Missions and Missionaries: Do We All Mean the Same Thing?
STATEMENT
Local churches send missionaries, who are faithful followers of Jesus, to the nations. They cross significant cultural barriers, such as language or geography, in obedience to and fulfillment of the Great Commission. Missionaries make disciples through evangelism and by teaching new believers to obey all that Jesus taught, starting with baptism. A missionary’s ultimate goal is to plant and strengthen healthy local indigenous churches to God’s praise and glory.
Starting with William Carey in the early 1800s and continuing till today, modern missionaries have advanced the gospel in ways unimaginable when Christianity began in the days of the Apostle Paul.
And if the Lord tarries, the future opportunities for missions are golden – things Paul could never imagine, or William Carey for that matter. Of course, there are still obstacles and much work to be done, but traveling distances in hours of what once took months, having immediate communication on the internet, or benefiting from modern medicines and vaccines make the world smaller and safer for the reach of the gospel. Best of all, Bible translations are available to people in thousands of different languages [1].
But there’s a vast overarching problem in modern missions. When Christians speak about missionary work, they assume we are all discussing the same thing, though we are not. These assumptions span Christian academies of higher learning to vacation bible schools in local churches. We may use similar words, but when it comes to any biblical agreement about what missions is or is not, or what a missionary is or is not, we are as far as the East is from the West.
The result is that we can say dumb, unbiblical things about missions. I know because I used to say them. I was in campus ministry for years and called myself a “missionary to the university world.” It sounded great when I said it at a fundraising event, and nobody challenged me – ever. But I was not a missionary. Understand, I did many things missionaries do. Yet, when we look carefully at the Bible’s description of the work of a missionary, we see that I wasn’t a missionary in the biblical sense. And if I wasn’t a missionary, how much more so those who call themselves missionaries when they are merely talking about being faithful Christian witnesses? With regularity, I hear good-hearted believers call themselves missionaries—a businessman who calls himself a “missionary to the business world,” or a soccer coach who calls herself a “missionary to a soccer team.”
To make matters worse, churches are tempted to leave these comments unchallenged because they sound noble and motivating. However, this only adds to the confusion. Some churches even foster this thinking with signs at their exits saying, “Now you are entering the Mission Field.” Pastors, please take down those signs.
If we confuse what missions is, or what a missionary does, we won’t know the aim of missions; and if we don’t know the aim of missions, we’ll spin missions out of biblical orbit. So, before we consider the essential aspects of missions in our other articles, we start our first article with a clear statement about missions.
The following is a succinct description of missions:
Local churches send missionaries, who are faithful followers of Jesus, to the nations. They cross significant cultural barriers, such as language or geography, in obedience to and fulfillment of the Great Commission. Missionaries make disciples through evangelism and by teaching new believers to obey all that Jesus taught, starting with baptism. A missionary's ultimate goal is to plant and strengthen healthy local indigenous churches to God's praise and glory.
Our statement may look simple, but upon closer examination, it includes and excludes critical understandings about missions. Let’s take a deeper look.
What Is Missions?
Defining missions is more straightforward than defining a missionary, especially if we take a big-picture view, so this is where we start. Missions springs from the heart of God to reach a lost world with the good news of salvation by faith for all peoples. We see His missionary heart woven throughout the Bible. It starts in the first chapters of the book of Genesis and continues to the book of Revelation. God’s mission plan begins most clearly with God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12 to bless the nations through his offspring; it is revealed further as God calls to himself a people to be a light to the nations. The mission then takes greater shape as his Word is given through the law and the prophets with a promise of a Savior. The mission comes into full view as God sends his only Son with the message of salvation for the world that is accomplished on the cross. Following the resurrection of Jesus we see the best example of missionary work in the life of the Apostle Paul as he strives to bring the gospel to the nations. Missions will end, as we see in the book of Revelation, when all peoples from every nation stand before the throne of God giving Him praise and glory.
But even with God's missionary heart revealed in his Word and demonstrated by missionary examples, it’s doubtful the church would have a full-orbed understanding of missions without the Great Commission. This is why our statement declares the Great Commission as the underlying foundation for missions. Since the Great Commission is the foundational text for missions, everyone who has an interest in missions, or the Christian faith for that matter, must understand it. Furthermore, they must understand both the Great Commission’s plain meaning and all that the Great Commission implies. The Great Commission is notable both for what it says and perhaps just as much for what it doesn't, so we'll explore the implications of both as we go. But the most important thing about the Great Commission is that it forms the missionary job description.
Here's the text of the Great Commission.
“[16] Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. [17] And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted. [18] And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. [19] 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, [20] teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Matthew 28:16–20
Before we take a deeper dive into the Great Commission, here are four primary points to keep in mind:
Jesus is speaking to his disciples (vs. 16).
He sandwiches his commission between an assurance of his authority (vs. 18) and a promise to go with them (vs. 20).
He sends them to the nations.
They are to evangelize; baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and then teach these new believers to observe all of the teachings of Jesus.
The Missionary Job Description from the Great Commission–in Six Parts
One issue that floats over any discussion about what missionaries do is that missionary is not a term in the Bible itself. Still, like the term trinity, it is necessary to summarize/label a particular role presented in the Bible—namely, ministers of the gospel who intentionally cross “natural” barriers to the gospel. Paul is never called a missionary, but he is obviously the prototype.
While missionaries get their marching orders from the same texts that all Christians in every land get their teaching from, there are distinct and necessary elements to missions, namely, that intentional crossing of geographic, cultural, and linguistic barriers that would otherwise prevent the spread of the gospel into new places and peoples.
1. Jesus is speaking to disciples.
So, first off, a missionary may have doubts at times, just like the disciples, but they must be people who have repented of their sin, put their entire faith and trust in Jesus, and follow Him as Lord. One of the biggest surprises in my life happened on the mission field when I met people who called themselves missionaries, but as I watched their lives, I realized that they neither knew the gospel nor were genuine believers.
If a person is not a faithful follower of Jesus, no matter what else they do, they are not a missionary.
2. Jesus reassures missionaries in the face of a daunting call.
Jesus knows the missionary calling is tough. That’s why he sandwiched his commission between two assurances: the fact of his authority (vs. 18) and the promise of his presence (vs. 20). It is the kindness of God that he knows our fears, doubts, and fragility. And in the face of such an audacious command, the disciples needed reassurance. Imagine that this bunch of bewildered and over-awed disciples in backwater Palestine are to participate in a plan of such daunting scope (the world!). But King Jesus gave them this task. Today, we benefit from hindsight, showing us how Jesus’ commission has truly played out in world history. And it will continue playing out until Jesus returns. Though the missionary call is as daunting today as it was then, we know the promises of Jesus are just as firm.
Missionaries trust that the mission's outcome is secure. We go under Christ’s authority and protection.
3. Missionaries are “sent ones”
The very word missionary has at its root meaning “sent ones,” and we can’t be sent if there is no sender. Jesus issued the command to go to eleven disciples. However, in the book of Acts (Acts 1:4), Jesus also tells them to wait in Jerusalem for Pentecost, when the church was formed. In Acts 13, we see our best model of sending missionaries. The Holy Spirit moves the church at Antioch to set Paul and Barnabas aside as missionaries.
So, Jesus issued the command to go and the church approved and sent missionaries equipped for the task. Missionaries are sent by faithful local churches.
In the past, some thought that the Great Commission was only for those eleven individual disciples Jesus spoke to in Galilee on the mountain and that it was over once they died [2], an idea long ago discredited by the church. Today, the issue is more on the opposite extreme: Jesus gave the Great Commission to all Christians. So, any faithful Christian is a missionary in their context; after all, it’s not a “Great Suggestion” but a Great Commission. However, neither of these two extremes fits a Biblical model.
The Biblical model is that all faithful Christians have a role in missions, but some go and some support. And these roles are superintended by the church. It doesn’t make sense to have both “goers” and “senders” unless the Great Commission is given to the church. Senders are not missionaries.
This understanding—that the Great Commission is given to the church—is the foundation for the idea that there are both “goers” and “senders” in missions and that not everyone is a missionary, but rather only those sent out by a church.
This flies in the face of the modern missionary movement. If the local church is considered at all, it’s to give a rubber stamp of approval with a bit of cash. Today, the common understanding of how people become missionaries is that God speaks to their heart, they sign up with a mission agency, and after some fundraising training and effort, they buy a plane ticket and head off to the uttermost. This is far from the Biblical idea. The church is not an afterthought in missions; missionaries are “sent ones” by the church. Self-appointed, lone ranger missionaries are not a biblical category.
Missionaries are approved and sent by a local church.
4. Missionaries go to the nations.
Going to the nations is what most people think about when they think of a missionary, and they should. Yet, it’s also the place of significant confusion about missions.
Since the 1970s, missiologists, specifically Ralph Winter [3], observed that the word nations in Greek is the root word for our English word ethnic, and since the concept of nation-states today differs from what would have been understood as nations in first-century Palestine, we should think more about ethnic people groups when we read the Great Commission [4]. This was a good correction for missions in many ways. However, there are caveats. For one, Jesus and people in the first century certainly understood the idea of nations - Babylon, Rome, and Israel, for example. Regardless, the clear idea is that we don’t go to our own culture; we go far beyond it. And so our statement reads that missionaries cross major cultural barriers. This is what it means to go.
Culture is notoriously difficult to define and extremely broad. So much so that some would argue that any variation from your home culture could fit the mandate of the Great Commission to “go,” but that’s not what Jesus is talking about [5]. He says the nations, not neighborhoods, to make it clear that this is an intentional move to the ends of the earth. That is why we say you are not a missionary if you work at Starbucks and are reaching out to your co-workers [6]. Our statement gets at the intent of Jesus in the Great Commission when we say that missionaries cross significant barriers: different geography, different predominant languages, and different cultures.
The implications of going to the nations require missionaries to become cross-cultural experts. They understand biblical contextualization, learn the language, live with the people, eat the food, study the people's religion, take public transportation, etc.
Not only is this the common understanding of missionaries, but it is where missionaries spend most of their time. Living in a foreign place and learning a new language and culture can be lifelong processes. All of this is a part of going to the nations.
Missionaries go to the nations and work to become cross-cultural experts.
5. Missionaries make disciples.
Disciple-making requires two parts: evangelism and teaching.
Evangelism
As we established in point four of the missionary’s job description, missionaries go to the nations and work to become cross-cultural experts. But hear me on this: it is not the end of missions; it’s only the start. As much as I long for missionaries to be cross-cultural experts of the local people, I want to convince everyone that missions is not primarily about a sacrificial life, language learning, getting visas, cross-cultural sensitivity, contextualization, living with the people, telling people not to distribute their prayer letter, alleviating suffering, or eating exotic food–as good and vital these things are to do. It’s not the primary goal.
That’s because you can do all that and never share the gospel! Sadly, many missionaries are cultural experts but don’t, or won’t, share their faith [7]. They may speak the language but don’t know how to disciple a young believer. They may live with the people but never invite them to a gathering of believers [8].
If you never share the gospel, you are not a missionary.
So, first, missionaries must evangelize. This is the start of making disciples. Evangelism is preaching or teaching the gospel with the aim to convert or persuade (I Corinthians 5:11). So, the missionary knows how to overcome objections to the gospel, answer questions about the gospel, and call people to respond to the gospel.
I know this sounds obvious, but I say it because many who call themselves missionaries have forgotten this—or never knew it. You may do many other things on the mission field, such as mercy ministries. But, if you are not evangelizing while working at a hospital, distributing aid, or digging wells, you are not fulfilling the work of a missionary.
Furthermore, all missionaries must know what the gospel is not. There must be no confusion between the gospel and gospel implications. Working to alleviate hunger is an implication of the gospel, and the missionary must explain to the watching world how what they are doing is the fruit that grows from the gospel, but not the gospel itself. The bottom line: the missionary must understand the gospel and how it applies to all of life.
