Typically when listening to a lot of Christian’s talk about missions in the West, they often refer to missions as outreach or outreach as missions & you may be thinking 🤔 “What’s the difference?”. So when talking to a number of people about missions they often jump to a defensive position, “We do missions, our mission is to reach our local community”. We need to reach our local communities, they are right but that’s not all the local church is accountable to do. A local church should have an active, effective outreach ministry, to change their community & reach out to touch the dying, hurting world around them. If we look at the Bible (it’s a good Book), we can see through the “great” commission Jesus purposed for for the church (all believers) to go into ALL the world (Matthew 28:19, Mark 16:15, Luke 24:47, Acts 1:8). We find though that the Apostles were in Jerusalem for a significant period of time before really going into all the world. Peter had to receive a vision, which he didn’t understand till he was thrust into a situation where he had to preach the gospel to Gentiles & in their home (Acts 10:9-48). Peter had to give a defense, can you imagine that, to the Apostles in Jerusalem as to why he was preaching to Gentiles, (Acts 11:1-18). Even though they had seen Jesus, heard His last words to them on earth, heard the “great” commission, they did not fully understand it. History tells us though, the Apostles did not stay in Jerusalem, they did eventually understand what it meant to go into all the world:
Where did the disciples go?
Thomas -> Parthia east of Syria, India
Matthew -> Persia and Ethiopia
Andrew -> Scythia, Soviet Union, Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey and Greece
John -> Asia, Ephesus
Peter -> Pontus, Galatia, Bithynia, Cappadocia, Asia to the Jews of the dispersion, Rome
James the Great -> Jerusalem (he was the Pastor of the church in Jerusalem and was martyred there)
Philip -> Carthage in North Africa and Asia Minor, Asia and Greece, Turkey
Bartholomew -> India, Armenia, Ethiopia, and Southern Arabia
James the Less -> Judea, Edessa, Gaza, and Eleutheropolis, Egypt
Judas Thaddeus -> Mesopotamia, Arabia, Idumea, Syria, Lebanon
Simon the Zealot -> Persia, Africa and Europe, from Britain to the Black Sea
Matthias -> Macedonia, Georgia and even Ethiopia
What can we say to this? Reaching our local community is a necessary outreach but the local church is also accountable to either going themselves or sending missionaries to where the gospel has yet to be preached. While the West has heard the gospel multiple times over, in a mass array of formats, there are those who have still yet to hear the gospel for the first time.
Will you send a missionary or will you go?
