Mission Possible!
Posted by: Jacob Friesen
Church: Gospel Mennonite Winnipeg
Date: February 8th, 2011
Over the weekend some of staff of the Go Mission! home office were at the Manitoba Missionfest. What a delight it was to see so many young people and young adults interested in missions. Many of them stopped by our booth and seemed to connect with the new image. (young and older)
But way more important was hearing the stories of how God is at work in our world. We sometimes get discouraged by all the “bad” news about the state of the church in North America. So it was absolutely invigorating to hear how believers and churches are multiplying at phenomenal rates in other parts of the world. You will hear more later.
How do we live out the “Go” in the great commandment and commission?
Attached are a few things to ponder. The first is a one page declaration of where some people think we are and should be putting our missionary bucks and energy. Is this true? What do you think?
The second one is a recent study by the Barna Group. It’s a USA study but some of the same things are probably true for the rest of us as well. Note the challenges we are facing as we think about mobilizing towards missions at home and abroad.
What are you learning and thinking?
P.S. Don’t forget to get your hands on the book – “Radical”. It’s a very good encouragement about how each of us can be involved in missions.
I have to respond to this and say AMEN to the Global Missions Trends Map. As someone who spent a long time living in the heart of the 10/40 window I have seen first hand the amazing things that God is doing there. As it says; Less than 2% of all missions giving is directed toward the 10/40 Window. Yet “dollar for dollar and hour for hour, the harvest coming from the 10/40 Window nations outstrips that from the rest of the world 100 to 1.”
Instead of focusing our mission efforts on places where there is already an established church and Christian presence, lets focus on places where there is no church and where people still have no hope of hearing about Jesus. I agree with the late Oswald Smith who said “Why should anyone hear the Gospel twice, before everyone has had the chance to heard it once?”
There’s a good reason why the 10/40 window is far outstripping the “west” in growth and that is in how they “do missions”. They use Christ’s example far more literally and precisely than “western” missionaries do.
Satan is fantastic! He has done a fantastic job confusing the “western” idea of how to do church and missions. He’s gotten the “west” to turn Christ’s model upside down and to use methods that end up bogging everybody down with rules and regulations, focusing more on the letter of the Law rather than the spirit of the Law. Now where have I heard this before? Oh, yeah, in the Bible when Jesus talks about and describes the Pharisees!
I wonder . . . . . . . .