Our world uses the term “missions” with an elastic range of meanings. Where I live in Malta, I often see the word written in bold letters on the side of public transit buses, emblazoned next to images of smiling children splashing themselves in bubbling, clean water. These advertisements promote a group that provides wells in needy areas of the world. Clean water is a good thing, and missionaries can provide wells as a means of gaining a hearing for the gospel, but what forms the substance of missions according to the Bible? Here is a short answer: The core of biblical missions is the church’s intentional extension of gospel reach into communities where no healthy churches exist to exert gospel influence. Let me explain by using my immediate context.

A Healthy Church’s Influence

I am writing these paragraphs as I sip an Americano next to the sea. I arrived here after an early morning flight from Malta, a small country historically dominated by Roman Catholicism. I’m now in a large country historically dominated by Islam. The coffee is good in both places, and the spiritual darkness is equally strong. During my flight, I looked out my window, wondering how many of the inhabitants below would ever meet a born-again Christian in their lifetime—how many of those people would ever live within the reach of a healthy church’s influence. Biblical missions consists of existing churches working hard to make that reality possible for all people in obedience to Christ’s command. I call this biblical missions because it is what we see when we fuse together Matthew 28:18-20 (make disciples/develop churches) with Romans 10:14-15 (how shall they hear without a preacher?), and compare those passages with examples we see lived out in the book of Acts.

Same Mission/Different Look

Biblical missions always consists of this core idea, but that does not mean it always looks the same. It might mean the effort to take the gospel to a small tribe living in the mountains near the Tajik/Chinese border, or it may be moving near a government housing development in urban America. The setting and approach of two different missionaries may look vastly different. But any church that seriously considers an area or demographic (that stands outside the reasonable reach of current churches) for the purpose of seeing a new church established is looking at missions through a biblical lens.[1]

[1] As the goal of biblical missions is the planting of churches that can further expand gospel influence in unreached areas, helping existing but fledgling churches in frontier locations to gain the health necessary for them to exert fruitful gospel influence is a legitimate application of biblical missions. The Pastoral Epistles give us biblical examples of this approach in Crete and Ephesus.

The Church’s Expanding Influence

Biblical missions moves beyond the task of initial gospel engagement. The work of biblical missions also involves exemplification, edification, and education so that, in time, a church with New Testament order and vitality stands where once there was none. The result is that a community can now come under the expanding influence of the new church, and so that the new church can send missionaries to the next unreached places.

It Takes a Team

A biblical missionary, then, is a person a church intentionally sends out to engage an unreached community/demographic. That missionary exemplifies godliness, edifies new believers, and educates them in how to obey everything Christ commanded. The task of Bible missions requires many roles. Most often, a variety of giftings and tasks are necessary to bring a church from the point of nonexistence to the point of sending its own missionaries. God has endowed some remarkable people with a figurative Swiss army of spiritual giftedness for missionary work, but most often it takes a team to faithfully complete the establishment of a new, reproducing church. Are you willing to join the effort? Christ’s commission still stands, and vast harvest fields lie before us. The laborers, however, are far too few.