Where Does the Earth End?

Some Thoughts on Missions in 2006!

     Do you remember back to the middle of September? Pope Benedict got the Islamic world fired up because he brought up the idea of “forced conversions” in the Islamic faith. This little piece is being written as these events unfold, and there has already been an apology of sorts. As Christians interested in sharing Christ with the world, our view of the Muslim world is colored by two extremes. On the one hand, there are those who just “write off” those who are Muslim, that there is no commonality in the human condition that would permit a Christian to even interact fruitfully with such a person. On the other hand, there are those who see the Islamic world as the “nut to crack” to bring Christ to the world. Many of us are somewhere in between recognizing that Jesus Christ came to save the whole world, including the Moslem component, and denying that Christ ever thought about salvation for the vicious Middle East. Perhaps this kind of thinking might bring us into God’s Word, because don’t you think God might have something to say about His world and its peoples, Moslem and Christian and everything else?

     God is very clear in our Isaiah text that the world IS His and everything in it. There is no part of the world that is exempt from God’s ownership. He is the God of the ends of the earth. Not only that, but there is no other. Allah is not an alternative, nor is any other deity people have elected to call their own. God’s desire is to save people. He wants to save North Americans and South Americans, Europeans and Asians and Africans and Australians. God seeks to save the lost in the world, even those people on the islands of the world.

     Think Old Testament for a moment. The whole idea behind Jewish proselytizing related to sharing the Jewish God with the nations. In fact, the Bible talks about Abraham and his offspring being the vehicle by which salvation would come to the world. Jewish people understood God’s promise and desire for the Jewish people to share their God. They weren’t too successful, but looking at history, it was their preparation to do so in the Jewish Diaspora that allowed St. Paul to share Christ in much of the known ancient world.

     So let’s take a look at missions, the spreading of God’s Word with special reference to two New Testament texts. The first verse, John 15:16, does not look much like a mission verse. But look at its focus. The purpose of a fruit is to bring more fruit into the world. A peach or pear or apple is not there to bring a grape into the world. It is not there to bring a watermelon into the world either. A fruit’s purpose is to get those seeds to a place where they can produce additional life of the same kind. Well, look at Jesus in this verse. He calls his disciples to fruitfulness, to making fruit like themselves. Disciples are to make disciples! If the replication process works, there will remain fruit in their place when those disciples are gone. Kind of like God telling mankind after the flood to go out and replenish the earth, isn’t it, only on a spiritual level?

     And that gets us to the verse that is often used to justify missions, the verse that talks about going out and getting the missions job done. Matthew 28:19 talks about this replication business too. The growing of fruit is not to be just where we are. It is to be other places as well. In Isaiah, God the Father is the Sender. In Matthew, God the Son is the Sender. The one who is sent, is to be a fruit-seeder so new fruit can grow.

     Here we are in the first decade of the 21st century. We see turmoil and war and argument and discord and separation and enmity in the world. How would God have us be fruitful today? Is it possible that God might want to send you to a strange place, say, a neighbor’s coffee table where you can sow some of Christ’s God-seed? Perhaps God might want to send you to another place to help build a church where you can sow some of Christ’s God-seed with Builders’ Fellowship? We live in a time of opportunity. Short-term missions abound, but Christ’s focus is that seed business. Perhaps we should look at how we can grow more Christians. This month we are fundraising for Bibles and for a Lutheran little kid’s school in India, both projects lay the groundwork for mission and growing people in Christ. How might God want to work in your life in these things?