Steve Auld
The living God is and always has been a missionary God. God’s passion for his glory to be known and enjoyed by all nations is at the heart of this missionary God. This missionary heart is most clearly revealed in the gospel: Seeing his people in darkness, the Son of God left the glory of heaven to walk among us. Jesus Christ came to our place, embraced our nature, spoke our language, and engaged with our culture so that he could make the glory of God known and knowable among the nations.
Likewise, the people of God are, and always have been, a missionary people. Like our missionary God, we are called to share God’s heart for our neighbors and for the nations so that they might see and enjoy his glory.
In our local churches, we often see people develop a heart to share Christ with their neighbors (though that can itself be a challenge). But how do we also help them cultivate a burden for God’s glory to be known among the nations? What follows are eight practices to help build cross-cultural missions into your church’s DNA. The aim is to expand our people’s vision so they can cultivate a heart to reach not only their neighbors with the gospel, but also the nations.
1. Ground missions in worship
John Piper begins his excellent book on missions by saying, “Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t.”1 God is worthy of the worship of every human being on the planet. Millions are not giving him the glory and honor due his name, so missions exists to proclaim to the nations, “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised” (Ps 96:4).
As the Apostle Paul walked around Athens, he experienced deep distress as he witnessed the people giving glory to idols rather than to the one true God (Acts 17:16). This burden for God to be known among the nations drove him to preach in the marketplace and later in the lecture hall of Tyrannus. As we help our people become more God-centered in their thinking about missions, perhaps they will come to share this burden for God to receive the honor he is due from all the peoples of the world.
2. Teach people missiology
Paul’s missionary task included planting churches that would continue the work of local evangelism in their surrounding areas. But local church evangelism is not the same as cross-cultural missions. Missions is what drove Paul away from established churches to keep pressing on to preach the gospel where Christ had not been named (Rom 15:20).
Evangelism is the outreach we do in our own home culture and language. Cross-cultural missions involves moving beyond our own culture and people to engage ethnically or culturally different peoples with the aim of establishing and strengthening local churches that can, in turn, evangelize their own people.
To help your people appreciate the distinct value of missions, teach them the difference between evangelism and missions, as well as missiological concepts like “people groups” and “unreached peoples.” The Lausanne Movement defines a people group as “the largest group within which the gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance.” An unreached people group is described as “a people group with no indigenous community of believing Christians able to evangelize that people group.”2
When people understand these terms, they can better appreciate the church’s work of sending people into their local area for evangelism and sending others across cultures to plant new churches among unreached peoples. A clear understanding of these terms will bring clearer definition to the remaining work of proclaiming the gospel among all the peoples of the world.
3. Make missions your mission
Our church mission states that we exist
- to glorify the God of the gospel,
- to grow in our understanding and enjoyment of the gospel, and
- to go into our city and the world with the gospel.
We intentionally crafted this statement to keep before our church both the call to local evangelism and the responsibility to take the gospel to the whole world.
Whether this same commitment is expressed in your mission statement or embedded within your church’s core values, it is vital to state clearly that part of your church’s vision is to send and support missionaries who will cross cultural boundaries to proclaim Christ among all peoples.
Deepen your understanding of God’s missionary heart.
Ed Stetzer unpacks missions from Genesis to the Great Commission.
4. Build missions into your structures
Create ways to keep world mission at the forefront of your church’s thinking.
In our church, every monthly leaders meeting includes a brief update on our missionaries, highlighting how they are doing and any specific prayer needs they might have. We have a missionary policy incorporated into our constitutional documents, a missionary secretary, and a missionary committee that oversees our missions involvement. We also hold regular missionary prayer meetings, often inviting representatives from mission agencies to share about their work so that we can learn about and pray for different aspects of God’s work around the world. In addition, we set aside an annual Missions Sunday to focus on a particular country or people group and to hear from someone serving among them.
Keeping focus on world mission will not happen on its own. We have to be intentional about building missions into our church’s structures and rhythms.
5. Pray about missions regularly
In nearly all of our Sunday services, we include a segment called “Prayers for the World and the Church.” This is our time of intercessory prayer. Each week, a different church member is invited to lead. We encourage them to pray for a cross-cultural mission concern, a national issue affecting the wider church or society, and a local matter related to the needs of our own church family. In this way, our congregation is regularly reminded that our prayers should extend from our immediate context to the ends of the earth.
Jesus said, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Matt 9:37–38). In an effort to obey this command, we have, for the past five years, adopted an unreached people group as a particular focus for prayer. Working alongside a local mission agency, we produce a short booklet introducing the people group and outlining their background, challenges, and prayer needs. We then invite church members to sign up for a month of focused prayer. This simple but intentional practice has helped foster a growing awareness of the spiritual needs of the nations and a deeper commitment to praying for the spread of the gospel among those who have little or no access to it.
6. Inspire through biographies
Missionary biographies can be a powerful way to stir and sustain a church’s passion for world missions.
Recently, one of our church members led a summer book club based on Elisabeth Elliot’s Shadow of the Almighty, her account of her husband Jim’s life and missionary work among the Auca people of Ecuador. Participants read the first half of the book, met together to discuss it, and are now reading the second half, with another discussion planned in the coming months. Simple initiatives like this can help bring to life the realities, challenges, and joys of missionary service. Leaders should look for opportunities to regularly recommend missionary biographies, whether through brief book reviews or personal recommendations.
From time to time, it may also be beneficial to devote an entire teaching session to the life of a missionary whose example can both instruct and inspire. Such biographies not only educate believers about God’s work in different times and places but also serve to broaden a church’s vision for the advance of the gospel. Recently, I preached a biographical message on Adoniram Judson, drawing on Courtney Anderson’s excellent biography, To the Golden Shore, which recounts Judson’s remarkable commitment to take the gospel to Burma despite immense hardship.
Give your congregation the tools to explore God’s heart for missions. Get Logos for your entire church.
7. Launch short-term missions teams
Short-term mission trips can be an excellent way both to encourage missionaries and give church members firsthand exposure to cross-cultural gospel ministry. Such trips should be planned carefully, with the needs and priorities of the host missionaries firmly in view, but when undertaken thoughtfully, they can be a tremendous blessing to everyone involved. In our own church, many people have returned from these experiences with a deeper understanding of God’s work among the nations and a greater passion for global mission.
8. Be excited about missions yourself
Someone once told me, “Your children will become excited about the things that excite you.” The same principle often applies in the life of the church. Congregations tend to become passionate about the things their leaders are passionate about.
If pastors and church leaders want to see a greater commitment to cross-cultural mission among their people, they must first cultivate that passion in their own hearts. We cannot expect our congregations to value the nations if we ourselves give little thought to God’s global purposes.
Perhaps one way to respond to this essay is to ask the Lord to deepen your own burden for the advance of the gospel among the nations. Pray that he would enlarge your vision of his glory and renew your passion to see Christ proclaimed where he is not yet known.
May a genuine passion for God’s worldwide mission shape the hearts of those we lead, creating a missionary vision that bears fruit for years to come!
Share your thoughts
How can a church foster a culture of missions? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.
Steve Auld’s suggested resources
- Roseveare, Helen. Living Sacrifice: Willing to be Whittled as an Arrow. Christian Focus, 2007.
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- John Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad!: The Supremacy of God in Missions, 2nd ed. (Baker Academic, 2007), 17.
- Lausanne Chicago Statement of 1982.
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