Evangelism and Missions
Revelation 3:8: “I know your
works: behold, I have set before you an open door, and no man can shut it: for
you have a little strength, and have kept my word, and have not denied my
name.”
In the evaluation report to the
church in
“I have set before you an
open door” goes right back to the fact that He is the one who has the key of
David, who shuts and no one opens, and opens and no one shuts. It is almost an
expression of enthusiasm. The Lord puts this right in there, interrupts the
flow of thought, and sets this there as a statement of encouragement to these
believers who are going through persecution. Correct translation: “I have given
before you an open door, and no one can shut it.” The verb there is the Greek
is DIDOMI [didomi] which is the word
for to give or to grant. It is a word that always speaks of grace. It indicates
a special grace blessing and privilege that God has set before this congregation.
He has given them and open door—opportunity for evangelism.
This brings up the doctrine
of missions, or what the Bible teaches about missions and missionaries. The
world is our mission field. Every single believer in the Lord Jesus Christ
enters into full time Christian service at the instant he believes in Christ. There
are some who enter into professional or vocational Christian service—pastors,
missionaries or evangelists—but every single believer from the instant they are
saved is in full time Christian service. Being an evangelist or a missionary is
not something that is restricted to those who have some special gift in the
sense of evangelism or pastor teacher, or who have a special vocational desire
to serve on the mission field either at home or abroad. Missions
is a vital part of the local church and has been since the beginning of
the church age back in the book of Acts.
General definition of
missions is: All believers are expected to be involved in witnessing. This goes
with the territory of being a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. When we go out
of the church doors and into the world we are missionaries, we have a responsibility
as a believer priest, as an ambassador for Christ, to explain the gospel to
those who are not saved and to challenge those who are saved to greater growth
in their spiritual life. We might call this an informal definition of missions,
but ever since the early church there has been a formal development of missions
(ever since Acts chapter 15) in terms of those who have been specifically set
apart by a local church in this responsibility.
Gordon Olsen’s definition: “
So it is part and parcel of
the mission, the purpose, for which a church exists. We can summarize the
purpose statement of any local church into two words: evangelism and
edification. The purpose of the local church exists to equip the saints to do
the work of the ministry—Ephesians
But even when we think of
Chafer Seminary we tend to think of the key players, the professors, the
teachers, and we don’t think of the secretaries, administrative help, the
office managers, but that is all part and parcel of that particular function. Too
often it is very easy to catch a vision for the out-front seminary trained or
ordained leaders in these areas and to forget about the people who are working
with them such as the support staff and all of the other people who are
necessary for the survival of a particular missionary, just as in a local
church where you have the pastor but there is also administrative staff, etc. So
when we think of missionaries it is not just the people who are involved in the
teaching aspect, there is a lot more to it. The advice given to a young man who
had completed his Masters degree in business administration and who wondered if
perhaps he had the gift of pastor-teacher was: “Don’t put blinders on it and
think that the gift of pastor-teacher only functions in terms of a pulpit
ministry and pasturing a church. That is what you have been exposed to. But you
may have the desire to teach the Word and maybe the best way that God is going
to use you is after get some training then you can work in a seminary as a
business administrator.” Missionaries also need people with those talents and
abilities. A concern is that in recent years there has been a failure, a
withdrawal of the pulpit challenge to people, especially young people, to
seriously consider making full-time vocational Christian work a career.
As a result, what we have
seen in recent years is a number of men who wake up in their later thirties or
in their forties when they have wives and children and careers, and they say
they think they have the gift of pastor-teacher. What do they do now? The
problem is that when they were twenty years old they didn’t have the spiritual
courage to really face this and go forward with it. Now they have made other decisions,
and in some case that ship has just left the dock, they’re too late. Part of
that is the failure of pulpit ministries to challenge young men. In a lot of
churches today we have distanced ourselves from some of the traditional structures
that churches have had for doing this, such as Christian camps.
