By Ryan Shaw
The global body of Christ is immense around the world. Among us, we possess the spiritual gifting, training, strategies, skills, capacity, people and even finances to fulfill the Great Commission in about 10 years.
Most importantly, we possess the Person of the Holy Spirit, whose chief purpose is to glorify Jesus Christ in the earth, specifically among those with little access to the gospel.
How do we bridge the gap between the resources the body of Christ possesses around the world and the need for a vital movement toward the literal fulfillment of the Great Commission in this generation?
By focusing attention on motivating our local ministries to take up responsibility to educate, inspire and activate believers within our fellowships. Every local fellowship becomes an “incubator” for the development of basic cross-cultural mission understanding and vision.
Every local church, campus ministry fellowship and Bible school has ongoing cross-cultural mission fervor developing at a grassroots level from within. Every believer is finding their particular role to play in the fulfillment of the Great Commission.
It is through the whole body of Christ, all in our assigned roles that we partner with God toward the fulfillment of the Great Commission in this generation.
These vital individual roles include: Extraordinary Praying, Extravagant Giving, Surrendered Going, Impassioned Mobilizing, Fervent Advocating and many more.
The body of Christ is positioned as never before to move effectively toward the Fulfillment of the Great Commission in this Generation.
We have numerous mission sending agencies from multitudes of indigenous national backgrounds specializing in all the major religious faiths. Wonderful efforts are being made to reach marginalized groups such as children at risk, trafficked women and children, the poor, blind and deaf globally.
Crucial strategies have emerged to propel the mission movement forward in hostile places through business as mission (BAM) initiatives. Professionals are recognizing God can use their college and university degrees to get jobs among unreached and unengaged groups, with their primary purpose as developing rapid-reproducing “church planting movements.”
Believers from every background are meant to be message bearers (alternative term for missionary) everywhere they go. The Great Commission is not only for those trained as ministers and message bearers.
If we will see the Fulfillment of the Great Commission it will be as a result of believers deliberately migrating about with the gospel. They will purposefully relocate their families, businesses and professions to places where there are few believers.
They will live, work, raise families and unassumingly spread the love of Jesus in a discreet way, sparking church planting movements. This was how the early church spread the gospel so fast and is how we do so as well.
The need among unreached and unengaged people groups is not merely evangelism. We want to see all of society impacted by the Kingdom of God through believers. This includes the following crucial areas of emphasis being raised up among unreached and unengaged people groups:
• Developing “Houses of Prayer”
• Making the Whole Bible Available in Every Language
• Doing Works of Justice (compassion ministries)
• Deliberately Engaging the Seven Spheres of Society
> Family
> Government
> Business
> Religion
> Education
> Media
> Arts & Entertainment
• Teaching the Gospel Orally To Oral Learners who Cannot Read
• A Relevant, Reproducing, Simple Church Life which Integrates into Every Area of Life
The “Church” is the key vehicle God uses to transmit the Kingdom of God among people. As a result we want to be a generation resolved to developing “church planting movements” among unreached and unengaged people groups.
These are rapid-reproducing, culturally relevant, simple, typically small groups of believers (20-30 and then they reproduce). Among many hostile people groups, these types of “churches” will be the only type that can exist.
These movements allow for the greatest number of people to be directly engaged with the gospel along the natural lines of friends and family. This was the strategy of the early church in the New Testament. They met in homes, not impressive buildings. There was no paid “pastor.”
The message bearers went out two by two into communities. The model Jesus taught His disciples for planting small groups of believers is laid out in Luke 10, step by step.
This is Jesus’ way and the method that will produce the greatest results among unreached people groups. One hundred small churches of twenty people can have a much greater impact on a community than one church of 2,000.
