The Mission of Christ

Introduction

I became a Christian at a church that was heavily invested in world missions and stressed the importance of sharing the gospel with as many people as possible. This church sent missionaries around the world, had short term mission trips filled every year, and they shared the gospel in their local community. As a new Christian, my own faith grew as a result of the evangelistic fervor of this church because for all the doubts that I personally had, I could not shake the fact that there was this large group of people who seemed to be genuinely living out their belief in God, even to the point of leaving the comforts of home to share the gospel in countries I’ve never even heard of. After seminary, I joined Acts Ministries, which is the community of churches that Radiance belongs to, largely because of its emphasis on missions and the opportunity to partner together to help fulfill the Great Commission. The idea that the book of Acts should be the normative expression of Christianity is something that resonated with me and I wanted to work alongside other leaders and churches that shared that same core spiritual DNA.

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that my early and most formative experience of the church is not one that is shared across the board. Many churches seem to teach that personal salvation is the sole priority of the Scriptures and that missions/evangelism is optional. But that is not what Jesus actually teaches us from His Word. At the end of the gospel of Luke, we see the teaching of Christ in regards to what a gospel-centered church must focus on.

Luke 24:44–49 ESV

Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.”

Body:

The central theme of the OT is the fulfillment of the gospel and its proclamation to all nations

There is no distinction from local evangelism and overseas missions

The Holy Spirit provides the power to accomplish the world evangelism

Normative biblical, Christ centered Christianity must include the proclamation of the Gospel to all the nations beginning with where we are. We have no right to change what the totality of the Scriptures describe as being the normative pattern of the Christian life. Missions and evangelism is not some small part of the bible, it is the core essence. Essentially what Jesus is saying is that the whole of Scripture, understood by the mind that has been opened by His Spirit, finds its fulfillment both in the account of His life, death, and resurrection and the proclamation of the gospel from where you are to all nations. Sharing the gospel is a non-negotiable of the Christian life because when it is done well, it reveals both our love for God and our love for people. Consider what Paul says in the book of Romans.

Romans 10:13–14 ESV

For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?

Now some people will object and say that their faith is a private one but that is contrary to the law of love. When you love someone or something, you want everyone to know. And often times, without even knowing it you are spreading the good news of what you have found. In the same way, when we are passionately in love with Christ, praise for his glory and fame becomes our greatest delight. Zeal for Christ’s glory and fame is simply an overflow of your love for him. As CS Lewis points out.:

“The world rings with praise—lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game—praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, etc…I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are, the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.”

Our enjoyment of God cannot be consummated until we learn to express it.

Some years ago, I realized what was taking the place of the proclamation of the gospel in places like the Bay Area. Social justice or what people refer to as the social gospel has become the replacement for the clear articulation of the message of Christ and though I saw the tides coming, I didn’t realize how strong those waves were. The social gospel is now pitted against the spiritual gospel and Christianity is becoming increasingly divided into these two camps, those who care for matters of justice and those who care for salvation. Admittedly 20-30 years ago, the church was far more focused on saving souls while virtually ignoring people’s physical needs. But in today’s Christianity, I fear that the pendulum has swung the other way, where we address social injustice but fail to see the spiritual roots of these problems. So we are passionate about justice but lukewarm about evangelism, failing to recognize that evangelism and justice are inseparably linked because God cares about individuals from the number of hairs on their head to the eternal fate of their souls. From the perspective of a loving God, there is no separation between the physical needs of his children and their spiritual needs. He cares for us through and through. But somehow we have made that distinction for God and have decided that our need for daily bread outweighs our need for daily forgiveness.

Andy Crouch writes this about the imbalance that we see in today’s church:

Meeting the physical needs of the poor wins attention and affirmation from a watching world. Naming the spiritual poverty of a world enthralled to false gods provokes defensiveness and derision from those who do not even believe there is a god... Our secular neighbors care, many like never before, about relieving human need— and more of them than ever before are indifferent or hostile to the idea that Jesus is the way, the truth, the life and the one who meets the deepest human need.

In short, justice is cool, but proclaiming the gospel is not. Justice without the gospel is not an innocuous common good. Justice unchecked can become an enemy of the gospel. History, especially history in the twentieth century has taught us that lesson over and over again. As Christians we do some things in common with the world but we do them for uncommon purposes.

Can you share your food with the hungry so that you can point them to the bread of life?

Can you provide clean water to the thirsty in order to lead them to the wells of living water?

Can you fight for the oppressed so that you have the opportunity to show them the only one that can truly set them free?

Justice is an important manifestation of the Gospel because it deals with man’s horizontal relationship with one another. Jesus came to bring peace among men. Yet for the Christian, we understand that true peace among man cannot occur until man’s vertical relationship with God is reconciled through the Gospel of Jesus Christ. More than ever we need to be reminded that the gospel needs to shared boldly even while we serve the world compassionately.

