Great Commission

Leader, author, and evangelist Leighton Ford wrote the following as he remembered his wife, Jean Graham Ford, and her brother, Billy.

“Don’t forget the evangelists.” That’s what my Jeanie would say every time we headed off to help young leaders to spread the gospel. “Don’t forget the evangelists.”

She and her brother Billy were two of a kind. Both raised on a red clay dairy farm in North Carolina with a strict mother, who taught them the Bible and a kind father who guided them with his prayers. They both became Christ sharers who felt called to let others know this God who loved and could save them.

He traveled across the world preaching to millions and millions. She stayed close to home for the most part living that good news with her three children and her husband. He raised his powerful and strong voice like a thunder. She spoke like a quiet stream with a voice made quiet by her childhood polio.

He opened his arms wide with an invitation to come to the cross. She held her arms open closely hugging others with a touch that took away tears and fears. He preached about sin and judgment and forgiveness. She showed grace in her face. He used stadiums as his pulpit. She taught in a spacious room in a friend’s home.

Now that they are both with the Lord they loved, I can see them standing side-by-side, and imagine him saying: “You are two of the very best evangelists I’ve ever had.” So – may we never forget the evangelists!

When it comes to fulfilling the Great Commission, how can the “1 percent” of Christians who work in professional ministry help the “99 percent” who don’t?

Consider the difference between how frogs and lizards get their food. The frog just sits and waits, and lets the food come to him, while the lizard cannot afford to sit and wait, but must go out into the world.

Pastors are like the frog. They get trained in ministry, join a church staff, and then everyone knows they work full-time to meet spiritual needs. Ministry opportunities come to them.

In contrast, when it comes to ministry and evangelism, lay people are like the lizard. They must learn to hunt by building bridges at work or in neighborhoods, earning a right to be heard, and then winsomely, creatively, prayerfully, courageously proclaiming Christ.

Unfortunately, there are many sad lizards out there who think that to have a ministry, they must act just like frogs. Many ill-equipped laypeople sit under-deployed. Even as hostility toward Christians grows stronger, Christ’s Great Commission mandate has not changed, and a pathway for spreading the gospel remains wide open—as it has since the days of the early church—through personal relationships between believers and nonbelievers who work together.

Church historian Alan Kreider sums up the strategic advantage of the workplace: “What happened was this. Non-Christians and Christians worked together and lived near each other. They became friends.”

This is what makes the workplace so key to the Great Commission. Here believers have daily opportunities to offer living proof—through their actions, attitudes, and words—that the gospel is indeed good news.

Mariska Hargitay has been playing the same fictional cop role for over 500 episodes of television, spanning over 25 years. Hargitay plays detective Olivia Benson on NBC’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. She’s been doing it so long she can practically do it in her sleep.

So, it came to no one’s surprise last April when a little girl spied Hargitay, filming an episode wearing a realistic looking police badge, and mistook her for an actual law enforcement officer. Given her public persona, it was not surprising that Hargitay halted filming on the episode to make sure the little girl got the help that she needed.

The girl had become separated from her mother in a playground in New York City and witnesses say Hargitay took 20 minutes to find her mother and console them both upon their reunion. When asked about it, Hargitay insisted it didn’t take a whole lot of convincing. She said:

There’s a thing: WWOBD, “What would Olivia Benson do?” The fans would always talk about it, and one day it hit me. I have those moments where I’ve sort of slipped into her. If there’s a crisis, I just take over and lead like that. Being strong and fearless.

Hargitay has good reason to feel secure in her role; a month prior, the show was renewed for a record-setting 26th season, besting the previous record for the longest-running primetime live-action series in American television history.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We become what we practice; when we practice deeds of righteousness, we become more likely to live as righteous people. Being a disciple of Jesus is not just about knowing rightly but doing rightly.

Kindness can be addictive and one small gesture can start a chain reaction of kindness according to readers of The Wall Street Journal who have written to the newspaper to tell their story.

