The Preach Purpose

It has been said that missions is the process of turning silver into souls. Only through the prayers and financial support of God's people and submission to the leadership of His Holy Spirit can this great task of closure ever be accomplished.

EVERY 13 MINUTES, OVER 2,300 SOULS PASS INTO ETERNITY...

With such large geographic distances, political instability, and cultural diversity, how can these people be reached with the message of salvation? How can such a vast language group, scattered across the immense expanses of our globe, be won to Christ and bring closure to the Great Commission?

Bringing a close to the Great Commission is a foreign concept to the church today. Filling our pews with an anticipative audience and our pulpits with mission agency representatives, the average annual missions conference has become a showcase event lasting a mere 3 or 5 days. Within one week, no evidence of the conference remains to prove the focus of the church is on fulfilling the greatest assignment Christ ever gave.

As missions in America becomes more commercialized, the effectiveness of the missionary on the field is diminishing. Instead of training faithful men to evangelize their own people, it has become the normal practice to create a welfare system in the new churches that are born to rely upon an agency or convention. The model of planting indigenous New Testament churches has been overridden by the drive to publish newsletters containing numeric figures of souls saved and church membership.

The result of abandoning the concept of establishing self-sustaining, reproductive churches is simply the addition of new believers to a congregation instead of the multiplication in evangelism required to bring closure to the Great Commission. The results of contemporary methods of ministry clearly indicate the failure of today's mission endeavors, as over 60% of the world still has never heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

As the leadership of the Holy Spirit's guiding in the area of missions is being replaced by the institutions of men, a disproportion has occurred in that 90% of the missionaries today are in only one-third of the world's countries, leaving just 10% to cover the remaining two-thirds of the globe. The most modem countries are the most evangelized, with our missionaries rather choosing the comforts and conveniences of a modernized society over the responsibility to reach where Christ has not been named. The strain and effort of learning a foreign language and adapting to a substandard culture has prompted us to embrace and pursue a substandard calling.