This post is the first in a three-part series exploring the role of the sending church in missions. Skip ahead to Part II here. The following is an excerpt from The Sending Church Defined, written by Upstream Collective. It can be downloaded as a free e-book or purchased in print.

Nothing Moves Without Being Sent

What makes you go? Not in the “Go, therefore” or “Daddy, I gotta go!” sense, but just at the most basic level. Go. Move. Do something. Your brain sends signals to your body and it stands. Pretty simple, you know, except for the dozens of muscles and bones it takes working perfectly together, not to mention 60,000 miles of blood vessels escorting millions of cells to the right places just so you can be on your feet.

If that’s not mind-blowing enough…what moves the brain in the first place?

Why start a missions article with science? Well, thanks to CBS’s “The Big Bang Theory,” geeking is hip. And it reflects perhaps humanity’s biggest question: what started all this movement? Some say it was a bang. Others look to an old idea referred to as the cosmological argument.

It says basically that nothing moves without first being caused to go. If we traced every movement in the history of the world back, there would have to be something that began the action, a “prime mover.” From its first words the Bible points out that this prime mover is God.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. (Genesis 1:1-3, ESV)

God is a Sender 

In the beginning, there’s just God. No heavens nor earth. No people. No ‘once upon a time’. Only the Triune God being God for eternity past—which honestly makes my brain hurt. We don’t know much about what that looked like, but Jesus gives us a hint in his prayer to the Father from John 17:

Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.John 17:24, NIV

The Father, Son, and Spirit expressed glory and love in perfect union. It was an exchange that came straight from the heart of who he is. This is crucial to understanding God not as One who needed to create something, but as One who had it all within himself. Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2012), 19-20.

From that setting he makes the story as we know it go. How does he do it? The same old expression, this time extended outside himself. He emanates. He initiates. In a sense, he sends.

He sends his Spirit to hover over the waters, ready for a word to bring it all to life through the Son. Like so many things in Genesis 1-2, this sets a pattern for how God will keep his story rolling. As a poetic commentary celebrating God’s rule over creation, Psalm 104:29-30 describes the crazy way that everything waits on him to move:

When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth.

God Sends Us

Not simply creating a man and woman, God commissions, or sends, Adam and Eve into the Garden of Eden to “fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over [it]” (Genesis 1:28). Forget peasants, says T. Desmond Alexander, these guys entered the story as royalty, “God’s viceroys [who] govern the earth on his behalf.” T. Desmond Alexander, From Eden to the New Jerusalem: An Introduction to Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2009), 76.  So it makes sense that the imago Dei (Imago Dei is a Latin phrase that means “image of God,” the basic way that people mirror God) makes for little sent ones.

And this is not just God’s ideal; even after sin corrupts the world he continues to send his Spirit, word, angels, law, messengers, judges, priests, kings, and prophets—not to mention his own Son. Paul writes,

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons, Galatians 4:5

So it should be no surprise when the Son looks to his own and says, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you” (John 20:21). The information age certainly has its privileges, namely the common knowledge of what many died longing to see— how the missio Dei actually works.

The Sender sends the Sent One who sends the Spirit (Acts 13:4) who sends the apostles (note the Greek, apostolos, meaning “sent one”) who start a chain reaction of sent-ones. The sending only returns to its original form when you track to the end of the story, where you will find not a garden of two, but a city of countless.

There the eternal glory and love of the Triune God will no longer be extended outside himself because the people of God will be hidden in Christ as “his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:23). The mission will be complete. New Testament scholar Andreas J. Kostenberger sums it up better than I could:

We have understood the notion of ‘mission’ as intimately bound up with God’s saving plan that moves from creation to new creation, and as framing the entire story of Scripture. It has to do with God’s salvation reaching to the ends of the earth: that is, his gracious movement in his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to rescue a desperately needy world that is in rebellion against him and stands under his righteous judgment. Clearly the notion of ‘sending’ is central to any treatment of mission. The Lord of the Scriptures is a missionary God who reaches out to the lost, and sends his servants, and particularly his beloved Son, to achieve his gracious purposes of salvation. Andreas J. Kostenberger, Salvation to the Ends of the Earth: A Biblical Theology of Mission (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2001), 268-269.

God, out of the overflow of his character, is a Sender. We then, by nature, are sent. The imago Dei makes it pulse in our veins. The missio Dei moves us to get on our feet and go. So that’s why we go. We’re sent.

In what ways do you see your church living out their sending identity? What are some ways that you could partner with your church in living a sent life?

