Why You Should Prioritize These Top 5 Missions Topics.

As missions advocates we are called to communicate. We’re called to communicate God’s heart for the nations. We’re called to communicate to folks to help them find their role in this epic story that God is telling. But regardless we are called to communicate. And a lot of times people think “oh that means I need to do a PowerPoint in front of a large group.” Maybe, but of course there are many ways to communicate, maybe your preferred method of communication is over a cup of coffee, Great! Maybe you’re a storyteller through writing or picture taking or filmmaking. While so many creative ways to communicate. But regardless we need to communicate God’s heart for the nations and help invite people in on that.

Now as we communicate, I think there is a couple of themes we should have in our pocket ready to go. One that should be at the top of the list is, of course, “The Biblical Basis of Missions”. To help people see that it’s not just these random 10 or 15 verses that they can come up with on missions but that actually there’s a theme that ties the whole of the Bible together from Genesis to Revelation. And that is God’s desire to bless His people and then through His people bless all nations. And that that is so clear and there’s creative ways we can get that across.

And of course then if we have another chance we can help raise up their hope by telling stories of how God uses ordinary people to do extraordinary things and he’s doing that right now, in this day and age. To highlight how in response to prayer God is on the move in the Muslim and Hindu and Buddhist world in unprecedented ways and raising up workers in and from those places. That there is no reason to give in to pessimism but to realize God is winning. His kingdom is advancing and we should be rising up and hope to partner with God to see that continue.

And so we can also then go on to say, hey every believer has a role. This is another theme “Everybody Plays” right. Not everybody is called to be a missionary, but every believer has a role in the Great Commission. And start to unpack the various different roles of praying and sending and welcoming the nations that are coming to our cities and mobilizing and going… all these different roles people can play. We can highlight impact those themes, those roles.

Another theme is, of course, if we’ve made a case for the Biblical mandate how clear that is for every believer, then we should stop and ask the question, how are we doing? How is the state of the world? How is the task? Are we finishing the task of the Great Commission? And so we have to have that information ready, like here’s the number of people groups that have nobody engaging with them. Out of all the missionaries only this many are going to the most unreached parts of the world. Out of all the money that is given to the Body of Christ, to the Church only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction is going to the places that have the least access to the Gospel. So we need to highlight that type of information as well. To ask the question how are we doing in allocating our time talent and treasure as the Body of Christ?

Then we can also start to look at, hey what are the motivations that can sustain us for the long run? Because when missions comes up many times people are expecting to be motivated by guilt or maybe they are motivated by need or maybe we’re motivated by trying to earn God’s love. All those are not biblical motivations and we need to just keep on pointing people back at Jesus and say what motivated Jesus was love for the Father. And so what should motivate us in terms of missions is love for the Father love for Jesus to continue to say “worthy is the Lamb to receive the reward of His sufferings” and to have worship be the thing that fuels us and motivates us into the nations not any of those other things of guilt or performance.

So yes, these are presentations I would suggest having ready to go if you need examples you can check out the ones we have here on the on the Web site and make them your own. But let’s be ready with a Biblical Basis of Missions, The stories of what God is doing around the world through ordinary people, how every believer has a role to play in the Great Commission and the State of the world where the resources are or are not going, and in then biblical motivations for missions.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash