Reclaiming Gospel-Centered Missions
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STATEMENT
Missionary practice today evidences gospel confusion by locating the goal of missions in the power and will of man. From cultural transformation to decisionism, a wrong understanding of salvation will lead to work that falls short of robustly biblical gospel-centered missions. Therefore, truly faithful gospel-centered mission chiefly aims to glorify God by upholding God’s salvation in Christ.
Gospel-centered missions prioritize the verbal proclamation of the Triune God’s redemptive work through Christ’s work on the cross. It is concerned with temporal needs but prioritizes eternal needs.
Gospel-centered missions is inseparably connected to the biblical doctrine of conversion. Biblical conversion is wholly the supernatural work of the Spirit to regenerate the sinner, granting repentance and faith and thereby raising the sinner from spiritual death to life. It evidences itself in the fruits of repentance and faith, affirmed by the risen Jesus’ disciples gathered in the church.
The Priority of Gospel-Centered Missions
“If everything is missions, nothing is.” So said the Scottish missionary Stephen Neill. Wonderfully, ours is a day in which gospel-centered ministry and missions have returned to the forefront of conversations about how believers reach and serve a world full of souls.
But what is gospel-centered missions? And how do we know it when we see it?
Immediately before the risen Christ ascended to heaven, He gave His disciples—who would become apostles—the Great Commission. This was and remains the missions mandate. If we are to understand what gospel-centered missions is, the Great Commission is the place to start. We learn from the apostles’ teaching, and we also learn from their example. After all, the apostles were among the first to receive the fully revealed gospel and the first to practice Gospel-centered missions. While today’s believers aren’t the first to proclaim the gospel, and we didn’t lay the foundation of the church like the apostles (Acts 2:14-41; Ephesians 2:20), we can and must learn from what they prioritized in their mission to make disciples of the risen King Jesus.
The apostles prioritized the eternal over the temporal, which demonstrated itself in their priority to the proclamation of the gospel. From Peter at Pentecost (Acts 2:14-36) to Paul at the Areopagus in Athens (Acts 17:22-31), the apostles prioritized the proclamation of the good news of what God had accomplished through Jesus of Nazareth’s death on the cross.
The apostles understood that the cross, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus were the decisive act of God in history. So, their obedience to the risen Jesus required them to proclaim the fact of the cross and parse out the fullness of what was accomplished there in terms of reconciling sinners to God once and forever. So committed to the priority of proclamation were the apostles that as the apostle Paul faced his impending death in a Roman prison—of all that he could hang the future of the church on—he famously urged Timothy to “preach the word” in season and out of season (2 Timothy 4:2). Gospel-centered missions prioritizes the eternal over the temporary, which means explaining what God the Son incarnate achieved on the cross both in light of human history and eternity’s future. If we are going to obey the Great Commission faithfully in this age, we must follow the apostolic example, which has proclaiming the gospel at the very center of the mission. Eternity is closer and longer than we imagine.
But what about the many temporal needs we see on the news, social media, and our street corners? The sick? The hungry? The uneducated? The abused? Didn’t the apostles care about them? In God’s providence, one of the most challenging cases imaginable arose in Acts 6 as the church was in her most infant state.
Conflict broke out between the Hellenists and the Hebrews because the Hellenist widows were neglected when their fellow Christians were divvying out food (Acts 6:1). In those days, government programs didn’t exist to address poverty. If your own community didn’t care for you, you went hungry. You would be hard-pressed to find a more urgent temporal situation than widows who didn’t have enough food.
What did the apostles do here? They reasoned, “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables.” So, they set aside men (deacons) who would attend to those physical needs (Acts 6:3) to free the apostles to do what improves, saves, and seals lives for eternity: preach and pray.
Are temporal needs important to God? Yes. That’s why they’re also important to His church: If the church neglects these needs, we lose credibility in our efforts to preach the gospel. But this instructs the church to this end. We should prioritize temporal needs in light of the greatest priority: declaring the gospel.
The apostles were careful not to drift in their mission by allowing the seemingly urgent priority in this life to squeeze out the eternal priorities of this life and the life to come. Gospel-centered missions compels us to ensure that when we meet our neighbors’ daily needs, we always point them to Christ as the only hope for their eternal need. As John Piper has rightly said, “We care about all suffering, especially eternal suffering.” Therefore, there is no gospel-centered mission without a clear gospel proclamation.