The second point is that there is no distinction between local outreach and overseas missions. It’s interesting to me when people do one or the other, when it seems very clear from multiple passages in the Scriptures that we are called to share the gospel first where we are with the vision of seeing this spread to every nation, tribe, and tongue. This is what Jesus is talking about when He teaches the disciples that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed to all nations, beginning in Jerusalem. The first half of our vision statement is a condensed version of Jesus’ words in this passage:

The vision of Radiance is to advance the gospel of Jesus Christ from the city to the world...

Unfortunately over the past few decades, the practice of world evangelism has been frowned upon by most liberal institutions and even some Christian denominations. And the main objection is that Christianity is a construct of Western culture and therefore it destroys the diversity of native cultures by forcing everyone into a single mold. But in a world that is shrinking rapidly because of advances in travel and communication, cultures are always changing and the real question that needs to be asked is “Which religion or worldview is the most adaptive to diverse cultures?” The history of Christian expansion will tell you that it is the most adaptive to different cultures. Of the world religions, only Christianity has been able to expand beyond the place of its origin and into a variety of races and cultures.

Hinduism, Buddhism, and even Islam has largely remained linked to their culture of origin but when you trace the movement of Christianity, you can clearly see that it has moved across many different groups of people. What started in Jerusalem, spread into the Mediterranean, then dominated Europe for a period of time, before making its way to North America. Today, most religious experts would agree that the center of Christianity is actually no longer in the West but now belongs in Africa or Latin America. The African scholar, Lamin Sanneh who is the professor of World Christianity at Yale gives us a reason why Christianity has grown so explosively in his home continent. This is what he writes.

“Christianity answered this historical challenge by a reorientation of the worldview…. People sensed in their hearts that Jesus did not mock their respect for the sacred nor their clamor for an invincible Savior, and so they beat their sacred drums for him until the stars skipped and danced in the skies. After that dance the stars weren’t little anymore. Christianity helped Africans to become renewed Africans, not re-made Europeans.”

In his research, Lamin Sanneh has pointed out that liberal secularism is far more destructive of local African cultures than Christianity ever was because of its anti-supernatural bias. And for a culture that is so aware of the spiritual realm, Christianity allows them enough distance to critique their traditions and to redeem the best of what it means to be African. And this happens for every group of people that Christianity touches. It doesn’t negate who we are culturally but Christ redeems every nation, culture, tribe, and tongue.

Finally, I want to address the third point which deals with how we can accomplish what seems like an impossible task. The only thing (the only one) that can fuel the on-going evangelistic fervor of the church is the Holy Spirit. When Jesus tells his disciples to wait for the promise of the Father and to stay in the city until they have been clothed in power from above, He is talking about the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit would be poured out into the hearts of believers. Again, we have a cheap paraphrase of this in our church’s mission statement.

The mission of Radiance is to make Spirit-filled believers who desire to know Christ and to make Him known.

The point of this statement is that apart from the filling of the Holy Spirit, you do not have sufficient power, (not knowledge), to make Christ known to anyone.

A Brief History of the Modern Mission Movement

1. The birth of the modern missions movement can be traced back to a group called the Moravians who were led by a man by the name of Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf in the early 1700s. As a collegian in Franke, Germany, he formed with five other students a group called the Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed. Bad name great results. The Moravians paved the way for world missions with their lives. At the very outset of their ministry, 75 of the first 170 missionaries died within the first few years.

2. The Moravians then influenced two young men John and Charles Wesley and as students at Christ Church College in Oxford, they formed the Holy Club and were known as the “Methodists”. John Wesley was stirred with a heart to reach the native Americans with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

3. In the late 1700’s, we saw the ministry of a man by the name of Charles Simeon who worked with undergrads at King’s college and stirred many to live for the cause for social justice and world evangelism.

4. In the early 1800s, we saw the birth of the Haystack Prayer meetings at Williams college in Massachusettes and with a vow to be used by God wherever he needed them, they started the Student Volunteer movement.

5. In the late 1800’s, under the influence of D.L Moody, seven students at Cambridge University took their college degrees and all their skills and they sailed together for China and opened the doors for countless numbers of others students to join the China Inland Mission.

Ever since the day of Pentecost, every notable missions movement has begun with some form of prayer movement. It is a clear reminder missions is not just about strategy or mobilization but about worship!

“Mission is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Mission exists because worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man. When this age is over and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever. Worship, therefore, is the fuel and the goal of missions. It’s the goal of missions because in missions we simply aim to bring the nations into the white hot enjoyment of God’s glory. The goal of missions is the gladness of the peoples in the greatness of God.” (John Piper, Let the Nations be Glad)