Mission is God’s Concern

In my last writing I got somewhat organizational wrongheaded. It is an error I hope to

be able to address today. Mission is God’s business and our responsibility to be sensitive
to.
Words like “mission” and “evangelism” have grown to have a fuzzy theological meaning in
Church society and history, the latter having both a positive and negative aspect
depending on the listener and the speakers position.
While both words have a similar meanings,they are different from each other.
Evangelism in its original intent was “good news” . It was what Jesus spoke about in
Jerusalem when He was passed a scroll of the book of Isaiah following His 40 days in the
wilderness.
The word mission has its application in the word missionary and has the sense of the
“sent ones”; following on from the commission in Matthew 28. A missionary is one who
steps out of his culture to take the good news of Jesus to another group of people.
Now there is another element in this overview which is that Jesus called for followers to
pray the Lord of the harvest to sent workers into His fields (Lk 10:2, Matt 9:38). Now
the concept of these verses was that Jesus was sending disciples out as innocents in a
hostile land that was called Israel to spread His message as they were travelling toward
Jerusalem and His spoken about death at the hands of Rome and the Jewish Leaders.
These verses introduce a second group of “sent ones”, one the first hand was the people
He sent to the villages as He traversed to Jerusalem, their role was to provide a people
who would be welcoming and well; as the sent ones had the power of the Holy Spirit. The
second group who were called in the Great commission of Matt 28:16-20 in which the
sent ones of the missionary era would become known and of which Paul of Tarsus would
probably be among the list of first among others.
But there is more to it than this. If I could draw your attention to Matt 9 and Luke 10
Jesus asks people to pray for workers to become available to go to the fields that were
“white for the harvest”. before He sent out His representatives. I rather wonder
whether this praying for workers might just be a future reflection for many years from
where Jesus was at that particular moment.
You see we have a responsibility to support those who are serving as “sent ones” and to
pray for more staff to “tend the fields” to the glory of God. Moreover when Jesus made
His comment there were no missionary statuses. He was if you can indulge me He was
looking at a home missionary scenario.
It was only after His Resurrection that the whole world was available. This then meant a
bigger picture and a bigger prayer column and the home network still had to be met.
There are people in our personal environments who need the love that Jesus gave us.
They need to experience that love from people just like us and the magic part is that we
already know the local area.