However, some see the work of the missionary as only evangelism. As important as evangelism is, there’s more to making disciples.
Teaching
The second part of making disciples is teaching those the Lord adds to the church's number. Jesus is specific in the Great Commission about both how we teach and what we teach. The how is to teach believers to obey Jesus' teachings. That is, we are not transferring cold data; we are calling people to follow Jesus as Lord.
And what we teach is everything Jesus taught. Teaching everything is a big task. It takes time and effort. As Paul outlines in I Cor. 3-4, this work is like building a house, not setting up a tent. Some missionaries say we should give new believers a Bible and let them sort out church and Christian life in their context. Though there are well-intentioned reasons for this, in the end, it is a dereliction of the missionary’s duty. After all, we don’t raise our children that way; neither do we raise new Christians without helping them grow. So, we teach and explain; we answer questions; we live with them to model discipleship; we establish leadership; we write them once we’re gone. This is all part of what Jesus means when he calls his disciples to make disciples. And clearly, when Paul speaks to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20:20-27, he repeats twice that he never shrunk back from teaching the whole counsel of God. In effect, Paul is recasting the need to apply the words of Jesus in the Great Commission to teach everything Christ taught. Notice, too, as Paul recounts his missionary work in Acts 20, he speaks both to evangelism and teaching.
Missionaries make disciples through evangelism and by teaching new believers to obey all that Jesus taught.
6. Church Planting: The Aim of All Missionaries
This is perhaps the most needed part of our statement about missionaries. Healthy churches are an essential goal in mission work because a healthy local church is both the context and the consequence of disciples obeying all that Christ has commanded us, yet planting healthy indigenous churches on the field is modern mission’s weakest link. The aim of all missionaries should be planting healthy indigenous churches. When we say indigenous, we mean a local church whose majority language, membership, and leadership are native to a place.
When we say healthy church, we mean it in a technical sense. It’s a local church shaped by biblical principles of expositional preaching, gospel doctrine, biblical conversion, biblical evangelism, membership, church discipline, discipleship, leadership, prayer, and missions. No church is perfect, yet churches grow in health as they align themselves with these biblical principles [9]. The measurement of church health is maturity in Christ and witness to the world (Ephesians 3:10, 4:11-16). “Healthy church” is not a method of missions but simply a focus on those things the Bible outlines for the church.
When we say the aim of all missionaries is to plant churches, it does not mean you can’t do other things on the mission field. Missionaries can be doctors, teachers, agricultural engineers, and more; however, any missionary not directly involved in church planting must show how their work and life on the field fosters church planting. That’s because the end goal of missions for any missionary is a healthy, indigenous church (more on that later). First, let me explain how we get church planting from the Great Commission.
Church planting is implicit in the Great Commission because one of a new disciple’s first acts of obedience is baptism, and when we baptize new believers, we don’t baptize them into nothing; we baptize them into a church [10]. So, when we baptize, we are planting churches, or at least we should be. We see this most clearly with the baptism of 3,000 converts in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost–the first church. The point is you can’t be baptized without forming a local church.
Moreover, we don’t merely baptize believers and trust them to figure out how to do church; baptism is simply the beginning of a long process that involves more teaching.
Even a cursory overview of the New Testament, post-resurrection, shows the missionary’s work of teaching is almost always centered on, or directly about, the church. Paul outlines the pattern for us in I Cor. 3-4: the gospel is preached, and the church is formed on top of that gospel foundation. Much, if not most, of Paul’s missionary work and writings, involved instructing churches over the years about living in obedience to Christ and his gospel. Missionaries, therefore, aim to plant churches that apply foundational biblical principles [11]. There is much freedom in how worldwide churches structure the elements of a fellowship. However, missionaries are not free to ignore, or worse, oppose, the clear teachings of the Bible about church practices [12].
Furthermore, if we are to obey everything Jesus taught (as we established in section 5), we find obedience to Jesus impossible without the church. How else are we to love in community despite our differences, submit to our elders, be members of a local body, and so forth?