Theresa Gale was locking up her church recently after a long day of volunteering when a young woman approached her, asking for water and bus fare. It was late and Gale was alone. But she gave the woman a bottle of water and $15 and offered her a ride to the bus stop.

In the car, the woman asked about the church, and Gale explained that the members believe that they have a duty to help those in need. “Well, you are God to me today,” Gale says the woman responded. “I was touched,” says Gaile said. “It was as if I, too, had received a blessing.”

Possible Preaching Angl e:

“When we act kindly, the systems in our brain associated with reward light up, the same ones active when we eat chocolate. They make us want to do that same awesome thing again.” -Jamil Zaki, associate professor of psychology at Stanford University

In a 2019 PBS documentary America Lost, filmmaker Christopher Rufo explores the devastating plight of three of America's forgotten cities: Youngstown, Ohio; Memphis, Tennessee; and Stockton, California. In a YouTube video, he describes a successful men's ministry in Stockton.

Pastor Jereme of the Men's Recovery Home is shown speaking to a man on the street:

We gotta let go of some of those old ways and those old habits, you know what I mean? I know I was there bro. I ran away from home when I was 15 years old. I was living on the streets. I was gang banging. I was getting high, shooting dope. Doing my thing man, running while carrying a gun. You know I was messed up. I was a hurting man. I didn't know any other way until somebody just like this actually handed me a flyer from Victory Outreach.

I said, “God can change your life” and at that moment I was at a point where I was tired. I was tired of the way I was living. I said “Man what do I have to do?” I was ready to make a change. We got a Christian recovery home for men. It's an intense program to help you get your life together.

Pastor Jereme narrates:

Everybody has a story. Could be through drugs. It could be through abuse. It could be through violence. Our families are broken down, our communities are broken down, people's lives are broken down. They're devastated. That's why this ministry is here. We want to let people know that they're not in a hopeless situation. That as long as they're breathing there's hope.

‘The people that come into our church, they come in hurting. They come in empty. They come in broken. They come in in need of a miracle. In need of a healing. A need of somebody loving them. And that's the beginning of the process. If we can affect a person, we can affect the community. We can affect the city. We can affect the world.’

You can watch the clip here (56 min, 36 sec – 60 min, 31 sec).

When people at Onecho Bible Church talk about “the mission field,” they mean the many places around the world where Christians are sharing the love of Jesus. But sometimes, they’re also talking about a literal field in Eastern Washington, where the congregation grows crops to support the people proclaiming the gospel around the world.

The 74-member church, smack-dab in the middle of a vast expanse of wheat fields, has donated $1.4 million to missions since 1965. They’ve funded wells, campgrounds, and Christian colleges. This year, they want to provide food and shelter to asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border. Brian Largent, Onecho’s volunteer farm manager said, “Being as isolated as we are, it’s our missionaries and this mission field that keeps us very focused worldwide. This church is a very mission-oriented church—always has been.”

The church started with Mennonite migrants in the 1890s and Methodist farmers 20 years before that. But the unique fundraising program started in the 1960s. One of the church elders passed away at age 65 and bequeathed 180 acres to the church. He supported missionary work his whole life and considered that his legacy. He asked Onecho to use his land to continue the work of spreading the gospel.

The church decided it wouldn’t sell the field but would farm it with volunteers. The proceeds from the harvest would fund various missions. The first year, the harvest yielded $5,500. Revenue fluctuates, based on the success of the harvest. In 2021, the field earned $39,000. Last year, it was $178,000. “We just put the seed in the ground,” Largent said. “Then . . . it’s all up to the weather and what God’s going to do to produce the money.”

When George Liele set sail for Jamaica in 1782, he didn’t know he was about to become America’s first overseas missionary. And when Rebecca Protten shared the gospel with slaves in the 1730s, she had no idea some scholars would someday call her the mother of modern missions.

These two people of color were too busy surviving—and avoiding jail—to worry about making history. But today they are revising it. Their stories are helping people rethink a missionary color line. As National African American Missions Council (NAAMC) president Adrian Reeves said at a Missio Nexus conference in 2021, challenging the idea that “missions is for other people and not for us.” African Americans today account for less than one percent of missionaries sent overseas from the US. But they were there at the beginning.

