What makes a faithful sending church?
This seems like a simple question, but I’ve found that churches will provide different answers. Some churches focus on financial faithfulness: that check comes every month like clockwork, but you’re hard pressed to get any response to prayer requests or newsletters. Other churches faithfully send checks, pray and communicate, but can’t provide much counsel on big decisions or struggles on the field because they are ill-informed or under-equipped. We’ve been blessed to have nine churches faithfully support us for the last five years, with two of those churches being our “official” sending churches. One of those churches is a great sending church, the other needs some work.
Your missionaries need more than money, they need their spiritual family to step up and support them through the whole process, from the first desire to serve cross-culturally to the first new believer, through the joys, pains and even failures. This is the first in a series of blog posts that will focus on five marks of a faithful sending church. My prayer is that we will continue to grow in our knowledge of the gospel, send out more workers for the harvest and faithfully support them the whole way.
Let’s start with the first aspect, which I believe is the most important…
A faithful sending church is GOSPEL-CENTERED
This is where it all starts – preaching and living the gospel. In 1 Corinthians 1:18, Paul tell us that “the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” We see the gospel throughout the whole of scripture and it shows us God’s heart. It shows us a God who longs for His creation to return to Him and it shows us that God is a God who sends.
New Testament scholar, Andreas J. Kostenberger says it this way,
“We have understood the notion of ‘mission’ as intimately bound up with God’s saving plan that moves from creation to new creation, and as framing the entire story of Scripture. It has to do with God’s salvation reaching to the ends of the earth: that is, his gracious movement in his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to rescue a desperately needy world that is in rebellion against him and stands under his righteous judgment. Clearly the notion of ‘sending’ is central to any treatment of mission. The Lord of the Scriptures is a missionary God who reaches out to the lost, and sends his servants, and particularly his beloved Son, to achieve his gracious purposes of salvation.”
It’s easy for churches to get off track. In the last couple of decades, we’ve seen churches abandon the true gospel for a social, happy Jesus love gospel that removes original sin and stresses social justice rather than God’s grace to sinners. We’ve also seen the continued rise of the “prosperity” gospel that emphasizes health & wealth here on earth rather than our real treasure being in heaven.
Finally, some biblical churches have swung to one side of missions or the other. There are churches that have a great vision to send internationally but have little to no impact in their local community. Then there are churches who have largely abandoned cross-cultural ministry for local church planting efforts, which is needed but extremely narrow-sighted.
A church that faithfully teaches the gospel as expressed through the whole canon of scripture will instill in its congregation a desire to see the world reached, locally and globally, down to the last tribe, tongue, and nation.