If you’re not being strategic with the resources God has entrusted to you, you are not being a good steward of them.
A strategic view is a long-term, big-picture view of how to accomplish your purpose. And the church’s purpose in missions, the Great Commission, is summed up in Matthew 28:19 as “make disciples of all nations.”
Since churches are disciple-making factories, and since the missionaries in Acts carried out the Great Commission by planting churches, you’re on safe strategic ground focusing your missions strategy on church-planting ministries.
But we dare not forget the second part of our Commission: “of all nations.” Literally, it says “in every ethnic group” or “in every people group.”
Obviously, no church can be involved in making disciples among every people group in the world. So do you just focus on your own community? If you do that, what hope is there for the men, women and children in people groups who have never heard?
Besides, we have the example of Acts. The church in Acts 2-7 was dynamic, and was having an impact on its community that churches today can only dream about out. Yet God said, in essence, “Hey, folks, if you won’t pay attention to the command I gave you in Chapter 1, I’m going to have to write Chapter 8.”
OK, then what if you try to focus on foreign missions, or on getting involved with missionaries on every continent, or something like that?
Well, there are places overseas where there are many, huge needs. Papua New Guinea comes to mind. Hundreds and hundreds of people groups have no access to the Gospel. Yet some churches will say, “Gee, we already support a missionary in Papua New Guinea, so we don’t want to support a second one.”
There are, conversely, places overseas with little need for missionaries because there are churches where believers are supposed to be making disciples. And finally, there are communities in the USA with cultural and language barriers that may indeed be more in need of missionaries than many places overseas.
Strategic missions is not a matter of sticking pins all over a map; it’s a matter of meeting needs, which brings me to the point.
Where do you think the greatest needs are? Are the greatest needs among people who already have access to the Gospel? Who already have believers living among them who can tell them about Jesus, and a New Testament in their language?
Or are the greatest needs among people who have no access to the Gospel? And even then, isn’t it important to focus on those where there is no other group already working toward planting a church?
That’s one of the reasons I’m sold on New Tribes Mission. NTM focuses on the greatest needs in the Great Commission: planting churches among people groups with no access to the Gospel. And we don’t work where someone else is already planting a church. (Romans 15:20-21)
(Just to clarify, by the way – a church is a place where believers minister out of love under grace, not a place where people are in bondage to law and works.)
So strategic missions starts with focusing on the greatest needs in the Great Commission: Making disciples among those people groups who have not yet had access to the Gospel. But it doesn’t end there.
Read Part 3: The big picture >>
Haven’t read part one yet? Go back and take a look >>
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