British missionary William Carey is often called the father of modern missions. Adoniram Judson has been titled the first American missionary to travel overseas. But both Liele and Protten predated them.

Former missionary Brent Burdick now believes African Americans are a “sleeping giant” with an important part to play in the proclamation of the gospel. “They have a lot to offer to the world.”

Dilli Lumjel gave his life to Jesus on May 4, 2011, at 1:33 a.m. Earlier that day, he had performed a Hindu funeral service for his father-in-law in a refugee camp in eastern Nepal, where he lived with more than 12,000 other refugees.

As was the custom, Lumjel spent the night at his wife’s uncle’s house. Both of Lumjel’s parents-in-law had recently converted to Christianity. That night he had a vision: His mother-in-law approached him and shared the gospel, stating, “If you enter this house, you have to believe in Jesus.” Then he saw a flash of lightning from heaven and heard a voice saying, “What you are hearing is true; you have to believe.” In the dream, he knelt down crying and committed his life to Jesus.

When he woke up, his face was wet with tears. Lumjel called a local pastor and told him he had had a dream and was now a Christian. The news shocked his family of devout Hindus. He said, “Every­body—my relatives, my wife, sisters—they all woke up asking, ‘What happened to Dilli? Is he mental? He says he’s a Christian!’”

The next day, the pastor explained the gospel to Lumjel and his wife. The two committed their lives to Jesus. A day later, Lumjel began attending a monthlong Bible school in the refugee camp. Then church leaders sent Lumjel out to preach the gospel to other refugees. Several months later, he became a church deacon, then an elder.

One year later, Lumjel arrived in Columbus, Ohio, as part of a massive resettlement of about 96,000 ethnic Nepalis expelled from their home of Bhutan to the United States. There he joined Yusuf Kadariya in pastoring a group of about 35 Bhutanese Nepali families. As more Bhutanese Nepali refugees settled in Columbus and the group brought more people to Christ, the church continued to grow.

Today, Lumjel is a full-time pastor at Emmanuel Fellowship Church in Columbus. On a wintry Sunday morning in December, about 200 people streamed into the sanctuary, greeting one another with a slight bow and “Jai Masih,” meaning “Victory to Christ.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

God is bringing the nations to our neighborhoods here in America and is bringing many to faith in Christ. We can carry out the Great Commission in part by welcoming them with Christian love and sharing the gospel to those with hungry hearts.

Sociologist Robert Woodberry has identified a robust statistical correlation between “conversionary Protestant” missionary activity and the democratization of a country. His conclusion: Areas where Protestant missionaries had a significant presence in the past are on average more economically developed today, with comparatively better health, lower infant mortality, lower corruption, greater literacy, higher educational attainment (especially for women), and more robust membership in non-governmental associations.

This was not a popular finding. Even the head of Woodberry’s dissertation committee warned him of the inevitable backlash: “To suggest that the missionary movement had this strong, positive influence on liberal democratization, you couldn’t think of a more unbelievable and offensive story to tell a lot of secular academics.”

But after years of extensive research, Woodberry nevertheless concluded, “Want a blossoming democracy today? The solution is simple—if you have a time machine: Send a 19th-century missionary.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

While Jesus didn’t tell us to go into all the world and make people literate, rich, and democratic, Woodberry’s findings illustrate the overwhelmingly positive influence of missionaries.

When Aaron Köhler tries to talk to people in Cottbus, Germany, about Jesus, church, and faith, he can’t assume they know what he’s talking about. Many in the city near the Polish border don’t know anything about Christianity. Köhler has had people ask him whether Christmas and Easter are Christian holidays, and if so, what they’re about. One time, he talked to someone at a local market who wasn’t familiar with the name Jesus. The person had never even heard it, that they could recall.

“That was crazy for me. In the ‘land of the Reformation,’ in a supposedly ‘Christian country,’ these people don’t even know the basic basics,” said Köhler, who co-pastors a church plant.

