How Can We Build a Missions Culture in Our Church?

How can we build a missions culture in our church that goes beyond just financial support?

I think the missions culture being created in the church begins in the pulpit. When you're preaching the word of God you really need to understand that God's mission is the sending of His Son — what we call the mission of the Son — to take humanity to himself so that he might save men and women and children from every tribe and tongue and nation. The mission of the the Holy Spirit is he's poured out so that the gospel about the person and work of Jesus Christ can be proclaimed in all the Earth. Everywhere you preach scripture you need to bring it back to the touchstone of who Christ is and what his mission is and why the Spirit was given so that we are always saying "Isn't it glorious that we've received Christ!" We received Christ because someone came and told us. Now we want to make Him known to those who have not heard about Him.

So we want to begin in the pulpit but beyond that we want to bring it all the way down to the youngest of children in our church. Teach them the stories of the missionaries in the history of the church beginning with someone like the Apostle Paul and moving through the history of the church. Just passing on those stories.

We want to put it into the prayer ministry of the church so that we're praying from the pulpit for unreached language groups, for missionaries who are in the field. I think when you train members to come into your church membership you ought to be training them about Christ's heart for the nations and how we as a church will bring that to bear in our own ministries, our own finances, our own prayer life, our own preaching. I think that you want to carry it into the life of the church by having missionaries come and speak occasionally, having lunches where they're present for people to ask them questions so that being a missionary doesn't seem like a foreign strange thing, but seems like something that is normal to the Christian life.