A little girl at the beach was enjoying a bag of chips. As always there were a few seagulls milling around keeping their distance although interested in a free lunch. Suddenly a gust of wind caught the bag spilling the chips and landed several feet away. The little girl ran to get it, however, when she got back there wasn’t a single chip left. The seagulls had a feeding frenzy. Satan will always take advantage if we are distracted from the task.
One of the most obvious characteristics of early Christianity is the way in which the movement crossed cultural boundaries and planted itself in new places. More than half of the New Testament was written by people engaged in missionary enterprise.
This places the question of the relationship between Christianity and His mission at the very top of the agenda.
In its simplest form, the term “missional” is the noun “missionary” modified to be an adjective. Whether followers are parachute-dropping into a village in India or reaching out in a metropolitan U.S. city they are working to answer Jesus’ personal call to go!
That’s what missionaries do—study and learn the language, become part of the culture, proclaim the Good News, become a presence for Christ, and illustrate biblical life and church for that culture.
It is not the church of God that has a mission in the world, but the God of mission who has a church in the world.