According to the most recent data, more than 60 percent of Germans identify as Christian. A little more than a quarter say they have no religion. Zoom in a little closer, though, and stark regional differences emerge. In the western part of the country—which includes Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, and Frankfurt—three-quarters of the population identify as Christian. But in the east, the region that was a Soviet Union satellite state from 1949 to 1990, only a quarter of Germans are Christian, with nearly 70 percent identifying themselves as “nonbelievers.”

Christianity is declining in much of formerly Protestant Europe. But eastern Germany stands out, even compared with other rapidly secularizing nations. Here, large swaths of the population have had no serious contact with Christianity for three generations. Köhler said, “For decades, there was no prayer, no Bible at home, no church attendance. After all these years, people don’t know what they don’t know.”

The regional differences are easily traced to the division of the country after its defeat in World War II. The French, British, and American-controlled sectors in the west merged into the German Federal Republic in 1949. The Soviet-controlled East formed the German Democratic Republic, a socialist state with totalitarian leaders who suppressed religion. The Christian population in East Germany fell from about 90 percent in 1949 to only 30 percent in 1990.

Evangelicalism is now the largest religious demographic in Central America, according to a poll of about 4,000 people in five countries. More than a third of people from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica told researchers that they are evangelical, while another 29 percent said they are “nondenominational believers.”

Only about a third of people in the region said they were Catholic—down from about 60 percent in the 1970s. Some scholars have attributed the shift to internal Catholic conflict and the long fallout from the church’s political affiliations on the extreme right and left, along with the disruptions of urbanization.

Evangelical theologian Samuel Escobar, noting the trend in an interview in 2006, said Catholics who moved to Central American cities found empowerment in their evangelical conversion. He said, “Their decision to accept Christ meant a change in patterns of behavior which helped people to reorient their lives.”

In an article in Vice, Brian Merchant argues that the first structure that humans will probably build on the Moon after they have completed building a base there will be a church. Indeed, Christian missionaries and clergymen have built churches in the harshest of climates, whether they be the tropical jungles of Africa or the sun-drenched deserts of Australia.

When the Ross Sea Party of Shackleton's Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917 landed in Antarctica, among the men was an Anglican priest named Arnold Spencer-Smith. Spencer-Smith set up a small chapel in a dark room in Scott's Hut at Cape Evans. He built an altar with a cross and candlesticks and an aumbry where he reserved the Blessed Sacrament.

Today, there are eight churches in Antarctica. One is an Eastern Orthodox church built of wood in the Russian style. Another is The Chapel of Our Lady of the Snows which is a Catholic church located in a cave in the ice. It is the most southern place of worship of any religion in the world.

Churches have been erected in Antarctica since the 1950s. Extended stays in the region can be an extremely stressful experience for the researchers who often stay separated from their families for months at a time, which is one of the reasons why churches exist in this remote continent.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Living anywhere in the world (or space) is a stressful experience for believers. We need the church to give support, care, connectivity to others, and to center ourselves in worship of Almighty God, creator of heaven and earth.

In the horror of 9/11, Charles H. Featherstone turned from Islam to Christianity. In an issue of Christianity Today he shared his story:

Although both of his parents were raised as Lutherans, his mother never had much use for religion, and his father lost his faith in God in the jungles of South Vietnam. When his father left the army, the family settled down in Southern California where Charles attended school. He writes:

I had been on the receiving end of my father’s intense but sporadic violence for years. I learned to both fear and hate him. School quickly became unsafe as well: I was bullied, terrorized, and abused regularly. There was no one to trust. I was frightened, incredibly alone, and increasingly angry. Would anyone ever love and value me?

Searching for something to do with his life he began studying journalism at San Francisco State University. Charles said: “That’s where I found Islam. A friend introduced me to the Qur’an, and I was entranced by its words. The Muslims who first taught me welcomed me as no one else had before.”

