reign immediately over them, but Jesus intended to inaugurate his rule in their hearts. Jesus had a bigger plan than defeating Caesar; he came to conquer sin and death. Risen from the dead and standing before his disciples, Jesus gave them a mandate that they—and the churches they would start—were never to forget, a mandate to “make disciples of all nations.”
Prioritizing Missions in the Church
Aaron Menikoff, Harshit Singh
In this brief, insightful guide, pastors Aaron Menikoff from Atlanta, Georgia, and Harshit Singh from Lucknow, India, share their journeys leading their churches to be more missions-centered by taking the gospel across geographic, cultural, and linguistic barriers.
This kind of disciple-making is at the very heart of being a Christian, which means it should be at the heart of every church. Our churches have the duty and the delight to strategize how to get the gospel not only to nearby neighborhoods but to faraway nations and into different languages.
But what is a church? Here’s our definition: a church is a congregation of baptized Christians who have covenanted to gather weekly for preaching the Bible, celebrating the ordinances, loving the saints, witnessing to the lost, and, in all this, glorifying God.
Of the Bible’s many images for the church, one of the most compelling is that of family. Paul calls the church “the household of God” (1 Tim. 3:15), which is why he refers to believers as brothers and sisters in Christ. We become family through faith in Jesus who died and rose in the place of everyone who has turned from their sin and trusted in him. Through this faith we are united to Christ, our older brother, and we become members of his family. We enter the universal church through conversion, and we enter the local church through the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper (sometimes referred to as sacraments). Baptism into a local church—one of these covenanted bodies—is the sign of entrance into this household. The Lord’s Supper is the regular reminder that we belong.
How then might we define missions? You won’t find the word mission in the Bible. Our English word is derived from the Latin missio, which we often translate as “sent” or “sending.” This concept of sending is all over the New Testament. Acts ends with Luke stating that the “salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles” (Acts 28:28). When the Lord called the twelve, “he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:2). And at the right time, the church in Antioch prayed for Barnabas and Saul and “sent them off” to share the gospel and plant churches in Asia (Acts 13:3).
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Missions, then, is church planting across significant barriers. To be more specific, “missions involves churches sending qualified workers across linguistic, geographic, or cultural barriers to start or strengthen churches, especially in places where Christ has not been named.”1
Church planters are sent by local churches to establish local churches. They’re supposed to plant gospel seeds which will grow into churches that are deeply rooted and standing strong. Such churches will bear witness to Christ and raise up more workers to plant and water more gospel seeds for generations to come.
Sending church planters is what Jesus had in mind when he issued the Great Commission. After all, Matthew 28 must be read in the context of Matthew 16 and 18, where Christ gives the authority of the keys to local churches (Matt. 16:13–20; 18:17–20). The church that gathers in his name has the authority to baptize in his name (Matt. 18:20; 28:19), and those with whom he dwells now, he’ll dwell with always (Matt. 18:18–20; 28:20).2 The book of Acts, then, is a chronicle of church planters from Jerusalem and Antioch sowing gospel seeds in an unbelieving world. The Bible requires churches to own this process of raising up and sending out qualified missionaries. Just as Paul was sent to the Gentiles, crossing the Jew and Gentile divide, so missionaries today walk through the geographic, cultural, and linguistic walls that separate unbelievers from the good news of Jesus.
A missions-centered church takes the Great Commission seriously.
There is no “missions” without a gospel to share, people to go, and a church to send. This is where the church and missions come together. George W. Peters called the church “the mediating sending agency of God” and “the responsible missionary body.”3 Missionaries are sent out by the “missionary body” of the local church to plant churches because missions is not only about people being saved; it is also about people being gathered into a local church. The new local church then bears witness to Christ, putting the nations on notice that he is the King, and then turns around and sends more missionaries to cross more barriers to make the name of Jesus known in more places.
In this sense, churches are both the origin and the end of missions. They are the origin in that churches send missionaries—missions originates in the local church. Churches are the end in that the goal of missions is faithful, healthy churches. Therefore, since churches are both the start and the goal of missions, we consider the local church to be the “method.”
This means that, even in parts of the world with no established church, the missionary should be tethered to a local church—sent out by a congregation to make and baptize disciples. Of course, a network of churches will often be involved in this work. Praise God! Still, the partnership of a multitude of churches must not eclipse the responsibility of individual churches to be actively involved in the missionary task.
We encourage local churches to reassume ownership of the Great Commission and not outsource that work entirely to missions agencies or other parachurch ministries. The authority to make disciples has been given to the church—it is the church who teaches the gospel that saves and who baptizes those who are saved (Matt. 28:18–20). Sending people to make disciples of all nations is at the heart of missions. Therefore, a missions-centered church is a missionary-sending church.
Notes:
- See the series preface Prioritizing Missions in the Church(pp. xv–xvi).
- On the role of the congregations that planters are to establish, see Jonathan Leeman, Don’t Fire Your Church Members: The Case for Congregationalism (Nashville, TN: B&H, 2015).
- George W. Peters, A Biblical Theology of Missions (Chicago: Moody, 1972), 221.
This article is adapted form Prioritizing Missions in the Church by Aaron Menikoff and Harshit Singh.
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