Episode 256

Training for the Sending Church 7 of 10 - Education 3 of 3

Welcome to Missions on Point, the Propempo perspective on church and missions. Thank you for listening to episode 256 of Missions on Point. This series deals with training for the sending church. I'm concluding a sub-series on education for the sending church. In this episode, I want to talk about resources for education for the sending church.

I just want to remind you that the overriding principle is our biblical understanding that the local church is the primary sender. What we know as the Great Commission for Missions is directed toward believers to establish healthy churches. What we see in the New Testament is the pattern of believers going out, whether through persecution or being sent, to establish local churches. And we see local churches having their fingerprints all over the potential missionary candidates before they send them out, and as they send them out, and after they've sent them out. So we say the local church is the beginning and the end of missions. It is the seed and the fruit of missions. It is the start and the middle and the result of missions.

The problem we have when we come to finding resources for education in training for the sending church is that there are really very few sources that are objectively and wholeheartedly behind the biblical concept of this role for the local church. We praise God that there are some organizations, missions and churches and publishers and those in social media that are catching on that this new wave of understanding about the local church's role in sending missionaries is an important, if not the most important topic of our time. When implemented, it's going to be a lot of communication. When implemented, it's going to have huge positive changes for the missions enterprise globally. This series is concerned about the changes that it will have locally in your local church. Having said that, you need to be very careful to read with discerning eyes about the source and about the background and culture behind reading and finding resources for local church-centric missions. I feel a little bit like the Apostle Paul in Philippians chapter 1. Not that I'm saying I'm like Apostle Paul, but this feeling of “there are some who are preaching the gospel with other motives, but we praise God that the gospel is being preached.” In this case, I'm talking about the “gospel” of local church-centric missions. There are well-known organizations and mission agencies that would say they are local church-centric in their missions philosophy, but if you peel the cover back a little bit, you see that they have an underlying assumption that churches are going to be like them, like very denominationally oriented, for instance. Their local church culture, where they're coming from, or their history, where they have come from, tends to push them in the direction of making assumptions that all churches are like them and need to change in similar ways and probably be connected with the same kind of association or affiliation or fellowship that they are connected with. Propempo and our associated ministries don't do that.

Another connected issue is that pastors and missions leaders of churches tend to not be students of ecclesiology connected with missiology or missiology at all. It has been just too easy historically, really over most of the last century, to count on mission agencies to kind of set the guardrails and the tone and the theology and the methodology of church planting and the results of missions, rather than be engaged and involved. It means that pastors and church leaders must be students of the right things in order to help their missionary all the way through the way we espouse. Yes, it will be stretching. Yes, it means that you're going to have to be a little bit more active or find a reliable source of finding the right information so that you can study the right things in order to be the best that you can be as a sending church. If you're like me, I have a lot of books stacked up on my desk in the yet-to-be-read pile. A few of them are ones that I want to read again because they are so significant to me. But most of them are going to take hours and days of time over the course of time to read and catch up, and by that time I may have another stack of books to be read. I say that as a preface to telling you about a small stack of books I have on my desk right now for this podcast. But toward the end of this podcast, I'm going to give you some Propempo-related resources that you can count on to be even-handed, biblically accurate, local church-centered missions studies.

Hang on, I'm going to rip through 10 suggested books in the order in which they were published. My list of 10 varies from time to time, so hang on, this is the top 10 for today. The first is a book entitled A Task Unfinished by Michael Griffiths. The subtitle is How to Recruit, Support, and Pray for Missionaries and Christian Workers in a Constantly Changing World. Michael Griffiths was a missions leader ahead of his time. Almost anything by Michael Griffiths is worth reading and is local church-centered, at least in the backdrop of what he's writing about. He was the international director of OMF International, which originally was China Inland Mission, the first interdenominational faith-supported mission agency.

Then we have Serving as Senders Today by Neil Pirolo. This is the most practical, though not comprehensive, handbook on how to serve missionaries and support them well on the field. Neil came from a context of churches that didn't believe in supporting missions. So he created a context in this book for having a group of people that especially supported a particular missionary. And it is the same concept that we use when we teach about Barnabas teams, but we relate it more closely to the local church.