But Islam also provided religious and political fuel for his anger. At one mosque he fell in with a group of jihadis. They discussed the texts of revolutionary Islam. One brother went to fight in Bosnia, and Charles wanted to join him. But there was Jennifer, whom he’d met at San Francisco State. There would be no one to care for her. He said, “I belonged to her, and she to me. This was a turning point. The anger that had burned in my soul was beginning to burn itself out.”

He started a journalistic career which eventually took him to offices in Lower Manhattan, right across from the World Trade Center. He was there on the morning of September, 11, 2001.

In the chaos and terror of the streets below, as I looked up at the burning twin towers and watched people tumble to their deaths, life-changing words came to me—words I suddenly heard inside my head: “My love is all that matters, and this is who I am.” I knew then that everything I understood about God, about sin and redemption, about the whole human condition, had changed. What happened was the kind of divine intervention that drove Abraham to leave home, trusting in God’s promises. The kind of force that struck Saul blind on the road to Damascus.

Charles and Jennifer began attending a church in Virginia.

The people showed me that it was the risen Jesus Christ who had spoken to me. They taught me the gospel, proclaiming the forgiveness of sins for the entire world. This is who I had met that horrible day in September. It was Jesus Christ who, in the midst of terror and death, assured me that his love is all that matters.

I belong to Jesus. He saw me and told me to follow. I left everything and obeyed. So, I trust God. For the first time in my life, I know who I am. I know whose I am. And that is all that matters.

Editor’s Note: Charles H. Featherstone is the author of The Love That Matters: Meeting Jesus in the Midst of Terror and Death .

The 150th anniversary of Canadian missionary George Leslie Mackay’s arrival in Taiwan was celebrated in 2022. Perhaps the country’s most beloved 19th-century Westerner, churches have reenacted his arrival, and several books are being published about the missionary. The Taiwan government even has a bio of him on their website. So, what made this foreigner worthy of this level of affection more than 100 years after his death?

In 1872, the Canadian Presbyterian missionary arrived in northern Taiwan (then called Formosa). Over the next 29 years, Mackay planted more than 60 churches and baptized more than 3,000 people. He started a college and a graduate school of theology. Mackay Memorial Hospital, named in his honor, is now a large downtown hospital in Taipei.

He also provided medical treatment. He and his students would sing a hymn to patients, extract their teeth, and then preach the gospel to them. Over the years, Mackay became known for having pulled thousands of teeth.

He insisted on identifying with Taiwan and the Taiwanese. Mackay spent more than half of the 57 years of his life on the island. Upon his arrival in Taiwan, he immediately began learning the language from the local boys herding water buffalo. Unlike most Western missionaries, he married a local woman, and they had three children. Embracing Taiwan as his adopted homeland, he touched the hearts of many Taiwanese and contributed to the conversion of many to Christianity.

Before he passed, Mackay captured his love for the country by writing a still widely beloved poem: “How dear is Formosa to my heart! On that island the best of my years have been spent. A lifetime of joy is centered here … My heart’s ties to Taiwan cannot be severed! To that island I devote my life.”

Some come with track marks from years of drug abuse. Others come with children in tow. Some are struggling through a bad week. Others, a bad decade. All bring their dirty laundry. They wash it and dry it for free at church-run laundry services throughout the United States. “Christ said we should feed the hungry and clothe the naked, and I think those clothes should be clean,” said Catherine Ambos, a volunteer at one such ministry in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Churches have been washing clothes across the US since at least 1997, when a minister at First United Methodist Church of Arlington, Texas, started doing a circuit around the city’s coin-operated laundries, passing out change. There may well have been others before this. Today, these ministries exist across the country, run by churches of all traditions and sizes.

Belmont Baptist Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, has one of the older laundromat ministries still running. The church started helping people clean their clothes in 2010, when pastor Greg Anderson heard through another ministry that poor people in homeless shelters and long-term-stay motels would regularly throw away their clothes.