This became clear to me on the field when I realized how critical rock-solid biblical teaching and practice were for the church since a church plant may be the only church in a local population for generations. And how a misunderstanding of the primacy of the church and the critical need for that church to be healthy can make for a lax, even wayward, church plant. Often called the “church of the lowest common denominator,” that is a church that bends biblical principles in deference to a cultural context. A lack of clarity in this causes confusion when people ask, “Who am I to tell people of another culture what they can do?” or, “I don’t want to export Western culture.” Without clarity, it becomes a great temptation for missionaries to plant churches that allow cultural contexts to override clear biblical principles.
Besides, these questions tend to be smokescreens that obscure obedience. For example, in our church in the Arabian Peninsula, a member told me that since he came from a shame-honor culture, he couldn’t practice church discipline—something he learned from a missionary! He even swayed some younger believers to agree until it was pointed out that church discipline is hard for any culture and that Jesus himself came from a shame-honor culture, and most importantly, it’s a command of the Lord (Mt. 18:15-20), not an idea of culture.
Sadly, many missionaries have never seen a church plant or thought much about it, so when believers arise, they’re lost about what to do. Sending churches should be aware of this and help missionaries understand the foundational principles of a church before they’re sent out.
Sending churches must also be aware of the critical nature of planting churches with firm biblical foundations. Yet, many sending churches give a pass to unbiblical practices on the field they would never allow in their own churches. Given the strategic nature of a field church and the long-term need for a church to nail down biblical principles into the DNA in forming a new church, it’s more important for church plants than churches in any other situation.
So those two things–baptism as the doorway to a church plant and obeying everything Christ taught, including the church–are how we understand that the Great Commission speaks implicitly to church planting. And it should be said that though baptism is the doorway into a church, the connection between what it means to be a disciple and to be a member of a church is strong–it’s a presumption of the epistles that being a Christian disciple means being a part of a church.
Finally, how do I say that the aim of all missionaries is a healthy indigenous church plant? After all, didn’t John Piper imply that the aim of all missions should be the worship of the living God since “missions exists because worship doesn’t”? Yes, and amen, but that’s God’s plan. We cannot force people to worship; that’s the Holy Spirit’s job; the missionary's job is to create the context for genuine worship, best practiced in a church [13]. Our responsibility, our obedience, is to plant healthy churches according to the instructions of the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 3-4.
To get this wrong introduces a serious error in missions, especially when combined with the aforementioned confusion about the gospel and gospel implications. When these two errors come together, they make a powerful (though erroneous) argument about missions by saying that the aim of a missionary can be social action. So, establishing an orphanage or advancing creation care is as valid as church planting. There is nothing wrong with orphanages; I have worked in them myself. But they are not the chief aim of a missionary [14].
One final concern. Missiologists point out that missions is a cycle: a church sends missionaries; they evangelize, baptize, form a church, teach, and obey the Great Commission to send new missionaries to plant new churches. This is undoubtedly God’s plan. The problem is that when missiologists draw a chart of this cycle, it appears as if the parts are equally weighted. They are not. The most important element in the cycle is the church. A local healthy indigenous church centered on the gospel becomes self-replicating and self-sufficient. It does not require endless cycles of missionaries or untold resources to prop it up. And when a missionary leaves (and they always leave), what they leave behind shapes what’s next.
When a church launches ministries, those ministries look like who they are. If they are unhealthy, they will plant unhealthy churches. Unhealthy churches send unhealthy missionaries, who then plant more unhealthy churches. It’s the negative cycle of missions. I say this because I’ve seen it.
The church is not merely one piece of the missionary calling but the ultimate thing we do. The end goal of missions is a healthy indigenous church to the glory of Christ. Our responsibility is to make sure that we plant correctly.
So, regardless of the other things they may do, missionaries aim to plant indigenous, healthy churches.
Therefore, a missionary must know what a healthy church is and how it functions. Which begs the question, what is a church at its core? Here are three definitions that every missionary should memorize.
