Send Me! Your Journal to the Nations
charting the course
The Big Picture: It’s Risky Business Charting Your Journey to the Nations
Steve Hoke and Bill Taylor
Living in a context of constant change can be both exhilarating and disturbing. Thrilling because it is constantly shifting and presenting you new options and experiences. Uneasy because the swirl of life and history at times seems too random. Life is chaotic much of the time!
In the global mission enterprise, we experience all varieties and degrees of emotions and conditions. Just consider some of the realities you and I face as citizens of our world at this unique historical hinge - we are entering a new century and a new millennium, for better or for worse.
Macro Issues
Facing Us
In Our Interlinked World Community
•
Constant political change presents fresh daily challenges to political and Christian
leadership.
• Unending tensions and violence between ethnic groups and religious factions make you wonder where tribalism will take us.
• An historic migratory mobilization of the peoples is taking place due to shifting economics and political violence. Result? The nations are everywhere!
• New and sophisticated terrorism threatens our civilization - no one is safe anywhere!
• Apparently random natural physical disasters unleash uncontrollable chaos.
• Economic crises in one region inevitably ripple around the world, impacting the global family, all linked to the border-less economy.
• Resurgent world religions (some not previously considered missionary) are on the march, with attractive adaptations to “win the West.”
• Populations explode and cluster most clearly in the cities - whether small or mega-world class in size.
• Christians around the globe constantly grapple with endemic injustice, disproportionate wealth distribution, and poverty, and they wonder, “What can I do?”
• The post-modern world is with us - with all of its implications at the level of lifestyle, arts and literature, science and technology, spirituality and religion.
From this hemispheric perspective, we look inwards, evaluating the status of the Christian faith, its various communities and its missionary movement. Each region and/or country has its own particularities, so let us focus only on North America, with possible application to Europe.
Macro Issues
Facing The Christian Community
in the West
•
The anemic, fractured church in the West is now recognizing that something is
lacking and that it needs a new, radical openness to the Spirit of God. May
it gain a heart that listens to and learns from the church in Asia, Latin America,
Africa, the Middle East, and the island nations.
• There is a growing sense that God is at work in history, and not just because of the historical hinge just before us. We may well be entering the last major phase of history. Think of what might happen if the global church were to live in holiness and in the power of the Spirit of God. Radical faith communities would extend into every locale, reaching out to the disenfranchised and investing their highest resources to establish these faith-in-Christ communities wherever they do not yet exist. If the church were truly to live locally its passion as the re-deemed fellowship, this would inevitably spill over into the entire world.
We live in a season of major transitions, as a friend has said, “entering a change-over season from the days of Moses to the days of Joshua.” What might that mean? We don’t know for sure. But we do see a number of crucial changes:
• Creativity, responsibility, and authority are being transferred from the older to the younger Christian generation.
• A new wave of younger leaders has emerged - leaders who passionately desire to live as practicing supernaturalists in a secular world and who are willing to play a high-risk game of radically following Jesus. These are creatively starting new Christian ventures in the name of Jesus.
• The tectonic shift of Christianity from the North to both South and East teaches us that the Spirit is moving - without abandoning the North.
• The nations of the world have come to the West, with great opportunity to tell them the Great Story of Christ. It is also a chance for Western churches to be infected with the family and celebratory values of these younger Christian communities now implanted in the West.
• Ownership of the missions movement has shifted from the parachurch groups to partnerships with local churches - with greater church involvement in selection, screening, testing, equipping, supporting, interceding, strategizing, and shepherding of the mission force. There is also a call for church partnerships with training schools and field based agencies.
• There has been an explosion of short-term missions as significant appetizers of cross-cultural reality and ministry for thousands of young and older adults, some of whom will be forever changed, and others who will return to invest longer seasons of their life in mission.
• Missions language and definitions are being reworked, allowing greater geographical mobility, a broader flexibility of vocational change during a lifetime, more focus on teams, and sequential terms of service with longer periods at “home” for ministry, equipping, restoration, and then returning to cross-cultural work.
• The skill sets and gift mixes needed for ministry in “open” as well as “restricted access” nations present unique challenges, as does the need for high originality to develop new “creative access platforms” for longer-term ministry.
• We must avoid oversimplifications (reductionism) of complex missions realities. The Great Commission is more than just evangelization. The unreached world is vaster than the 10/40 Window. “People group” thinking is only one paradigm of need reality. Short-terms are great, but they aren’t a substitute for the longer-term cross-cultural servant.
• Our next generation of Western missionaries must go out as servants, able to serve alongside and under leadership from other cultures and mother languages.
Making the
Connection
So
there you have it! This is our own limited reading on history and our role in
God’s Story. Thank God that His Story is going somewhere, and so is your
life. But we must take the time to make the connections between events and trends
that some observers might describe as random. Do you resonate with a desire
(even a passion) to impact the nations for Christ, but perhaps feel as if you
are exploring uncharted territories?
This interactive workbook is a tool to help you make sense of the data that flood you. It will coach you in making connections between your experience and interests, world events, and God’s global plan for all people. It will do these things in a way that will help you draw your own course on a complicated map. That’s why we call it Send Me! Your Journey to the Nations.
Ultimately, no one else but you and the sovereign Lord can draw the connections. In a sense, you have the steering wheel in your hands - empowered by the Spirit, counseled by God’s people, and grounded in your values and commitments. But the wisdom of others’ experiences and knowing the story of how the church has gotten to this point may assist you in your own journey. For these reasons, you’ll want to work with others in this project. It’s in community that God today truly wants to reveal Himself. We need one another. Invite your community of friends, family, spouse, spiritual leaders, veteran missionaries, and cross-cultural workers into the planning process.
Come! Let us walk this lifelong, global pilgrimage of strong obedience together. Let us experience both the pain of our world as well as the thrill of what God is doing and is about to do to redeem the nations. This may very well be the generation that will witness the greatest spiritual harvest of history - but it will not come easily. Be prepared to serve and suffer in ways you may not imagine. Thousands have gone before, and thousands will accompany you in this cross-cultural pilgrimage. They come from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and the South Pacific. They journey to the nations who are without a witness to Christ’s power and glory. The next generation of redemptive history belongs to these holy ambassadors of the Most High God!
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Charting the Course
Excerpt from Send Me! Your Journey to the Nations Copyright 1999, World Evangelical Alliance, all rights reserved, reprinted by permission. The entire Send Me! workbook may be purchased online at www.wearesources.org.
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