The landscape of

Reveal Answer

missions has undergone massive changes in the past few decades. Here are a few examples of the upside down, global shift in Christianity and missions:

• Christianity Today reported that 85 percent of the members of Yale University’s Campus Crusade for Christ chapter are Asian, whereas “the university’s Buddhist meditation meetings are almost exclusively attended by whites.”
• The World Christian Encyclopedia recorded that more Anglican Christians worship in Nigeria in any given week than all the Episcopal and Anglican churches of Europe and North America combined!
• An examination of World Christian Trends reveals that there are now more evangelical Christians in Nepal than in Spain.
• The historic William Carey Memorial Church in Lester, England, is now a Hindu temple, while the church in India, the traditional home of Hinduism, now sends out over 41,000 cross-cultural missionaries.
• China can now boast of the fastest growing church in the world, with an estimated 16,500 new Christians every day.
• Today there are nearly half a billion Christians who are crossing cultural boundaries with the gospel from the Majority World.
• Each week fifteen thousand missionaries, mostly from Africa and Asia, are evangelizing communities in Great Britain.

Are we discouraged to hear about these shifts?

• We talk a lot about

where we are. But we have also talked about the danger of defining the success of ministry apart from faithfulness, namely in terms of

Reveal Answer

and results.
• How can we avoid

Reveal Answer

and fight against a sense of

Reveal Answer

when we get shut of local or national conversations because of our faith, or we become marginalized as we truly seek to follow Christ? Is God still at work? Can we be confident that He is moving?
• The doctrine of Missio Dei, the Latin term for Mission of God, will serve as the final part of understanding the Imago Dei, or Image of God.

What have we learned about the Image of God?

• God

human beings in His image, which means that all human beings were created to know God personally and, as a result, serve as His representatives to Creation by living according to their purpose to cultivate and spread His glory.
•

Reveal Answer

corrupted the image of God and cursed the purpose of human beings.
• Jesus comes as a the

Reveal Answer

image of the invisible God, providing a means of redemption and an example for us to follow.
• Now, as individuals are

Reveal Answer

to God the Father through Jesus, they are filled with the Spirit, which propels them out into Creation to fulfill God’s original purpose for their lives.

What is the Missio Dei, or the Mission of God?

• We just finished saying that the original purpose or mission that was given to Adam was to gradually subdue the earth as he and Eve grew their family. Through them, the

of God was meant to be made known throughout the earth.
• We typically talk about

Reveal Answer

as trips that we take to preach the Gospel.
• But David Bosch corrects: [the church’s idea of] mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God. God is a missionary God. “It is not the church that has a mission of salvation to fulfill in the world: it is the mission of the Son and Spirit through the Father that includes the church.” Mission is thereby seen as a movement from God to the world; the church is viewed as an instrument for that mission. There is church because there is mission, not vice versa. To participate in mission is to participate in the movement of God’s love toward people since God is a fountain of sending love.

How does the Mission of God relate to the Great

Reveal Answer

?

• When Jesus came, He spoke of the Kingdom of God in a way that we had not previously heard explicitly in the OT. However, the

of the Kingdom of God included justice, mercy, the upheaval of the world’s values and the establishment of the reign of God over individual lives. This reveals the mission of God and how part of His mission (missio dei) to advance His kingdom by communicating dignity to individuals and connecting them with the local church.
• Missio Dei bows before the sovereign hand of God moving through

Reveal Answer

to understand that we are moving with Him, even when persecution comes against the church. Our mission is ultimately His mission, not the other way around.
• So, God’s mission includes, but is not limited to the Great Commission.

Missio Dei and the Church’s Local Ministry

• The church in America has been stagnant and

for a while. The decadence of American culture, while being harnessed to advance the Kingdom of God, has not ultimately brought about better disciples.
• But God is at work throughout the world and His word is advancing and growing, in spite of the church’s stagnation or resistance from governments and communities.
• Our faithfulness is measured by how we respond to the

Reveal Answer

in front of us >> Matthew 25