Why We Need Missionaries to Fulfill the Great Commission

I once heard someone summarize the Bible in four words: “God wants everybody back.”

And that is the impetus behind Jesus’ Great Commission to take the Good News to people who don’t know that God loves them so much that He gave up His Son to bring them home.

The early church obeys Christ’s command.

The Book of Acts opens with Jesus outlining what it would look like when the church carried out His instructions in ever-widening circles: “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem… in [the surrounding region of] Judea… [then crossing ethnic boundaries] in Samaria… and to the uttermost parts of the earth” [all people groups everywhere] (Acts 1:8).

Two millennia later that work is still ongoing, as missionaries keep bringing the Good News about Jesus to groups that have never heard of Him.

But I’ve long thought it odd that as important as the Great Commission is – and I do believe it is a prominent theme running throughout the Bible – the Great Commission mandate is not reiterated as an imperative in the epistles. We hear Jesus give His people their marching orders – “Spread out and tell everyone what happened” – and we see the church doing that in the Book of Acts. But we don’t hear the writers of the epistles tell people over and over again to witness to their neighbors and loved ones. In fact, there is precious little in the epistles about how we interact with non-believers (Col 4:5-6; 1 Pet 2:12). There seems to be an assumption that believers’ normal, daily interactions with non-believers will result in people coming to faith.

And it seems that this is precisely how the early church did grow, at least in the beginning. After the explosive growth on the Day of Pentecost – when the Spirit was poured out on God’s people and the church was born – there was continued numerical growth from that point on.

Then we reach the decisive point.

Luke tells us that the church in Antioch – a largely Gentile congregation – was praying together one day when the Spirit told them to send their two key leaders away to evangelize elsewhere.

I’m sure there was some considerable anxiety about losing those two men. Barnabas was the mature, encouraging representative of the mother church in Jerusalem, and the young, brilliant Saul of Tarsus, formerly a vicious enemy of the church, was now an energetic Christian leader.

But there was in the Spirit’s prompting a recognition that as vital as personal evangelism had been in spreading the Good News, the scope of personal interactions wouldn’t be broad enough to carry out Jesus’ instructions. The church would have to take deliberate steps to launch the Gospel into other places where Jesus was not known; fulfilling the Commission must involve sharing the Good News with strangers, not just friends and family.

The cost was high for that fellowship in Antioch.

They lost two key leaders. Somehow other leaders had to step in to take the place of the mature Barnabas and the gifted Saul.

The cost was high for Saul as well. He never returned to anything like a quiet, settled life. Though he did stay in some places for as long as a few years, he mostly traveled from city to city planting churches or checking with churches he had planted before. Beyond that, he suffered great personal harm, mostly at the hands of Jewish opponents to the Gospel message he carried with him.

But the cost of cross-cultural ministry is always very, very high, both for the missionary and for everyone else in the church as well.

When my father was stationed in Taiwan, the only American school in our city was Morrison Academy, a missionary school, so the student body was an interesting mix of military brats and MKs (missionary kids).

As I got to know my MK friends, I came to understand how difficult it was for their families to leave home and hearth to devote themselves full-time to cross-cultural missions. I knew that my dad’s assignment to Taiwan had an expiration date on it. We would finish his assignment there and then go back “home” to our life in the States.

But my MK friends had grown up as “third-culture kids,” not at home as Americans there in Taiwan nor totally at home in the States, either. Both they and their parents were paying a heavy price to bring the Good News to the people of Taiwan.

So why all the bother?

Why invest all the effort? As with all examination of our motives, we find we have mixed motives about doing the work of evangelism.

Primarily, our Lord and Master Jesus told us to do this work, so we must do it. Regardless of other motivations, His command is in itself sufficient.

But there’s more.

As we’ve written before in these pages, the most compelling reason for telling anyone else about Jesus is neighbor-love.

When I was part of some of the early missions efforts in Mongolia in the early 2000s, I remember thinking what it would be like to be part of the story some Mongolian matriarch would someday tell her extended family: “I remember when the Christians came to our town. That was the first time I had heard about Jesus. That day changed my life forever.”

What wouldn’t I be willing to give up to be part of that moment in that woman’s life and family?

But my presence there wasn’t a solo flight. I had traveled halfway across the world to be part of that team, but my wife had also played a role and paid a steep price: she was holding down the fort at home while I was gone for three weeks every year when I was making those trips. And there were dozens of donors who helped pay for my expenses. All of us together contributed to my being there to tell people far away about Jesus.

And it has always been so.

As with Barnabas and Saul and the visionary church in Antioch, it has always been a massive group effort to take the Good News about Jesus to places where He is not known.

We may never know in this life what effect our efforts will have. But we do know this much: Jesus told us to go, and both the going and the sending are a great privilege.

So let’s take the Good News to our neighbors and co-workers, and let’s send the Good News to people elsewhere who have never heard of Him.

When Jesus returns, I want Him to find me – to find us – busy doing what He told us to do.

Persevere,                                                                                              Paul Pyle      
Pastor of Discipleship