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WORLDVIEW: A truly global missions movement is emerging


RICHMOND, Va. (BP)–The 67 new missionaries appointed Oct. 31 by the International Mission Board will join more than 5,100 Southern Baptist missionary colleagues already working to take the Gospel to every people group on earth.

Many more will follow as Southern Baptist churches send their best and brightest -– and support them through giving to the Cooperative Program and Lottie Moon Christmas Offering.

But American missionaries can’t handle the challenge of world evangelization alone. Not 5,000. Not 50,000. The task is just too big.

The world’s population has topped 6.5 billion. At most, about one in 10 people claim evangelical Christian faith. Of more than 11,000 distinct people groups worldwide, more than 6,000 –- containing more than 1.65 billion people –- remain unreached (with “unreached” defined as less than 2 percent of the population being counted as evangelical believers).

“You can never have enough missionaries,” says Dickie Nelson, the International Mission Board’s regional leader for South America. “We have a significant part to play, but the real hope comes from partners around the world who catch a vision of being a part of the Great Commission, and there’s a lot of them out there.”

Completing the task, Nelson says, will take local, indigenous churches multiplying new churches in every culture. That’s where working with our overseas partners comes in.

“Every believer a full participant in the Great Commission” is one of the key goals of Nelson and his regional missionary leadership team. South American church members, they stress, should be trained as full participants not only in reaching their own cultures, but other peoples and cultures –- in South America and beyond.

It’s no more -– and no less –- than what Jesus commanded His followers in Matthew 28:19: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations … and teach them to obey everything I have commanded you.” In God’s divine economy, the discipled must become disciplers; one-time mission fields must become missionary senders.

That’s why Southern Baptist missionaries worked last year with 1,772 international missionaries sent out by overseas Baptist partners to other people groups, as well as 3,400 home missionaries reaching out cross-culturally to people groups within their own countries.

Consider the ministry of “Marie,”* a South American medical mission worker serving in tough areas of North Africa and the Middle East.

“Local government officials actually ask her to go into some mountain areas there to do medical work,” Nelson told IMB trustees during their Oct. 31-Nov. 2 meeting in St. Louis, Mo. “A wonderful door has been opened in a place where there is no church and no witness to share the Good News of Jesus. The folks who know Marie say that if you show her a mountain, her next question is, ‘How do I climb it?’”

IMB President Jerry Rankin told trustees about his recent travel to South Korea, where he met evangelical mission leaders and spoke to several thousand seminary students. During a student-led missions emphasis week at the Korea Baptist Theological Seminary in Taejon, up to 300 students made commitments to international missions service.

“It was absolutely one of the most powerful experiences I have ever had,” Rankin reflected. “When they come down the aisle and make a commitment, they’re fully expecting you to put a passport and airline ticket in their hand, and they’re out of there. They’re putting it all on the shelf to follow the Lord to the mission field.”

The Korean Baptist Foreign Mission Board already has more than 500 missionaries to 44 countries. Rankin met during his trip with leaders of multiple Korean mission agencies that report sending out more than 13,000 missionaries. He found an eagerness among them to learn about church-planting movements and how to finish the task of reaching the unreached.

“I came home with the impression that if Southern Baptists don’t step up to the task … (God) is moving to fulfill His mission” with or without U.S. Christians, Rankin said.

The ideal, however, is to work together. We have experience and know-how. Overseas partners have passion and energy –- like the Arab believers who took a three-month journey on camels earlier this year to bring the Gospel to non-Arab nomads in isolated desert oasis camps. Despite violent resistance in some locations, they won some new believers to Christ, and they intend to do it again next year.

“It was the Holy Spirit,” says “Luke,”* the Southern Baptist worker who won the Arab believers to Christ and trained them in how to tell others stories from God’s Word. “From the beginning, we told them, ‘As soon as you know the stories, you need to be sharing them.’ That was on their heart, and the Book of Acts had just come out in their dialect of Arabic. They began going through it and wanted to be like (the apostle) Paul. They saw that Paul went out to other places.”

God will have many surprises for us as the global missions movement grows. The Roma (Gypsy) believers in Eastern Europe are members of a people long despised by those around them –- rejected even by many European Christians as “too sinful” to be saved. But Jesus is the loving friend of sinners, says Rodney Hammer, IMB regional leader for Central and Eastern Europe. He sees Roma people coming to faith in Romania, the Czech Republic and Poland.

“Not only is it just like Jesus to specialize in the despised and the rejected, but Roma have now discovered through the power of the Holy Spirit that they can reach others as well,” Hammer says. “Our missionaries have had the audacity to develop a missionary training program for the Roma.”

It’s a big world out there. Despite the increasing sophistication of mission research methods, we don’t even know where all the people are -– much less how to reach them. But God does, and He wants to use all His children in His great mission.

“We aren’t just sending missionaries. We are impacting people groups who are rising up and sending their own missionaries,” says IMB trustee Chuck McAlister, chairman of the board’s overseas committee. “Jesus did not come to launch an institution or an organization. He came to start a movement, a revolution. All around the world people groups are getting the feel of that revolution. It cannot be stopped, and it will not be silenced.”
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* Names changed for security reasons.

    About the Author

  • Erich Bridges