Joy-Driven Missions

Our journey into church planting began when I got to serve as a pastor at Lakewood in Gainesville, GA. Here, I had the joy of working closely with the church’s church planting ministry and getting to see how the Lord seems to delight to use plants to make disciples. It was also during these years that my friend Tyler first introduced me to the writings of Lesslie Newbigin, who has proven to be an invaluable conversation partner for me as I try to better understand how we’re called to join in God’s mission and particularly how our new church can be part of that.

If you have spent much time at all around church, missions often ends up being promoted with guilt and shame. Missions is presented as a urgent crisis in the world that you must act now to solve. Long-time missionary and missiologist Newbigin elaborates on this problem:

There has been a long tradition which sees the mission of the Church primarily as obedience to a command. It has been customary to speak of “the missionary mandate.” This way of putting the matter is certainly not without justification, and yet it seems to me that it misses the point. It tends to make mission a burden rather than a joy, to make it part of the law rather than part of the gospel.

On the other hand, Newbigin counters, the pages of the New Testament present mission in an entirely different light. He continues,

If one looks at the New Testament evidence one gets another impression. Mission begins with a kind of explosion of joy. The news that the rejected and crucified Jesus is alive is something that cannot possibly be suppressed. It must be told. Who could be silent about such a fact? The mission of the Church in the pages of the New Testament is more like the fallout from a vast explosion, a radioactive fallout which is not lethal but life-giving.

For Newbigin, it is the joy of knowing God in Christ that explodes into mission. Such a joy cannot be contained.