Ed Stetzer is executive director of the Billy Graham Center, serves as a dean at Wheaton College, and publishes church leadership resources through Mission Group. The Exchange team helped with this article. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily represent those of BCNN1.
Interestingly enough, when I sat down to write this column, I had just received the Lausanne Movement’s latest info graphic—this time on Integral Mission, which lays out the biblical mandate of holistic mission, showing (by deed) and sharing (by word).
This is not new. God’s people have always been called to hold these in tension and it has only been in recent generations that we have created a false dichotomy. (See Acts 2 and onward for the biblical model of the people of God.)
I have written before that I call myself an “integral prioritist,” meaning that I believe in integral mission but I understand that today we tend to lose the “word” part of the equation if we aren’t careful.
We have an entire institute at the Billy Graham Center focused on helping pastors see their churches grow through conversion. Yes, this involves deed. But it can never be done without word, and when we measure our personal evangelism temperature (Are we white hot on fire for sharing Jesus with others? Or are we lukewarm and find we are poor models of evangelism?), where do we each fall on the spectrum?
A vision for mission everywhere, at all times, in all ways is one that understands that there is no moment in our day when we aren’t on mission. There’s isn’t a place we aren’t called to be witnesses. There aren’t a limited number of ways to show and share the love of Jesus.
God is on a mission to redeem people and eventually to redeem all of creation that has been tainted by sin and make it into something new. God’s mission is to see a world renewed and changed for our good and his glory.
But we live in a world which pulls us off that mission. We have a thousand reasons for not faithfully taking part in God’s mission—we are busy, we are tired, we haven’t been trained, we don’t feel equipped. On and on the list goes. But what if we were to begin to see all of life as mission?
Indeed, the creativity of the Body of Christ is limitless when it comes to reaching our world with the love of Christ. I need only look at my little community of Wheaton, IL, to see the incredible variety of callings being implemented:
Source: Christianity Today
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