When Should Mobilization Begin for New Disciples?

We’d like to ask the question “When does missions mobilization begin in the life of a new disciple?” “When should missions mobilization begin, in the life of that new believer when should they start learning about and participating in the Great Commission? Well, perhaps one way to get out this is to compare seed planting with grafting. Right? Seed planting we know, you take the seed whatever in that DNA that’s what you’re going to get. Grafting, however, as a whole another thing you’ve got an existing tree and you take a branch of something you really want and try to splice that into the tree. And it’s a difficult procedure that often doesn’t really take. So that caused us to ask the question of “When does missions mobilization begin when should missions mobilization begin in the life of a new believer?” Is it after they’ve received lots of information lots of teaching and they’re mature? Is it at that point that we try to get them to think about, pray about, give to, go to, the nations? That seems very much like grafting things in later.

We believe that missions mobilization begins… at the beginning! Week 1 of that new believer’s life.

So we believe that missions mobilization begins… at the beginning! Week one of that new believer’s life. They’ve learned that they are freely freely received and now they’re freely freely supposed to give. They understand that to be a disciple means to obey the commands of Christ, hopefully, and one of those commands is, “Go make disciples of all nation” so they can be from the beginning, yes, learning how to reach the lost in their city, but also began to think about the nations on God’s heart and pray for them from wherever they’re at.

So I was having a conversation years ago with a regional leader who was over the church planting efforts in his region. And we were having a great conversation about missions mobilization he was very excited about it. But at the end he said something that surprised me. He said “This is great but I don’t want my disciple makers, church planters, to be distracted by this topic, You just do your thing. And at that time I didn’t have a good answer for him. But now I would say, if that disciple maker, church planter is successful what’s he going to have on his hands. A community of disciples. And do they read the same word of God? Do they have the same mandate, capacity, privilege of claiming their inheritance in the nations? Absolutely! So I believe that disciple maker, church planter’s job part of his role is to help impart that DNA from the beginning.

And this is why I love the story of what happened in Mongolia. As I understand it the disciple-makers, church planters there had on their hands a handful of young leaders and they got them started discipling these folks. But from near the beginning, they also invited them to pray for and learn about unreached people groups. And so after years, some years they turned over the leadership to these young leaders and they left. But the young leaders actually called them back and said we want to start our missions movement from Mongolia. Can you help us? We have seen that you can do it we can do it. We have the same mandate and the same responsibility. Come and help us. And now some researchers have said that Mongolia is the number one per capita sending nation in the world. It takes about 222 believers to produce one cross-cultural missionary. Whereas unlike my country it’s over 2500 believers for every one cross-cultural long-term worker. So when does missions mobilization start? From the beginning, Week 1 of that new believer’s life!

Photo by Christian Joudrey on Unsplash