Next we have When Helping Hurts, subtitled, How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself, co-authored by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert. This is a classic for missionaries understanding how to cope with and work through the issues of Western affluence in the midst of global poverty. I don't agree with some of their hermeneutics in the early chapters, but the practical part is really excellent. There is also a spinoff book on short-term missions.

Next is a book entitled Here to There, subtitled, How to Get to Your Mission Field. It was actually written by me and for the Cross Conferences. God has enabled us to give away thousands of Here to There books to potential missionary candidates. And it is local church-centric. There is a new edition being formed right now that is enlarged in its content and much more specific without having to have reference to Cross. So look for it coming out this fall. The revised edition is available online as a PDF through sendforward.org.

Next is a book that has been taken out of print. It's called Introduction to Global Missions by Pratt, Sills, and Walters. On the whole, this is the only Introduction to Missions book that is local church-centric in its mindset, from the very beginning to the very end.

Next is What is the Mission of the Church? by Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert, subtitled, Making Sense of Social Justice, Shalom and the Great Commission. It has very helpful biblical content and perspective on some of the issues of missions today.

Next is a book from the Nine Marks series entitled, Missions, subtitled, How the Local Church Goes Global by Andy Johnson. This small book is a great treatise on how a local church can do missions based on Andy Johnson's experience with Capitol Hill Baptist in Washington, D.C.

Next is another Nine Marks book printed by Crossway called No Shortcut to Success, subtitled, A Manifesto for Modern Missions by Matt Rhodes. I really love this book. It is written as a missionary to the rest of the world to understand some of the crazy methodologies and thinking that's going on out there in missions. It should be absolutely required reading for a missions candidate, but also for the missions leader to help build the right kind of discernment about missionary methodologies out there.

The next book was just released last year. It is Missions on Point. You heard that right. The title is the same name of our podcast. The subtitle is The Local Church at the Heart of Ecclesiology and Missiology. Just to give you a heads up, Missions on Point book is not content from the podcast. It is the only book I know of that has a thorough biblical defense of the local church's role in missions. And it rounds out with very practical information and stimulation to help your church grow to be a good sending church. The Missions on Point book also has keys to understanding how that changes the role of every person in the missions enterprise. I'm happy to say that we now have a study guide available on Amazon for the Missions on Point book. So if you wanted to take it and study it as elders, as a missions team, along with a missionary, you can use the study guide to help guide your thoughts and questions in the right direction to be the most productive tool for change in your church.

The last one is a really new book called The Sending Church Applied. It is from the Upstream Collective, which is notably a local church-centric mindset organization that has helped local church missions leaders for years learn how to move their church in the direction of being a good sending church.

The last three resources are basically related to our ministry in website accessible tools. First, Propempo.com has literally hundreds and hundreds of articles for every type of role and inquiry of local church and missions for anyone interested. Go to resources and look for missions paths at Propempo.com.

Related to that, we have a unique tool. I don't know that anyone else has had one like this that I've seen on any website of any kind. If you go to Propempo.com/services, you'll find an opportunity to go to the missions path PDF, which enables you to create your own PDF among the hundreds of articles on Propempo, choose which ones you want, and get it sent to you as a compiled PDF for a very small fee. You can make a custom PDF of your own to share with your missions team with as many missions path articles as you like, and each article, no matter the size, whether it's one page or five pages, is 10 cents with a $3 minimum. The generated PDF from your choices will be delivered to your email inbox within five minutes of placing your order. And you can choose by different kinds of groupings of articles, whether it is the role or the function of missions, or by topic.

The last one is just to go to SendForward.org. The SendForward.org store has a lot of information that has been collected from Propempo and other sources to enable you to have in one place a store that has reliable, local church-centric, sending church-centric information. You can find there tools for helping write your missions policy for specific topics regarding security or summaries of the main sections of the Propempo.com articles.

If you want you and your church to become educated in training for the sending church, it is going to take some effort and some study, and I hope this episode will give you the resources that you need to get on track, to study, to become all that God wants you to be as a sending church.

Thanks for joining us today on Missions on Point. We trust that you'll find more help and resources on our websites at Propempo.com and MissioSERVE.org. We are so thankful for those who support us, enabling us to produce this podcast. Now to God be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus forever and ever. Amen.