Missions is a vital function of the church. It is related to the
mission of the church. Jesus Christ gave us a mission and that has to do with
evangelism and with edification. That is, teaching the Word of God so that
people can grow to spiritual maturity. Missions in a specialized sense refers
to the sending forth of authorized persons beyond the border of the local
church, and for immediate gospel influence, to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ
is gospel-destitute areas, to win converts from other faiths or non-faiths to Jesus
Christ, and to establish functioning, multiplying local congregations who will
bear the fruit of Christianity in their community and their country. Missions
can be involved in sending and preparing people who can go into a ghetto
culture, into a Hispanic culture, into a Muslim culture, right here in our own
country, and to have an impact and to communicate the gospel.
Authorized and trained
people: These are spiritually mature people who have been trained formerly
through either Bible college or through seminary. If
the church was doing what it was supposed to do there wouldn’t be any need for
Bible colleges and seminaries. But churches don’t do what they are supposed to
do, other than one or two, and so it is necessary to have these other schools. It
is also important to have academically trained people who have the right
credentials, who have gone through seminary and have a Masters degree in
theology, and even those who have pressed on to a Ph.D. Too often we have
limited ourselves in terms of this vision to challenging men to go to seminary
and get a Th.M so that they can be a pastor. But what
about going on to get a Ph.D so that you can train
pastors and be qualified to teach in a seminary? We need to send trained and
authorized people. We need to have an emphasis on that in the church. In the
Acts accounts we see that they sent the very best. For example, in Acts 1:1-3
we have the first example of a local church setting aside specific people to
send them out as missionaries. “In the church at
Examples of home missions: Schools
and Bible colleges should be a priority in any local church, that when a plan
for supporting missionaries is started there should be a plan to support
seminaries or Bible colleges foremost because that is the future. If we aren’t
training pastors to teach our children and our grandchildren, then we are
ignoring the future. There are also summer camps and youth ministries, campus
ministries which take the gospel on to the campus; all kinds of different home
ministries.
Then there are foreign
missions where somebody is commissioned to take the gospel to cross-cultural
situations. The idea is to first of all teach them, train them, or teach them
to communicate the message that Jesus Christ died on the cross for their sins
and if they believe in Him alone they can have eternal life. But to do that you
have to have somebody who is willing to take the time to learn that foreign
culture, so that they can more sufficiently and efficiently communicate the
gospel. The second task is to train and to teach them the Word of God, the
whole counsel of God from Genesis to Revelation, and ultimately to train
indigenous leaders to take over in those local churches and establish local
churches that are self-supporting. We have to have a vision for evangelism.
This goes back to Genesis and goes all the way through the Scriptures.
A challenge
to parents and Sunday school teachers. We need to create a world vision for our children. We can do this
through reading missionary stories to our children, about various missionaries
down through the centuries, so that our children have a vision of the entire
world as their mission field. We should challenge our young men, our sons, to
look at missions and the pastorate as possible career options, if they have the
gift of pastor-teacher. And even if they don’t have the gift of pastor-teacher
there are many areas in missions and education that demand other skills. We
need to teach about giving and financial support. The reality of life is that
these missions live on money. They have to pay salaries, purchase computers, rent space to have their offices, build class rooms and buy
land. It costs money. This is true both for foreign missions as well as home
missions.
We are a young church. One of
the principles that has been applied over the years is
that young churches need to wait until they are firmly established before they
get too committed in terms of financial commitments to missions. This is simply
because it is better to wait until the church is fully and firmly established
as a local church before starting to send all the money away. In stage one we need to recognize that we are still a mission, but we
should be involved with missionaries. We need to identify missionaries who we
can pray for. We need to encourage the sending of special gifts and care
packages and dealing or helping with some of the special needs of some of these
organizations. As the Lord provides for us and as we grow then we move to stage
two, which is where we would identify a few missionaries that we think are
worthy of financial support and then challenge the congregation to support them
with financial gifts to our church above and beyond the general fund. The third
stage would be to move that missionary support level into the general fund as a
major category.
We have a mission that the Lord Jesus Christ has called us to, to take the gospel to everyone who needs to hear it; to the lost in our neighbourhood, to the lost in our city, the lost in our state, and throughout the world.