The Threat to Gospel-Centered Missions
If the apostles had to think and act carefully to guard against straying from the church’s mission, how much more must we be diligent not to drift off course? The 19th-century Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde wisely remarked, “It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done.” Mission drift happens when an organization moves away from the goals stated in its mission statement.
Consider this hypothetical tale about two young people. We’ll call them Jack and Jill. Jack and Jill love Jesus and want to give their lives to make His name known. They sign up for missionary training school, graduate, and—WHAMO!—soon find themselves doing missions on the international field. They do the hard work. They learn a new language and culture. Over time, though, Jack and Jill realize that the locals aren’t remotely interested in the gospel. The missionaries grow discouraged.
Since Jack and Jill are serving in poorer communities, the locals are more receptive to them once they set up a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) that helps community members learn skills that equip them for the job market. Finally, Jack and Jill find their presence welcomed and their work fulfilling. They are making a difference among the needy, and they come to love their adopted community. The couple occasionally have conversations about the gospel, but keeping the NGO up and running makes it hard to give themselves first and foremost to evangelism and discipleship—like they once were able to.
If Jack and Jill stay put and work at building their NGO in the community, they’re looking at a lifetime of wonderful work. But at what point does their work stop being gospel-centered missions and become good secular work that happens to be carried out by committed Christians? If we aren’t clear about what gospel-centered missions is, then everything Christians happen to do among unreached populations will be considered gospel-centered missions.
Even among believers with the best intentions, the church risks declaring so many endeavors to be “missions” that, ultimately, little of what they do truly constitutes reaching the unreached with the good news of Christ.
The Great Commission mandate necessitates the priority of proclaiming, explaining, reasoning, persuading, and teaching. While Christians can cross oceans to do all kinds of good work, the church should not pretend that every public service fulfills our Great Commission mandate. The apostles guarded against that confusion, and so must we.
The Goal of Gospel-Centered Missions
Gospel-centered missions has as its chief aim glorifying God by the proclamation of the cross and the resurrection. With God’s glory as the aim, faithful missionaries work to proclaim the gospel to convert sinners to faith in Christ. In Romans 1:21-23, the apostle Paul clarifies that people have defamed God and withheld worship from Him. Mankind has, without exception, traded the eternal glory of the creator for idolizing mere creatures (Romans 1:23).
Across cultures and nations, men know God but refuse to give Him the glory He deserves as our Maker and Savior (Romans 1:21). The result? It’s the same today as when Paul penned his letter to the Roman church: “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23). So, it’s not just that “missions exist because worship doesn’t.” Mankind can’t help but worship. Instead, missions exist because God-glorifying worship doesn’t. The worship of idols abounds.
Accordingly, gospel-centered missions focuses on bringing sinners to faith in Christ. This is a conversion from worshiping what is unworthy of glory to worshiping the triune God Who reigns eternally and saves wicked people decisively. This is Biblical conversion. This is conversion brought about by the one true gospel of reconciliation to God by grace through faith in His Son.
When the Holy Spirit converts sinners from adoring idols to the living God, He gets the glory. Not only does God receive glory when evildoers repent and trust in His righteousness, but He also receives glory as He transforms their lives. Every convert to Christianity begins spending his life enjoying and glorifying the true God and gets to spend eternity in the same way.
The Scriptures make clear that the sinner’s fundamental problem is that he has refused to worship his Creator in order to worship the creation. So, when the sinner is converted, instead of abandoning the glory of God for the worship of idols, his worship replaces his obsession with idols with fidelity to the true God.
So, what is biblical conversion? It is God's miraculous, supernatural work in raising the sinner from spiritual death to spiritual life. It is God’s effective work to graciously move the wicked from being an object of His righteous wrath to an object of His undeserved grace and mercy (Ephesians 2:1-6). Biblical conversion is the work of God, not man. And it comes at God’s initiative, not man’s. The conversion that accomplishes salvation is located in God’s will eternally before man’s will (Ephesians 1:4). God’s gracious work then aligns man’s will with God’s—for the good of the sinner and to the glory of God.
Before the gospel leads us to look at man, it focuses our gaze on God’s righteousness. Though more urgent than the physical needs we perceive is the glory God’s character and work deserve. When the gospel orders the church’s priorities, we can’t help but look at the world’s greatest need differently than unbelievers do. The difference is radical. We might even say it’s supernatural.
Under the authority of Scripture, the Church is the only institution on the planet that evaluates the world through the lenses of God’s holiness and of eternity. If the church allows the world to lower its gaze from what’s eternal to what’s temporary, the church will slowly drift from its gospel mandate. Only when we maintain God’s glory through the conversion of sinners as our aim can we carry out gospel-centered missions.
