“As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” (John 20:21)
Priority of Mission
After dying on the cross, Jesus rose again from the dead and then went to find his disciples who were hiding in a locked room out of fear for their lives. When Jesus found them, He gave them a mission. He gave his disciples a purpose that was bigger than they were.
Before, their primary goal seemed to be staying alive; but Jesus gave them a purpose worth dying for a purpose that would soon drive them to leave the upper room and risk their lives to tell others about the peace and the forgiveness that was available through faith in Jesus.
When Jesus said to His disciples, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you” (John 20:21). He was showing them the priority that God’s purpose for our lives ought to have. For Jesus, being sent by the Father was at the very core of who He was.
He called himself the “sent one,” and everything He did was part of his finishing the work that God the Father had sent him to accomplish. In John 20:21, Jesus says, “As the Father sent me,” that is the way I am sending you.
In other words, Jesus wants mission to play just as important and central a role in our lives as it did in His.
Let that sink in for a minute. Jesus wants His mission for us to have just as important and central a role in our everyday life as God’s mission for Him had on his everyday life.
Identification of Mission
In Matthew 28:19-20, Jesus tells his disciples, “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.”
When Jesus sent His disciples, he sent them to make other disciples. That is our mission; we are called to be disciple making disciples.
That means we are called to be a people who take the good news of the Gospel that God has used to change our lives. We are to proclaim it to others in both word and deed, urging them to join us in trusting Jesus and acknowledging Him as the true and good king of every aspect of our lives.
Motivation for Mission
Oftentimes, Christians find themselves feeling guilty for not witnessing like they should be and out of guilt, they decide that in the future they will do better.
As motivating as guilt might be, it cannot be what motivates us to proclaim the Gospel. One of the key aspects of the Gospel is the good news that Jesus Christ has borne all of our guilt in his body on the cross.
We cannot genuinely tell someone that Jesus shed His blood on the cross in order to forgive them of their sins and free them from guilt, if our only motivation is to not feel guilty.
Sometimes we do feel guilty about not sharing our faith, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes we feel guilty because we are guilty.
However, we cannot go from feeling guilty directly to trying harder. Instead, we need to go from guilt to repentance, and from repentance to trusting in God’s promise to forgive us. Once we truly taste the amazing forgiveness Jesus bought for us on the cross, we find ourselves loving Him even more and realizing even more how desperately others need to hear this good news.
That is when we will find ourselves able to authentically proclaim the Gospel as the good news that it truly is.
But just because you do not always feel like the Gospel is good news does not mean you should wait to share it until you do feel it. The Gospel is good news even when you do not feel it, and what you need to do is believe it and share it with others even when you are not feeling moved by its promises.
Often, God will use our sharing of the Gospel to remind us of its truths, and we will soon realize that we needed to hear the Gospel just as much as the person we were sharing it with.
Power for Mission
We have been given a mission that we will never be able to accomplish on our own. On our own, our best efforts are not enough to truly make someone a disciple. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes disciples because the Holy Spirit is the one who is able to take people who are dead in their sins and make them alive.
What that means is that we cannot try to do this alone. We need help. The way we acknowledge our need for help is through prayer. Prayer is the way we demonstrate that we know that unless God shows up everything we do will be in vain.
Others need the Holy Spirit to open their eyes so that they can begin to see Jesus as He truly is. We need the Holy Spirit to give us the boldness necessary to tell others the Gospel.
Over and over again, Paul asked people to pray that God would give him boldness so that he might proclaim the Gospel boldly like he knew he should. If Paul needed prayer to be bold, how much more do we need the Holy Spirit to come and give us the boldness necessary to rightly proclaim the beauty and worth of Jesus?
Practice of Mission
We believe that the best way to make disciples is to learn to live ordinary life with Gospel intentionality. We believe that all of our life should be impacted by the Gospel, and that we should learn how to communicate its impact in regular conversation.
Our prayer is that we would become a people who let the Gospel impact every aspect of our lives and who are unafraid to talk about its impact in everyday conversations.
Mission in Community (Missional Communities)
We believe that one of the best ways to foster Gospel intentionality in everyday life is for God’s people to do mission together. In order to help foster that, we have set up Missional Communities.
These are communities that gather together to encourage each other with the Gospel and to work together on spreading the Gospel to others. In these communities, we seek to become more comfortable talking about Jesus and His beauty and worth with each other.
We believe that the more comfortable we become talking about Jesus to one another, the more natural we will find it to talk about Jesus with people outside the church. We also believe that God has designed our love for one another to be one of the primary things God uses to make himself known.
John 13:35 says “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” So our Missional Communities each have a specific people group that they are working together in order to reach. They are united in praying for these people, building relationships with these people, and loving each other in tangible ways where these people can see them.
Mission to the World (Missionaries)
We believe that our mission will not be complete until people from every tribe and nation and tongue have come to know and worship Jesus. Therefore, we support a number of different church-planting pastors around the world.