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I heard someone say once that you can summarize the Bible in four words: “God wants everybody back.”
True words.
Those four words are 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 carries the mission
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 taking 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, that 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 numerical growth from that point on.
We learn from Acts that when the church faced violent persecution in Jerusalem, believers were scattered throughout the region and took the Good News with them, resulting in increasing numbers of believers in the surrounding region.
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 wise, 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.
Luke tells us that the church in Antioch was obedient, and they sent Barnabas and Saul away. And in that moment, the missionary movement was born.
The high cost of evangelism
The cost was high for that young congregation in Antioch. They lost their 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.
When my father was stationed in Taiwan, I attended Morrison Academy, a missionary school, the only American school in our city. 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 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 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 Chinese people of Taiwan.
So why all the bother?
Why invest all the effort? Primarily, our Lord and Master Jesus told us to do this work, so we must do it. Regardless of other motivations, this is in itself sufficient.
But there’s more. 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? I was there on a short-term mission trip, and 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 home holding down the fort while I was gone for three weeks every year when I was making those trips. And there were dozens of donors who paid for my expenses. All of us sacrificed and shared together in the privilege of introducing people to Jesus, people I would never have met in the normal course of my day to day life.
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.
When Jesus returns, I want him to find me – to find us – busy doing what he told us to do.
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