The Community Produced by Gospel-Centered Missions
The fact that people whom God’s mercy has transformed into godly obedience would listen more closely to what God says sinners need than to what those sinners say they need is radical. It’s right. And it’s compassionate on every front.
When an individual sinner moves from being alienated from God to being reconciled with Him, that sinner’s horizontal relationships with other people also begin to align. That’s because his vertical relationship with God has been restored and that reconciliation has massive implications for how the convert relates to God’s people. The sinner isn’t just reconciled to God by way of the cross but also to God’s people by the same work of Christ (Ephesians 2:11-22). The cross kills the hostility between unsaved peoples.
Regeneration is on display, and conversion is tested, proven, and demonstrated in and through the church because it is the only institution in which God’s manifold wisdom is made known (Ephesians 3:10). Gospel-centered missions is concerned both for God’s glory through the proclamation of the gospel and for the conversion of sinners who then display God’s wisdom and glory within the church. In other words, the Holy Spirit saves unbelievers and empowers believers to care for one another practically today, tomorrow, and into eternity.
So what does this mean for you?
Like every organization and nation, each church and individual has limited resources. When it comes to supporting missionaries, if you aren’t careful, the best intentions can lead saints to support “missions” work that isn’t gospel-centered. Churches and individuals obey the Great Commission by stewarding their missions funds faithfully. That means supporting missionaries who are doing faithful, sound missions.
To that end, a few questions can help you consider potential missionary partnerships faithfully.
There is no gospel-centered missions if a missionary cannot rightly answer, “What is the gospel?” Ask yourselves, does the missionary understand the gospel biblically? Does the missionary understand who God is as eternally good and holy? Do they know that man is a helpless, hell-bound sinner who has rebelled against God? Do they confess that Jesus is God the Son incarnate who accomplished salvation through His life, death, and resurrection? Does the missionary grasp what biblical repentance and faith are, and can he or she carefully explain and expound on them?
While these may seem like basic requirements and definitions, missions drift away from gospel-centered missions because missionaries are sometimes unclear on the gospel in their own hearts and minds. And that lack of clarity can squander your church’s resources and be destructive on the field.
Concepts that may seem basic are often fundamental. Do the missionaries asking for your partnership know the gospel? And, just as importantly for gospel-centered missions, do they make the gospel known?
Second, ask your missionary partners, “What is a Christian?” Do they define conversion biblically by rooting it in God’s work and power? Or do they understand conversion as a choice centered primarily on man's will and agency?
When God called Eve back to His side and put enmity between her and the serpent (whose side she had taken) (Gen. 3:15), He initiated reconciliation and salvation. When God called the idolator Abram out of Ur to be His own (Gen. 12:1 - 3), He started and completed Abraham’s conversion. So, it is with every sinner who the Holy Spirit regenerates and sanctifies. God has chosen to use the gospel proclamation to convert the lost but sinners ultimately and always come to faith in Christ by God’s gracious work. Do your missionary partners understand that the power and work of conversion belong to God? Do you? The implications this has for gospel-centered missions are profound.
Third and finally, ask whether your church or your missionaries have—even with good intentions—slowly succumbed to mission drift. Evaluate your work and partnerships through the lens of how that work prioritizes the eternal over the temporal. Of whether the missionaries in view proclaim the gospel both regularly and faithfully. Of whether the overarching goal remains the conversion of sinners who are then faithfully reconciled to other converted sinners in the church—for God’s glory.
Isn’t this what we see in Paul’s missionary strategy? Being unashamed of the gospel includes having complete confidence that it saves sinners and heals the broken. Gospel proclamation leads sinners to be reconciled with God through Christ and then reconciled to each other within the church. Paul’s ministry demonstrated this pattern over and over again in every place he went. The Great Commission brings reconciliation across the board. How aligned is your or your church’s mission strategy with this design?
As with any responsibility, Christians must ensure we keep the main thing the main thing in missions. Mission drift threatens the modern church just as heresy infected parts of the early church. While you and I may not be able to repair every problem or correct what we disagree with or what concerns us in the missions landscape, we can be faithful stewards of what the Lord has entrusted to us here and now. We can do faithful gospel-centered missions and partner with faithful gospel-centered missionaries. We can and should pray for God to get the glory that is His due as sinners are converted and as we live lives of true worship by making much of His triune name.