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Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” John 20:21 (ESV)

Too often the word “mission” is thought of more in terms of a project we volunteer for, a trip we go on once a year, or an outreach event we are a part of at the local homeless shelter or juvenile detention center. While the word “mission” does mean to be sent, the truth is, when Jesus invited us into his mission, he was inviting us into the adventure of a lifetime; not into some sporadic events we choose to volunteer for here and there.

Finding our identity in Christ means that we also find our identity in his mission. As the Father sent him, Jesus as sent us. It’s not something we turn on or off like a program or event. It becomes our lifestyle—an adventure of living each day and every moment with Jesus as he breathes redemptive hope into the broken world we live in.

Every breath has a missional rhythm with Jesus.

In his book Joining Jesus on His Mission: How to Be an Everyday Missionary, Greg Finke puts it this way:

Joining Jesus on his redemptive mission is what I mean by the term “missional living.” “Missional living” is simply living each day as if it were a mission trip. The difference, of course, is that instead of being on a mission trip to a foreign land, we are on a mission trip to our own community. We are Neighborhood Missionaries. The word “missional” is simply a descriptive word indicating that each part of our daily lives can now be seen as part of Jesus’ redemptive mission in our community.

Going out to get the mail, going to the store for a gallon of milk or going to the school to pick up our kids now has mission potential. But don’t worry. Joining Jesus on his mission is easier than we think— not more complicated. Joining Jesus doesn’t add another layer of busyness on top of an already insane schedule. Instead, joining Jesus results in less stress, more life, more laughter and more fruit than what many of us are currently seeing. Living missionally simply requires a new “missional” mindset – in other words, we begin to think of ourselves as Neighborhood Missionaries – and to put some new “missional” practices into play along the way…

Joining Jesus’ mission is not so much about changing the whole church as it is about changing our own mindset and practices and inviting a few friends to come with us… Let the adventure begin.

Questions for reflection:

• How is Jesus messing with you?
• What is he up to in this moment?
• What is he inviting you to notice, believe or wrestle with?
• What is he inviting you to do today?

Father, help us to see our lives in your kingdom as an everyday adventure of living with Jesus in the very natural, unforced rhythms of mission. Give us passion to live every moment as a missional moment; the opportunity to offer subconscious worship in every thought and breathe redemptive hope into every circumstance and every relationship. This is the adventure of living with Jesus. In his blessed name, Amen.

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Esther became a missionary:

Then Esther spoke to Hathach and commanded him to go to Mordecai and say, “All the king’s servants and the people of the king’s provinces know that if any man or woman goes to the king inside the inner court without being called, there is but one law—to be put to death, except the one to whom the king holds out the golden scepter so that he may live. But as for me, I have not been called to come in to the king these thirty days.” And they told Mordecai what Esther had said. Then Mordecai told them to reply to Esther, “Do not think to yourself that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” Then Esther told them to reply to Mordecai, “Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my young women will also fast as you do. Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish.” (Esther 4:10-16 ESV)

When we think of the word missionary, we don’t think of a courageous queen in a Persian palace. We tend to picture someone preaching in a remote village with Islamic terrorists just around the bend, a Mother Teresa like figure sleeping in a mosquito-infested hut in India, building an orphanage in a ghetto, eating raw snake meat in the Amazon, or smuggling illegal Bibles into a hostile country. We think of sacrificing the comforts of friends and family, giving up the American Dream, and moving to a region far away. We think of cross-cultural barriers, social exclusion, persecution, and possibly martyrdom.

But the word missionary isn’t relegated to third world countries; it simply means this—one sent by God to a specific place at a specific time to live for God’s glory.

You are a missionary right where you are. You have been strategically positioned by God to live for his glory in this moment and in this specific place. The only thing holding you back is your own comfort.

David Livingstone, the missionary to Africa once wrote: For my own part, I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay? Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word in such a view, and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger, now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.

Jim Elliot, the missionary martyr who lost his life in the late 1950’s trying to reach the Auca Indians of Ecuador wrote, “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”

When James Calvert went out as a missionary to the cannibals of the Fiji Islands, the ship captain tried to turn him back, saying, “You will lose your life and the lives of those with you if you go among such savages.” To that, Calvert replied, “We died before we came here.”

These are the words of people who understood that their lives were not their own. They were bought with a price. They were sent to a specific place in a specific time to live for God’s glory. They understood that the story of their lives wasn’t about them; they were merely caught up in a much larger story where Christ was the main character, not themselves. This is what got a hold of Esther. She already resolved that her life was as good as dead. Now she could be free to really live.

This is the only secret you need to unlock your greatest missionary potential to live an extraordinary life for God right now in the ordinary place where God has positioned you — you must renounce comfort as the ultimate value of your life and resolve to live for God’s glory alone.

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