Do You Know What Your Missionaries Actually Teach?

Stop sending prosperity-preaching missionaries to the jungles of Peru. They’re killing the villages here. Your missionaries are spending tens of thousands of dollars, traveling across land and sea, invading and settling into new cultures, and it’s all for nothing. They’re doing more harm than good.

Your short-term and long-term missionaries are bringing death to Peru in the form of the prosperity gospel and word of faith teachings. Men and women are coming down here and telling these people that they’re poor because of sin and doubt. They’re telling the people to speak positive and claim success and health. These missionaries are telling people that they can be rich and live like the patriarchs of the Bible, blessed by the hand of God because of their faith and unshakable holiness.   Continue at Sean DeMars

 

Assessing 'Chrislam'

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- Christians sharing the Gospel in Muslim-dominated countries take incredible risks. And converts from Islam to Christianity are routinely banished, imprisoned or murdered.

So, how do Christian missionaries teach Muslims about Jesus when Islam denies His deity and death on the cross? And how do new converts from Islam to Christianity worship Jesus without inviting severe persecution?

One attempt is "Chrislam," the bringing together of Christianity and Islam. Proponents of Chrislam say that because the Qur'an mentions Jesus and affirms certain biblical teachings about Him, Christianity and Islam share at least some common ground.

They further argue that if Christians avoid the offensive term "Son of God" when referring to Jesus and, instead, emphasize His role as prophet rather than divine Savior, Muslims are more open to the Gospel. Once they come to faith in Christ, Muslims may continue to worship at a mosque, pray Muslim prayers and even partake in a pilgrimage to Mecca.

The motives behind Chrislam seem sincere. Believers want to be, like the apostle Paul, "all things to all people, so that I may by every possible means save some" (1 Corinthians 9:22). But the problem with Chrislam is that it strips away, or at least masks, the essentials of the Gospel, according to Joshua Lingel, Jeff Morton and Bill Nikides, editors of "Chrislam: How Missionaries are Promoting an Islamized Gospel."   Continue at Baptist Press

John Calvin, Missionary and Church Planter

So long as some Christians have called themselves Calvinists, other Christians have probably alleged that Calvinists care little about evangelism, missions, and church planting. The critique isn't new. But only recently have we learned the extent of the zeal and effectiveness of the early reformers in evangelism, missions, and church planting. Elias Medeiros, Harriet Barbour professor of missions at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, will lead a workshop on The Reformer's Commitment to the Propagation of the Gospel to All Nations at TGC's National Conference in April, likely presenting this wider understanding.

But in this short article, I want to give a small taste of John Calvin's missionary and church planting zeal in particular. If you want to get a sense of Calvin's theology of missions and activity, you can read Calvin's sermon on 2 Timothy 1:8-9, "The Call to Witness," Herman J. Selderhuis's John Calvin: A Pilgrim's Life, and Frank James III's series of lectures, The Calvin I Never Knew. From these works, I have compiled several fascinating, surprising, and convicting facts about the missionary and church planting movement John Calvin launched in France and throughout Europe.

Calvin, Equipper and Sender of Missionaries

 

In the 1550s the population of Geneva doubled as refugees, many of them from France, poured in. Many of them sat under Calvin's preaching five times each week.

They heard sermons like this one on 2 Timothy 1:8-9, where he said:

If the gospel be not preached, Jesus Christ is, as it were, buried. Therefore, let us stand as witnesses, and do him this honor, when we see all the world so far out of the way; and remain steadfast in this wholesome doctrine. . . . Let us here observe that St. Paul condemns our unthankfulness, if we be so unfaithful to God, as not to bear witness of his gospel; seeing he hath called us to it.  Continue at John Starke

You Can Get There From Here

The mission of the church is to make disciples.

That’s basically what Greg Gilbert and I take 250 pages to say in What Is the Mission of the Church? We believe our answer to the question is clear from the Great Commission, from the record of the early church in Acts, from Paul’s own missionary example, and from piecing together theological themes like Kingdom and shalom. God sends the church into the world to bear witness to Jesus Christ, win people to Christ, build them up in Christ, and establish them in Christian churches.

There are any number of reasons why someone might not agree with our thesis or like our book. But at the level of gut-reaction I think many people are uncomfortable saying the mission of the church is to make disciples because they feel like this makes most of our lives for most of us rather irrelevant. “I want all of life to matter to God” is what I often hear. Most Christians, especially young ones with a lot of life and a lot of dreams in front of them, want to do something that really counts. They want to know that teaching botany or being a vet or running an ad agency isn’t a distraction from what really matters in life.  Keep Reading >>>