“Wherever you are, be all there”: Living a Life of Mission

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.

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 ...