By Bevin Ginder
Bevin Ginder is the co-founder of GlobalCAST Resources and loves to connect, equip, and coach missions leaders, mobilizers, and advocates.
If you see yourself as a mission mobilizer, you may sometimes feel as if people just don’t care about missions. I like to think of mobilization as trying to inspire people: to help them feel they want to do something and can do it. Of inviting them into the process of finding God’s heart and engaging with it.
Perhaps that’s what’s happening in Habakkuk 1:5.
“Look at the nations and watch—and be utterly amazed.
For I am going to do something in your days
that you would not believe, even if you were told.”
I love that! Watch. Be inspired. God is preparing an amazing harvest. And that includes our days as well. There is so much we can learn right now to be poised and ready for the incredible fruitfulness that’s coming and is even happening right now!
Mobilizers are those who channel key resources, training, or vision for world evangelization to the Body of Christ. Many people are called to give, go, pray, and welcome the nations that are coming to their cities. But the mobilizer is the leader who’s saying, “Hey, everybody has a part to play. What is your part? I will help you get there, get you training and resources.”
Mobilizers serve people in every other role in the Great Commission, so we want to see a lot more mobilizers. That includes mobilizers in the Global South, the non-Western world, including Asia, Africa, and Latin America. God is transforming places that only received missionaries into places that send missionaries!
Let’s consider three core principles of mobilizers who inspire. They inspire themselves, the mind of others and the hearts of others.
1. Mobilizers Inspire Themselves
If to mobilize is to inspire, we need to start with ourselves, because people don’t just listen to what we say, they watch our lives. What they catch from you is not just your teaching, it’s your passion.
As mobilizers, we need to find ways to stoke the fires in our souls when we run out of passion. Here are a couple of practical ways to do that.
A. Connect With God – God is the source of everything we need. You could be thinking, oh yes, of course, I know this, it’s so basic! But brothers and sisters, we cannot grow beyond this. We cannot leave behind the essential foundation. We need to connect with God as our source of life.
B. Connect With Others – Another thing that keeps us inspired is to connect with people who have similar passions. Then we realize we are not alone. We can also share what’s working and what we’re struggling with. We can pray for each other and encourage each other. That coming together is so crucial, life-giving, and inspiring.
C. Get Coaching – Along the same lines, it helps to find a mentor or a coach. Often, we don’t need to be told what to do. We don’t need more information. We just need somebody who can draw out the wisdom that is already in us and help us to figure out the next step.
2. Mobilizers Inspire the Mind
In the global Church, we have a lot of work to do in the area of missions education, helping believers to learn, to understand, what missions is and what their part in mission is.
A key to inspiring people for their global destiny is to make sure we answer the question, “Why?” Too often, especially regarding missions, we jump into where to go, how to do things, and who to serve…. all important things. But we should start with why.
- Why should we care about the nations?
- What does the Bible say about the nations?
- What is God’s heart for the nations?
A. Teach The Biblical Basis for Missions
A key to answering the “why?” question is to be ready to give a good case for what the Bible says about missions. There are 31,000 verses in the Bible. If, as most believers think, there are only a few verses about missions, is it really that important? That’s a “why?” question!
Mission mobilizers need to be ready to show people that missions is a theme that goes from Genesis all the way through to the book of Revelation and ties the whole story of the Bible together. We have to be able to do that in a creative, new way for each generation.
B. Share Information About the Task Remaining
When you’re talking about inspiring the mind, compelling information is important. We have amazing sources for information about missions and about the world, like the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, Operation World, and Joshua Project.
Part of our job as mobilizers is to connect our communities to the information that’s out there. I like to share bits and pieces people can remember, like the fact that 86% of the Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims in the 10/40 Window do not have a Christian friend. That’s the kind of information people can remember.
C. The Story God Is Telling
If we like romantic stories, well, guess what? God is our bridegroom God, and he’s in love with his bride. And missions is not just a task, it’s inviting and preparing the bride for the party at the end of the story. And that bride is made up of every nation, tongue, and tribe, right? You see, it’s a romance story!
If you like action stories, hey, this story has that! There’s a bad guy who led a revolt and is still creating problems. And we take real risks and are invited to pray dangerous prayers like, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on Earth as it is in heaven.” We go do crazy things for the kingdom of God! That is the reality. That’s part of this story.
If we reframe missions in light of the story God is telling, it’s much more inspirational. And missions is not just a task; it comes with an invitation to ordinary people just like us. He loves to use people just like us to play key roles in the story: fishermen, tax collectors, and people who may have no skills or finances.
3. Mobilizers Inspire the Heart
When it comes to cross-cultural missions, people often need a change of heart. A man named A.T. Pierson said, “Christians need conversion to missions as much as a sinner needs conversion to Christ.” A bit shocking. What is he trying to say? We can sow the seeds, but Holy Spirit converts. Could it be that the same principle is true in mission mobilization?
The Holy Spirit is the one who adds revelation to the information we receive and brings it to our hearts so we can say, “Whoa, that’s for me.” He helps us apply it in our life and gives us the ability to be transformed from the inside out, not just by stuffing our heads full of more information.
It would be nice if we could just turn on a switch in our hearts (or someone else’s) to have a burden for the unreached lost. But it turns out there is no switch like that. I can’t flip the switch. What I can do is say, “God, can you give me some of your heart for unreached, frontier peoples?”
Let’s arise as mission mobilizers who are committed to inspiring ourselves, the mind and hearts of others.
*This article has been edited for length from a series of three articles from GlobalCast Resources. Check out the complete versions and many more wonderful mission mobilization resources below:
