Encouraging Missions as a missionary
Do we do well when we withhold this vision and challenge from the churches overseas?
A mentor to me in my early days in Peru, Don Bond, often repeated a sentence in this excerpt. He challenged all of us to resurrect our missionary sermons and preach them to our young churches in Peru. I think it was great advice for me then and I think it is still great advice for all. Please read the following. I believe you will be blessed.
Finally, missionaries should lead churches in a vision for missions beyond their country. Missionaries have gone to foreign fields because of the missionary vision others passed on to them. Certainly they have not waited until all the cities were evangelized in their homeland before they went out. Why then should they wait until the whole country is reached by the gospel before they present to them the challenge of carrying the gospel to the ends of the earth?
Admittedly, there are problems, one of the chief of which is lack of finances. Yet we know that churches in the U.S.A., which also have great needs themselves, take up regular missionary offerings to send the gospel abroad. Do we do well when we withhold this vision and challenge from the churches overseas?
Happily, in some areas of the world, the national church has already begun to send out missionaries—sometimes to neighboring tribes, sometimes to neighboring countries, and occasionally across the sea. Some national churches have already formed missions departments. This is to be encouraged. The missionary would do well to resurrect some of the missionary sermons he preached to the churches at home and preach them again to the younger churches overseas.
Let us pass to the national churches the torch of world evangelism we ourselves have received and the vision that impelled us to go to the regions beyond, so that every church and every individual may truly feel a part of the worldwide outreach of the universal Church.
Melvin L. Hodges, The Indigenous Church: Including the Indigenous Church and the Missionary, Revised Edition (Springfield, MO: Gospel Publishing House, 2009), 190–191.