Anderson said, “It was just easier to go and get new clothes at a clothing-center type of ministry as opposed to being able to launder them.” The church decided to install five washers and dryers in a building on its property and open a laundromat. Today, volunteers estimate that they save people upwards of $25,000 per year. This is money they didn’t have, or if they did, they could now spend on food, gas, or medicine.

19.25 million US households are without a washing machine.

38% of US households earn less than $50,000 per year.

J. Dudley Woodberry, senior professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Theological Seminary, said, “More Muslims have become Christians in the last 35 years than in all previous centuries since the foundation of Islam. But they do not have a Christian background to support their newfound faith. Many of these converts have come to faith through such means as satellite TV or the Bible passed along via cell phones. So, a greater depth of understanding (of doctrine) is needed.”

Braulia Ribeiro shares how God taught a first-time missionary group to depend on him:

In 1983, I was part of a first-time team of Brazilian young people going to plant a mission station among the Paumarí. I was chosen because I had some training in the Paumari language with the Summer Institute of Linguistics.

We traveled on a small boat to reach Lábrea. From there to a small river where the Paumarí were, there were no transport boats available. We would have to hire a private boat to take us there. We would be the first missionaries to reach this particular village.

The only money our little team had left was a few hundred dollars we put aside to buy supplies and food to stay in the jungle for three months. “What do we do, Lord? Should we just stay here waiting?” I felt that I had received Matthew 13:46 from God. It said, “he went away and sold everything he had.” Is God saying that we have to use all our money to pay for the boat ride?

And that was exactly how things went. We hired the owner of the smallest boat we could find. The price he charged amounted to the exact figure we’d saved. We set out with food for only the short trip, no kerosene, or other supplies. After five-day trip we found a man with a large canoe that was available to take us the rest of the way to Maniçoã Lake.

We got out of the canoe in front of the first hut. I shouted from the land in my broken Paumarí, “Ivaniti?” – “Is that you?” An old woman answered me from the top, “Ha’ã hovani!” – “Yes, it’s me!” She did not seem to find it strange to hear me speaking her language.

We all climbed up to the hut and sat ceremoniously on the floor. After a good hour of conversation about the trip, she asked what we were there to do. I said, “We are missionaries. We want to help you to know Jesus, the Son of God.” The lady looked at me with a puzzled expression and started shouting for her grandson, Danilo. “Come over, Danilo. The missionaries have arrived. Take them to their home.”

“Our home?” I asked. She pointed to an empty tall hut nearby. “Danilo and I built this hut two summers ago, preparing for your arrival. We heard in the radio about the Creator God, and how his Son, Jesus, wants to help us. I said, ‘If that is true, he will send us his people.’ So we built the hut for you.”

We were placed in our “home,” and from that day on, we were fed with abundant fish, manioc flour, and jungle fruits. For the whole six months we stayed with the Paumarí we were well taken care of, never needing a cent of the money we applied to renting the boat. We had nothing to offer them except ourselves, and that was all they needed.

Did you know there were two boats that responded to the Titanic when it was sinking? One boat, the Californian, was about 20 miles away. They turned off their radio about ten minutes before the Titanic hit the iceberg. They saw rockets and flares shoot off in the distance. They couldn’t figure out why another boat was shooting rockets and flares, but they didn’t turn on their radio, and they didn’t investigate. They saw the boat’s light turn off, but thought it was just turning its light off for the night. The crew of the Californian were so in maintenance-mode with what they were already doing, they couldn’t imagine the Titanic sinking. For the rest of their lives the crew members of the Californian had to wrestle with why they didn’t go.

But there was another ship, the Carpathia. It was 58 miles away. But its radio was on, and when it got the call that the Titanic was sinking it powered up all its engines and headed straight for the Titanic, navigating around icebergs in the night. It ran full-power ahead for 3.5 hours. When the crew showed up at the scene of the disaster, many had already perished, but they saved 705 lives from the life boats.

Possible Preaching Angle

The Carpathia was in mission mode. The Californian was in maintenance mode. Which would we rather be? The Californian ? Or the Carpathia ? A church just trying to get by? Or a church on a mission, saving lives?