The Scope of Missions

I've decided that I'm going to post the thought papers I write for my class. This will give some idea as to what we're learning.

Our discussion about what it means to be a missionary got me thinking about the scope of the word “missions”. On one hand, we must be careful about pigeonholing the “missionary” as just being someone who leaves everything to live in the jungle and evangelize to a people who have been in complete spiritual darkness. On the other hand, is it valid for all of us to call ourselves “missionaries”? Are we, as the old saying goes, in our mission field as soon as we leave the doors of the church?

I see this as important because we want to make sure that everyone is sharing the gospel as much as possible. If we limit the term “missionary” to those who go to a different culture then we might begin to think that because we are not doing that we can leave the evangelism to those who are. If we take the whole world as our mission field we can be overwhelmed by the task at hand instead of focusing on a people group with whom we can connect and we might not share out of frustration of not being able to reach everyone. However, as we discussed in class, we will be most effective in reaching people most like us since we can make connections more naturally and speak the same language more easily. Therefore, since we find ourselves in those situations most of the time we need to make sure that we take advantage of them. We may indeed be called to missions in another culture, but we also need to evangelize to those in our culture with whom we regularly interact.

This motivates me to think long and hard about how often I effectively share the gospel. As things stand right now I have an office full of unbelievers who could be called my “mission field”. My coworkers know that I am in seminary and I do differentiate myself in a variety of ways. I do chime in when I can offer what I believe to be a biblical perspective on some topic of discussion; however, I rarely find or make opportunities to give a clear presentation of the gospel. I feel convicted about this and see the need to prayerfully pursue more opportunities to share the gospel. To me, this is the “so what” of the fact that “everything is missions and missions is everything” (p. 28 of Missiology).