You’ve probably heard people talk about being “strategic” in missions, and you’ve heard us refer to our ministry as strategic.
But what does strategic mean, and what’s it mean in missions? And why should you care?
A strategic view is a long-term, big-picture view of achieving your purpose, and you should care because if you’re not truly being strategic, you are probably not using the resources God has entrusted to you in the right way.
If we’re going to take a long-term, big-picture look at our purpose in missions, we need to go back to the purpose that God gave us: the Great Commission. Matthew 28:19 sums it up nicely: “Make disciples of all nations.”
Let’s start with the first part of that: “make disciples.”
Making disciples takes time and effort. It’s a long-term investment. Look around you. The followers of Christ you know are the result of people pouring their lives into others for years.
You can’t make disciples overnight in your own culture, can you? So it’s clear that making disciples cross-culturally is also a long-term process.
Evangelism is a key part of making disciples. But you and I know people who say they have “been born again,” who have “come forward,” who say they’ve “made a decision for Christ.” But maybe there was little or no follow-up, and worse, perhaps there was very little in advance of that, so they didn’t really understand what they were doing. What most of us think of as evangelism alone does not accomplish the Great Commission.
Disciples certainly need Bibles they can read, but again, look around you. Virtually every American has access to a Bible in their own language, but that alone doesn’t do a lot of them any good. Focusing on translation is non-strategic.
A church is, in essence, a disciple factory. That’s why Paul and his co-workers carried out the Great Commission by planting churches. Paul and his co-laborers worked in their own culture, and it still took them years to establish churches.
And establishing churches is in itself strategic, because those churches then join in the work of making disciples of all nations.
If you want to be strategic – if you want to take a long-term, big-picture view – your missions strategy should focus on ministries that plant churches. That’s true whether we’re talking about a personal missions strategy, or a church missions strategy.
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