Four Things Every Missionary Needs, part 1

The great missionary was facing a major ministry transition. Paul spent years planting churches in strategic cities throughout the Mediterranean world. His basic strategy would be to find the local synagogue and preach the Good News that the Messiah had come. A handful of Jews and “God-fearing Gentiles” (Gentiles who revered and followed the God of the Jews without themselves becoming Jewish converts) would believe the message preached and a church would be planted.

Now, the winds of change are blowing across the Apostle’s spirit. There is no longer any room for him in these regions. His mission is coming to completion. He needs a new field to proclaim Christ as Sovereign and Savior.

His eyes are cast upon Spain, the final frontier.

Today, we don’t think of Spain as the ends of the earth but in the days of the Roman Empire it was. The Rock of Gibraltar was one of the two Pillars of Hercules that marked the ends of the earth.

Spain was on the edge of the world and its people were on the edge of humanity. They were, after all, barbarians. They were not educated, civilized, and honorable people like the Greco-Romans of the Mediterranean world. These were barbarians, people hardly worth considering. Except to the Apostle Paul. Christ had redeemed for himself people from every nation, kindred, tribe, and tongue, and surely this included the barbarians of Spain.

It was a new field of questionable worth to those whose mindset and culture had been shaped by the Greco-Roman world.

It would also require a new strategy: there were no synagogues in Spain. This mission would require a new level of partnership with the Roman congregations.

It was this discovery that revolutionized my approach and understanding of Paul’s letter to the Romans: The Book of Romans is a missionary appeal letter unlike any missionary appeal letter I have ever seen.

As a missionary I began readying Romans with “missionary eyes,” looking for clues and insight from this greatest of all missionaries. The synergistic and dynamic relationship that exists between apostolic missions and the local church began to emerge. The Letter to the Romans is Paul’s manifesto on global missions and the mutually necessary relationship between apostolic missions and the local church.

I discovered, for example, four things every missionary needs from the local church: These are fellowship, mutual ministry, material support, and prayer. These are nutrients every missionary needs that can only be found in the local church. Because the missionary is on the field, away from the local church, these “nutrients” must be intentionally pursued and protected. Otherwise, the missionary may fall into the “out of sight, out of mind” trap.

I will unpack this more in my next post. Stay tuned.

TO BE CONTINUED…..