This month we reach the conclusion of our 75th anniversary year celebration. We have outlined eight decades of our mission history over the course of the last twelve months. So now what?
Deeper
We must go deeper.
Spiritual maturity is a continual movement in two concurrent directions: we “take root below” and “bear fruit above” (Isaiah 37:31). We sink a spiritual root into the dependable love of God in Jesus Christ. And then we bloom. This is the fundamental dynamic of the spiritual life.
From the plenary podium at the Urbana Missionary Convention in 1961, our own Paul Lindell described “the kind of people… required [for] bringing the gospel to our generation in all parts of the world.” They are people, first of all, with treasure in their hearts. They are people who have heard the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ, have come to accept it by faith, and have found in the bargain a radically new life. They are people with a spiritual root, planted firmly in the soil of God’s promises. This, above all, is what drives them to “all parts of the world.”
Please note: the Scriptures do not call us to a “deeper” root within ourselves. Sometimes Christians get this image wrong. The Scriptures call us to deep, intimate, trusting abandonment to Jesus Christ. Not to our fears or ambitions. Not to our challenges or our own possibilities. Not certainly to our feelings, nor even to our faith. We are nowhere called to have faith in faith, after all. We are called to have faith in Jesus.
So “look up,” Paul advised the Colossians, “and be alert to… Christ – that’s where the action is. See things from his perspective. Your old life is dead. Your new life, which is your real life – even though invisible to spectators – is with Christ in God. He is your life.” (Colossians 3:2,3, The Message)
Sink roots below: deeper in Jesus. Bear fruit above: reaching the wide world.
Broader
We must go broader.
The mission of God belongs to the entire people of God. Not to a collection of isolated individuals. It belongs to the entire Body: it is the “family business.” It calls and commands the entire community of saints.
At Urbana, Paul Lindell explained: “Wherever men [and women] came to believe in Jesus Christ, they somehow moved together. They were always found in clusters – not as single pilgrims marching in separate directions.”
“We have a new citizenship now, in heaven. And here on earth… we’ve all been drawn together in the one wonderful family of God.” Lindell described “a thrilling interdependence” in this family: there are “many varieties of gifts, all of which are needful” (cf. 1 Corinthians 12). In this wonderful family, we become “members one of another.” We are enlisted together in the mighty purposes of God.
Over 75 years, this expansive identity has led us into many, many effective partnerships. Many, many more await us.
Farther
And then we must go farther.
We must go farther into the world that surrounds us. I mean, on the one hand, farther into the places, farther among the peoples that have yet to hear the good news. The evangelistic task is not yet completed: many millions of our fellow human beings remain “outsiders to God’s ways” and without “the faintest idea of Christ.” (Ephesians 2:12, The Message) “And how can they hear if nobody tells them?” (Romans 10:14, The Message)
And I mean something more. We must go further into life – further into our work-a-day professions, our communities, businesses, schools, families, and world.
Paul Lindell reminded his young audience at Urbana: “There is traffic to direct, there are gas stations to run, there are legislatures where laws must be passed and taxes collected, there is research to do, there are diseases to cure, there are thousands of things to do that relate to our daily, normal, natural life. God means that his people shall plunge into these tasks as his servants.” God has not made us “all mouth,” Lindell explained. We are hands and feet and brains, as well. We have lives to live for the Savior, in addition to words to proclaim.
Deeper. Broader. Farther. This has been our game plan for seventy-five years. It is a game plan for missionar- ies of “any century,” to borrow a phrase from Paul Lindell – and a powerful plan for our century, too.