In the beginning God sends forth His word. In the fullness of time the Father sends forth His Son. After the ascension, the Spirit is sent to the Church and the Spirit in turn sends the Church. Sending is present throughout the whole of Scripture and continues in the life of the Church today. From the latin missio meaning “to send,” mission is part of the story God is telling throughout redemptive history. Missions begins in the Church, flows out into the world, and brings the world back into the Church.
Like the word “Trinity,” “missions” does not appear in Scripture but it holds important biblical truths. While there are numerous books written on missions, is the modest hope of this short 5-part treatment of missions to summarize what faithful stewardship of missions requires in this generation.
In summary form: the means of missions is the Word, the purpose of missions is worship, the signs of missions are the sacraments, and the center of missions is the Church. At the core of God’s mission is His people, those for whom the earth was created in the beginning (Eph 1:4) and for whom Christ died (John 3:16). God Himself is the beginning and end of missions because God is the One who sends and is sent. Ultimately, God’s mission is His people. God’s mission is His Church.
God’s Word | The Means of Missions
God creates through acts of speech. When He speaks, it is so. “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” (Gen 1:3, LSB). God sends forth His word, and the world comes into being. God’s word mediates reality. It is the means of mission because it is the intermediary of all that is. When God’s word is sent out it accomplishes what it is sent to do (Is 55:11). God’s word calls forth everything out of nothing (Heb 11:3), holds all things together in the Son, and is reconciling all things to Him (Col 1:17-20). Jesus, the Word made flesh, is our mediator to God (1 Tim 2:5). My pastor has an adage, “words build worlds.” This is true because God’s word built the cosmos.
God gives Mankind dominion, a command to rule over the creation, to be fruitful and multiply, and to fill the earth and subdue it (Gen 1:28). He gives Adam the command to keep and work the garden, to guard it and cultivate it (Gen 2:15). God creates, directs, and upholds all things by His word (Col 1:16-17), creating a very good world.
Speech can also be corrupted, and used to build anti-good worlds. The serpent deceives Eve through speech, Adam blames his wife and Maker through speech, and the serpent is cursed by God through speech (Gen 3:1-19). At Babel, everyone had “the same language and the same words” (Gen 11:1). Through a false unity based on the word of Man, humanity rebels against God’s word by refusing to multiply and fill the earth. Founded on disobedience and the power of human might, they seek to build a kingdom to their own greatness, making themselves gods by building a tower to reach to heaven (Gen 11:4).
But God’s word is also gracious. In the midst of sin and rebellion, God’s word provides for redemption. In the Garden He announces the proto-evangelium, announcing that the seed of the woman will crush the serpent’s head (Gen 3:15). At Babel, when Man does not obey God’s word, He responds by confusing their speech, dispersing peoples and languages across the globe, helping Man to fulfill His original command to fill the earth (Gen 11:7-9). At Pentecost, God undoes the sin of Babel through the power of the Spirit when faithful believers from every nation gather together and foreign tongues are heard and understood as one’s own (Acts 2:5-6).
God is also a God of particularity. God chooses to speak through specific people at specific times. When the earth is corrupt with violence and God sets to destroy all flesh, he speaks to Noah. He picks one family, and instructs him how to save the world through His words. Unlike Adam, Noah obeys the word of God (Gen 6:22). After the flood God speaks a covenant with Noah (Gen 8:20-22), and Noah saves himself, his family, and all the “families” of the animals (Gen 8:19). God also speaks to Abraham, telling him to leave his father’s land, and go to the land he will show him. He promises to make him a great nation, to give him a land, and to make his name great, concluding “and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed” (Gen 12:1-3). Abraham is the first human missionary, called and sent out. Unlike Adam who was driven from the garden, Abraham is sent into a new land to subdue it by God’s Word. God sends Abraham to leave his father’s house and become a “great father,” like His heavenly Father. The greek word ἐκκλησία translated “congregation, church, or assembly,” comes from ἐκ + καλέω meaning “out from + to call.” As Abraham is called out of the land of Ur, so the Church is the “called out ones” in the world. We are the offspring of Abraham by faith, and the Church inherits the promises of the covenant through the work of Christ (Rom 4:16). God’s people, first called out in Abraham, now being realized in the Church, are the mission.
The Parrhesians 