EULESS—“We need to equip our friends, our churches, our Sunday School classes, our small groups to think like missionaries,” the International Mission Board’s Eric King told those gathered in a classroom at First Baptist Church of Euless for a session called “5 Milestones of a Missional Church.”
His plea could easily represent the heart of messages delivered in more than 40 different breakout sessions at the SBTC’s SENT Conference on April 27-28 in Euless.

The annual conference is meant to be a catalyst for churches to gain a bigger vision for the Great Commission.

This year’s event drew 47 speakers from national and international mission boards and a few missionaries who work in high-risk areas of the world. There were 321 participants. Some took pre-conference sessions in basic disaster relief, travel and safety training, and teaching English as a second language.

The consistent message, as King stated, was: “We are all sent.”

“If you are a follower of Christ you are sent. For some of us that sent-ness is literally to live in the house you are living in, in the community you are living in. You are the ambassador of Christ in your neighborhood. Do the people in your church think like that?” asked King, the IMB’s missional church strategist. “Do the people in your church realize that they are the ambassador of God to their workplace or to their school or to the kids’ baseball team? It’s not like we clock in and clock out. We’re sent.”

King said the life stages of churches often parallel the conversion and discipleship stages of people. There is an awakening, an exploring, an equipping, engaging and, hopefully, multiplying.

Every church is unique and may not experience those stages in that order, but they are generally milestones in the process of a healthy congregation seeking to obey the Great Commission.   

Wherever a church is in their journey of faithfulness, the ultimate motivation for missions is not compassion or even obedience, crucial as they are, King said.
Rather, it is loving God.

“You cannot possibly love God and not love the nations,” because God loves the peoples of the world.
The Abrahamic covenant in Genesis 12 lives on partly through Christian believers “who are Abraham’s seed to bless the nations,” King said. Taken together with the Great Commission in Matthew 28, believers get a sense of God’s heart for the “ethne” (peoples) of the world.

To leave the Great Commission untried is disobedience, King said, but moreover it is to miss out on one of life’s greatest blessings.
 
WORD & DEED
Rebekah Naylor, a medical doctor and missionary emeritus with the International Mission Board who now works with Baptist Global Relief, Southern Baptists’ human needs arm, laid out gut-wrenching statistics of global suffering with a caveat: “Human needs ministry cannot evangelize or plant churches. You must share the gospel” or the work is merely social, she said in a session called “The Hands and Feet of Jesus: Meeting Physical Needs.”

That said, human needs ministry, including medical missions, is a valid facet of Southern Baptists’ international strategy and provides access to difficult areas where bald-faced gospel work would not.
Where Southern Baptists gain access, it should be done with a legitimate human needs ministry and be properly vetted by the local government.

More than 1 billion people don’t have clean drinking water and 2.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation. Millions more lack adequate food and often are held back by oppressive governments. There are 15 million AIDS orphans.

Naylor explained that global dollar expenditures for basic education are about $6 billion, $9 billion for clean water access, and $13 billion for basic health and nutrition.

By comparison, Americans spend $8 billion a year on cosmetics. Europeans spend $11 billion annually on ice cream and $155 billion annually on alcohol and tobacco.  

Human needs ministry is both doable and a platform for the gospel, Naylor said.

Jesus’ exemplifies this in Matthew 9:35, where he is shown teaching, preaching and healing, she added.

Often the tendency is to choose between gospel proclamation or social ministry, but “I will tell you today that is not biblical. … We are to make disciples, but we are also to meet physical needs.”

MAPPING YOUR CITY  
To explain the importance of missionary mapping, Caleb Crider drew upon nearly a dozen years of experience as a missionary with the International Mission Board in Spain and his current ministry helping churches develop sustainable, church-based mission strategies.

When missionaries first hit the ground, one of the first things they do is to go out of their houses and start observing, recording what they find in order to make sense of their environments, explained Crider.

He guided SENT participants in developing the geographic, social and spiritual layers of a map of their own communities. Drawing from the insight of urban planner Kevin Lynch, Crider said the geographic layer includes the paths along which people move, nodes where paths converge or intersect, districts from which people get their identities, the edges that often interrupt the flow of a district, and landmarks that help in navigation and provide historical context.

The social layer provides insight into demographics such as income, crime, ethnicity and religion, helping Christians know how to incarnate the gospel. A spiritual layer can be added by asking God to provide insight into the lives of people encountered while walking through an area.

“You can’t learn everything that you need to learn by looking on the Internet,” Crider reminded. “What does what I’m seeing tell me about the people who live here?” Personal conversations provide insight into their stories.

“We become priests to our neighbors,” he said, urging his listeners to take responsibility for spiritual needs and suggest ways for their church to minister to the community.

Next year’s SENT Conference is planned for April 26-27 in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

—This article was written by Jerry Pierce & Tammi Ledbetter