Tell me if it sounds familiar. College freshman Joe joins his church, is delighted with Jésus. Il wants to give his life to the Lord, which means dedicating it to people who are not affected in the world’s most difficult regions. Joe can barely stay in the middle, class, American Christianity and his complacency and obsession with comfort. Listen to David Platt’s sermons on the way to class, and look forward to leaving school so that we can go to the jungles of Indonesia or Ecuador and bring the gospel to those who have, most of the discipleship you can give Joe is to help him think more gracefully about the Saints in the same congregation as he is?saints who have never left the country but who love Jesus and faithfully serve the Lord in his ordinary and everyday form. peaceful lives.
So what? Joe finds Jane. Se fall in love with each other. As you approach graduation, you realize you need a job (at least to buy a ring). Jane has a great debt to the university, so she realizes they have at the same time, Joe began to understand the importance of having other believers involved in her life, especially through the local church. He became a fixed member of the church, showing himself to serve those He began the ministry of evangelism and brought others with him. He pledges to faithfully love his new wife, to work faithfully in his secular work, and to faithfully serve the Church. Gradually, his dream of going abroad disappears under the responsibilities and joys of his life as it is. Then look at this bright, jealous and critical first-year-old student and denies with his head, remembering how he was too.
- I’ve seen this happen over and over again.
- At some level.
- There is nothing wrong with people deciding that the Lord has not actually called them to cross-cultural missions.
- Moving to a long-term local church.
- Working secular work.
- And living a peaceful life is not only “okay”; it is an honorable vocation that the Lord gives to many.
And yet I can’t help but wonder if we serve these young fanatics if only the most persevering persist in the search for missionary work. For me, this situation is far from abstract, as my wife, daughter and I moved to the Middle East. Year.
This is important for at least two reasons. First, there’s a terrible trend for “those who stay?”And? (at least young people) question the motivations of the other ‘side’. Second, missionary zeal and love for the local church should not be affections in competition in our hearts. If one seems to defeat the other, there is a problem, for the Church is the body to which our Lord has entrusted missionary work.
It’s not just a problem because we all need to understand each other. The uninstioned consequence of this dichotomy is that those who wish to move abroad because of the gospel are often the least convinced of the importance of the local Church. missions and the local church as two completely different and therefore mutually exclusive Forms of Christian life, we not only lose qualified people who would be great missionaries; we build churches that believe missions are something of these people there, not ours.
As a church, how should we consider and answer this question? How should we help people, especially the young, make wise decisions about how to give our lives to the service of the Lord? How can we do this soberly, without demonizing? or elevating the decision to stay or go?
The question obviously goes beyond the limits of a short article, but here are some first proposals:
When people say they fell in love with the local church, they often mean they have increased their love for their particular local church and for the people who live there. Of course, it’s a wonderful thing. I pray that this will be true for more and more Christians. However, we are not necessarily connected to a local church for the rest of our lives. If you can’t imagine your life beyond a private church, it can reflect a love of the comfort you currently feel, rather than a love for Christ’s wife.
The local church is essential to the Lord’s plan; Christ himself promised us that the gates of hell would not prevail against the church (Matthew 16:18); but that does not mean that your church will be essential until Jesus returns. people to love the local church, we must teach them to love the kingdom of God more, so that if the Lord calls them, they are willing to abandon brotherhood in one church to help another, either on the same street or around the world. Membership in a church is important because it affirms our citizenship of the kingdom. Our participation in a local church is important because it is a much more important manifestation of our membership in the next celestial assembly.
One of the reasons many young people are so passionate about missions is that they see it as a great adventure. Make no mistake, it is exciting to be part of the gospel advance. It’s exciting in both theory and real times when we see people coming to the faith, growing in maturity and founding a church.
But there’s also a lot in common on missions. Let me describe to you what was the first month of life abroad: bureaucracy; Apply for a visa Move into an apartment Furnish our apartment while we wait for our visa; administrative bureaucracy; Find our way to a new city Learn new rules of conduct Learn where to buy food plus administrative bureaucracy?Oh, and did I mention bureaucracy? To this we must add other basic challenges to live in a new place: make new friendships, meet new people, adapt to a new work and office dynamics, adapt to fatherhood (in our case); and all romance quickly disappears.
Like life anywhere, life abroad is full of ordinary moments. Waiting for a full day at the post office or getting lost in a new city isn’t exactly the content of missionary biographies. If your main motivation for living a radical life is emotion, you won. It lasts a long time amid the difficulties of real life. Church members need a stronger eschatological vision than yours; they need a constant vision of Christian fidelity from day to day.
Like any other form of Christian life, missions are a sacrifice (Romans 12). Perhaps in reaction to the youthful romanticism of the “radical” demanded by writers like Platt and Francis Chan, some seem to argue that Christians should not aspire to achieve much. without fulfilling their basic responsibilities as family members, church members, or employees, but that can’t be true. Is it good and safe for Christians to want to be used a lot by the Lord?By the name of the Lord, not yours.
In some cases, moving abroad means going where there is currently no church. This is a great sacrifice that can be made by a Christian, and I hope that Christians who feel the greatest cost, and not believers whose dependence on a local church is weakened, will do so. Think about the number of times the Apostle Paul has deeply missed the churches he has left behind. He did not leave them for adventures or pleasure; Left them so that there would be more churches in more places for God’s glory.
That many churches evaluate their current missionaries according to their immediate fruits in relation to what has been said, do their missionaries feel compelled to tell incredible stories about the people who come to Christ every time they visit them?Prayer reports and requests, you can teach your future missionaries how to evaluate the success of their lives abroad.
Living in another culture because of the gospel is sometimes impressive, but it is always expensive; However, we know that the Lord and his gospel are worthy of it.
Churches should rightly appreciate the sacrifice that honors God and the role of serving the kingdom of both the missionary abroad and the mother who remains at home; in doing so, they will cultivate a healthy environment for each member to act where and how they can serve. The Lord.
There is a human tendency to justify the good things we have done at the expense of other good things; as Christians, we can’t do that.
Marriage is a good gift, just like celibacy. Similarly, living in another culture and living in your native culture are good ways to serve the Lord. We need Christians to do both because no Christian can live in all contexts where faithful witnesses are needed. .
Similarly, both good manners can be used to cover sin: someone can choose to stay in their native culture because they love their comfort so much; someone can choose transcultural missions because they avoid commitment and responsibility because of the adventure. so quick to criticize those who have chosen “opposite” life. Instead, we must be careful to first check the beams with our own eyes.
World missionary service and local religious service do not oppose each other; or at least they shouldn’t be.
And yet we often teach by example, if not explicitly, that love for the local church is like staying where you are for a long time. Imagine what would happen if your church started sending those members who love and better serve the church abroad. Imagine what might happen if your members increasingly saw missions as part of their lives as members of the church, whether they stay or leave.
By: Caleb Greggsen. © 9 brands. Website: 9marks. org. Translated with permission. Source: You can’t love missions without loving the local church.
Original: You can’t love missions without loving the local church. © faithful of the department. Website: MinisterioFiel. com. br. All rights reserved. Translation: Camila Rebeca Teixeira. Review: André Alosio Oliveira da Silva.