Missions

The Lord’s Leading

We have been directed toward Pioneers over and over again. Our first experience was when a Pioneers missionary named Ted spoke at a small-group meeting.

He directed Tahran to a team in Budapest in 2006 for a one-year assignment where she saw how her passion for God, missions, and music could all work together.

In February 2007 Ted and his wife were in Minneapolis for Grace Church’s missions week, and after talking more with Ted, we decided to visit their headquarters in April 2007.

We discovered a need for us in Orlando in the areas of worship leading, development/fundraising, and computers. Since we’re sold on Pioneers’ mission, we were thrilled to have the opportunity to work at the US base while we prepared for overseas work.

Mission and Core Values

Pioneers’ core values have influenced our decision tremendously.  A couple that stick out to us:

Passion for God

Everything starts here. It’s the foundation for what we do. John Piper makes this point in his book Let the Nations Be Glad! He says passion for God, or worship, is the fuel and goal of missions.

Our passion for God is what motivates us to missions… but this is different than what we used to think. Wanting everyone to go to heaven, the concept of “the lost” was probably the greater motivation for us. But eternity is not ultimately about the lost. It’s not ultimately about people. It’s about God. And God’s ultimate goal is not missions, but worship. So our passion for the worship of God is ultimate, not our passion for missions/the lost.

And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.

Galatians 6:9

William Carey worked for 7 years before he saw his first convert. Adoniram Judson waited 6 years. We believe a passion for our Lord, above all else, will produce perseverance for a harvest – even if we only see it and greet it from afar (Hebrews 11:13).

Unreached People

Those with the least opportunity to hear and understand the gospel.

It’s definitely not just language. There are other barriers to effectively communicating the gospel: caste/socio-economic status, nationality, religion, ethnicity, residence, occupation, etc. In short, the Lausanne Strategy Working Group in 1982 defined it as “the largest group within which the Gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance.”

When you look at it that way, you find that Sudan has 131 unreached people groups.

God seeks worshipers from every people group. In the song of the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders, look at the reasons Christ is worthy to take and open the scroll:

Worthy are you to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation,
and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,
and they shall reign on the earth.
Revelation 5

You could possibly draw out four or five reasons from that passage, and one of them is the fact that Christ was slain for people from every tribe and language and people and nation. Throughout the Bible you see God’s commitment to reach all the nations. We commend Let the Nations Be Glad! to you, with 45 pages dealing with this topic. This could whet your appetite: Unreached Peoples

In Romans 15, Paul writes about the Lord’s and his commitment to reach the unreached. The Greek word for ‘Gentiles’ in this chapter is consistently some form of ethne, which of course is related to our word ‘ethnic.’ Piper argues extensively that this word does not refer to individuals, but to people groups.

This sheds light on Romans 15:19-23 where Paul repeatedly says he has completed his missionary task, from Jerusalem to modern-day Croatia. Is he suggesting everyone in that huge region has a saving knowledge of Christ? No. He’s explaining that his missionary task was to preach Christ where he had not been named (and then presumably to move on once there were believers who could continue the work).

So you have Paul-type missionaries and Timothy-type missionaries. It was Timothy’s job to remain in Ephesus and see the church grow. These two types of missionaries are not at odds because it’s the goal of “frontier” or “pioneer” missions to establish churches that can then reach the rest of their respective people groups.

Practically speaking, we could certainly stay in Sioux Falls or Minneapolis and reach the lost. It’s crucial. It is the necessary next step after establishing a church. And if you’re not going to an unreached area, then it’s your job! 🙂 We look around our churches in the US and see no shortage of Christians to do the work there.