Giving your life for an eternal cause is worth it every time! After more than 30 years in full-time ministry as missionaries, living in 3 foreign countries, it is time to talk about what it means for us to be missionaries! After all, aren’t we all called to be missionaries? Aren’t we all called to be the hands and feet of Christ? What is a missionary? One on a mission? One with a task to accomplish? Like the Great Commission Jesus gave us in Matthew 28? YES!
God is on a mission to get his children back, and those who join him in that mission are missionaries! There are occupational missionaries and workplace missionaries. There are those who evangelize, make disciples, train leaders, and send people out for a profession, and there are those who do it alongside their career. But none are exempt! If we follow Jesus, we obey His command to love God, love people, and make disciples!
In today’s world, especially in the Western and more “Christian” world, there are many church-planting movements. There are those who raise money, gather people, and start a church, hoping that before the pledged money runs out, the church’s income from tithes and offerings will be sufficient to live off and continue the church. Therefore, raising money is a temporary thing to help a leader get started. This is fine, but this is NOT what we do.
We are full-time professional missionaries and will probably never be paid, on-staff pastors. For some people, that seems strange, but maybe it’s because they are looking through a pastor’s lens. I am clearly an evangelist with an apostolic vision, and that doesn’t jibe with sitting in one spot; babysitting Christians doesn’t interest me in the long term. At this point, it also does not interest me to gather Christians to start churches or Bible studies.
We are pioneers, builders, disciplers, coaches, consultants, and leadership development mentors. Our job is to start things through evangelism, discipleship, and leadership development. We then lay the foundation for the church and empower leaders. As a result, we are ready to do it again, and again, and again! In fact, that is our story for the past 30 years: University of Houston, throughout Texas, Innsbruck and Salzburg, Austria, Nürnberg, Germany, Budapest, Hungary, Marseille, France, and throughout Europe.
A full-time, classic missionary is someone who lives by faith in the goodness of God to move his/her family to another place: a city, a state, or sometimes a foreign culture and language. The work of a missionary isn’t necessarily to get a church launched that will support his family. The work of a missionary should be to make disciples of a city and nation, which includes dissecting the culture: listening to the people and their stories, learning the customs, and contextualizing the gospel in their language. This is so the missionary can start preaching the gospel and declaring the freedom, power, and love we have in Christ. After that comes the follow-up: meeting with people to lay the foundations, creating small groups/communities, which are the precursor to starting a church.
In my opinion, God’s goal is to make disciples, not merely to plant churches (Matthew 28:18-20). Church plants result from making disciples. Therefore, planting churches is important. Jesus said HE would build His church, and WE are commissioned to make disciples. This thinking can change how we do life with the King, if we let it.
My wife’s and my hearts are part of the “old-school” camp of missionaries. This thing is for life. We have sold out. We have burned the ships; we are abandoned to God’s purposes for our lives, be it dying in France, Europe, somewhere, or back in Houston, Texas. We will never give up on lost people. We will never stop loving them, reaching them. We will never stop starting small groups, winning students to Christ, & seeing families transformed by the power of the gospel everywhere we go.
The strategy God has given us is to have a partnership team for moral, prayer, and financial support because we love the idea of being missionaries with others, rather than alone. We need one another, and together we can always accomplish more. Thanks for joining us on the crazy, faith-filled adventure, seeing God’s love and power on display.