A Foundational Understanding of What the Church Is:
A local church is a gathering of baptized, born-again Christians who covenant together in love to meet regularly under the authority of the Scriptures and ordinarily enjoy the leadership of the elders. They mutually commit to worship God, be a visible image of the gospel, and, ultimately, give God glory (John 3:1–8; 13:34–35; Acts 2:41; 14:23; Eph. 3:10; Col. 3:16; 2 Tim. 3:16–17; Heb. 10:24–25).
What the Church Does:
A church must do only a few things to be a church: the people regularly gather in gospel love to hear the Word preached, sing, pray, give, and practice the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Members build each other up in faith and faithfulness (1 Cor. 12:12-26) and guard each other's Christian lives, even, if needed, through the practice of church discipline (Matt. 18:15-17).
The Mission of the Church:
The church is God’s strategic plan with one overarching mission: the Great Commission. Its mission is to go to all peoples, make disciples, and teach them to obey everything Christ has commanded, including forming new churches (Matt. 28:18–20). [15]
That’s it. Missionaries need to nail these three principles down, aim for them, teach them, and live them.
In Summary
Missionaries are faithful followers of Jesus who trust that the outcome of missions is secure–going on Christ’s authority and under his protection. Missionaries must be approved and sent by local churches. They go to the nations and work to become cross-cultural experts. Missionaries make disciples through evangelism and by teaching new believers to obey all that Jesus taught, starting with baptism. Missionaries know what a healthy church is and how it functions, and regardless of the other things they may do, all missionaries aim to plant indigenous healthy churches.
Footnotes:
[1] Wycliffe.net reports that the full Bible has been translated into 736 languages, 1,658 of the New Testament, and 1,264 with smaller portions of the Bible – and counting.
[2] Martin Luther, for example, though some scholars dispute this.
[3] Ralph Winter’s Plenary address at Lausanne I,1974
[4] See the GCC article “Unreached People Groups or Unreached Language Groups?” for a more in depth look at this issue.
[5] Part of the issue is that many have conflated Mt. 28:16-20 with Acts 1:7-8. We would argue that they are separate and distinct. The Great Commission found in Mt. 28 is a command to churches to purposely commission missionaries to move out to make disciples, while in Acts 1:7, Jesus is telling the disciples about how the gospel will advance through all Christians from the neighborhood to the ends of the earth.
[6] We acknowledge that the lines blur at some point. For example, say you are a Caucasian teacher in an inner-city Hispanic school across town, and in that setting, you hold out the gospel of Jesus. Perhaps you see some students come to faith! Praise God, you are doing wonderful work as an evangelist. But you are not a missionary for two reasons: teaching is your job, and it is unlikely your aim is to baptize students at the school and plant a church there, and secondly, unless your church has specifically commissioned you as a missionary to teach at the school, you are not a “sent” one. But if those two things are true about you, however unlikely, we understand why you could be called a non-traditional missionary. See the GCC article on that topic.
[7] See GCC article “The Priority of Proclamation”
[8] As Paul desired (I Corinthians 14:23-25)
[9] Mark Dever, Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, 4th edition, Crossway, 2021. c.f. The Church, the Gospel Made Visible, B&H, 2012.
[10] Yes, Philip baptized the Ethiopian eunuch, but I would argue that the 3,000 on the day of Pentecost is the clear example for the church over the one exception–and praise God, he gives the grace for exceptions.
[11] See “Healthy Church” entry in the GCC Glossary
[12] See GCC article “How Should Church Look in This Culture?”
[13] John Piper is correct when he says the reason missions exists is that worship doesn’t.
[14] For a quick look at the concern of the holism/proclamation debate, see this review written by a member of the Great Commission Council. https://www.9marks.org/review/book-review-the-essence-and-implications-of-missio-dei-by-peter-pikkert/ or simply read Peter Pikkert, Missio Dei, ALEV, 2017.
[15] Definition taken from Evangelism: How the Whole Church Speaks of Jesus, by J. Mack Stiles Crossway, 2014
