What Does it Mean to be Sent?

Zach Bradley • Feb 22, 2016

The sending church, not missions agencies, send missionaries. So what does it mean to be sent?

This post is the first in a three-part series exploring the role of the sending church in missions. Skip ahead to Part II or Part III here. The following is an excerpt from The Sending Church Defined, written by Upstream Collective. It can be downloaded as a free e-book or purchased in print.

Nothing Moves Without Being Sent

What makes you go? Not in the “Go, therefore” or “Daddy, I gotta go!” sense, but just at the most basic level. Go. Move. Do something. Your brain sends signals to your body and it stands. Pretty simple, you know, except for the dozens of muscles and bones it takes working perfectly together, not to mention 60,000 miles of blood vessels escorting millions of cells to the right places just so you can be on your feet.

If that’s not mind-blowing enough…what moves the brain in the first place?

Why start a missions article with science? Well, thanks to CBS’s “The Big Bang Theory,” geeking is hip. And it reflects perhaps humanity’s biggest question: what started all this movement? Some say it was a bang. Others look to an old idea referred to as the cosmological argument.

It says basically that nothing moves without first being caused to go. If we traced every movement in the history of the world back, there would have to be something that began the action, a “prime mover.” From its first words the Bible points out that this prime mover is God.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. (Genesis 1:1-3, ESV)

God is a Sender

In the beginning, there’s just God. No heavens nor earth. No people. No ‘once upon a time’. Only the Triune God being God for eternity past—which honestly makes my brain hurt. We don’t know much about what that looked like, but Jesus gives us a hint in his prayer to the Father from John 17:

Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.[footnote]John 17:24, NIV [/footnote]

The Father, Son, and Spirit expressed glory and love in perfect union. It was an exchange that came straight from the heart of who he is. This is crucial to understanding God not as One who needed to create something, but as One who had it all within himself.[footnote] Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2012), 19-20. [/footnote]

From that setting he makes the story as we know it go. How does he do it? The same old expression, this time extended outside himself. He emanates. He initiates. In a sense, he sends.

He sends his Spirit to hover over the waters, ready for a word to bring it all to life through the Son. Like so many things in Genesis 1-2, this sets a pattern for how God will keep his story rolling. As a poetic commentary celebrating God’s rule over creation, Psalm 104:29-30 describes the crazy way that everything waits on him to move:

When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth.

God Sends Us

Not simply creating a man and woman, God commissions, or sends, Adam and Eve into the Garden of Eden to “fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over [it]” (Genesis 1:28). Forget peasants, says T. Desmond Alexander, these guys entered the story as royalty, “God’s viceroys [who] govern the earth on his behalf.”[footnote]T. Desmond Alexander, From Eden to the New Jerusalem: An Introduction to Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2009), 76. [/footnote] So it makes sense that the imago Dei, [footnote] Imago Dei is a Latin phrase that means “image of God”[/footnote] the basic way that people mirror God, makes for little sent ones.

And this is not just God’s ideal; even after sin corrupts the world he continues to send his Spirit, word, angels, law, messengers, judges, priests, kings, and prophets—not to mention his own Son. Paul writes,

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons, Galatians 4:5

So it should be no surprise when the Son looks to his own and says, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you” (John 20:21). The information age certainly has its privileges, namely the common knowledge of what many died longing to see— how the missio Dei5 actually works.

The Sender sends the Sent One who sends the Spirit (Acts 13:4) who sends the apostles (note the Greek, apostolos, meaning “sent one”) who start a chain reaction of sent-ones. The sending only returns to its original form when you track to the end of the story, where you will find not a garden of two, but a city of countless.

There the eternal glory and love of the Triune God will no longer be extended outside himself because the people of God will be hidden in Christ as “his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:23). The mission will be complete. New Testament scholar Andreas J. Kostenberger sums it up better than I could:

We have understood the notion of ‘mission’ as intimately bound up with God’s saving plan that moves from creation to new creation, and as framing the entire story of Scripture. It has to do with God’s salvation reaching to the ends of the earth: that is, his gracious movement in his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to rescue a desperately needy world that is in rebellion against him and stands under his righteous judgment. Clearly the notion of ‘sending’ is central to any treatment of mission. The Lord of the Scriptures is a missionary God who reaches out to the lost, and sends his servants, and particularly his beloved Son, to achieve his gracious purposes of salvation.[footnote] Andreas J. Kostenberger, Salvation to the Ends of the Earth: A Biblical Theology of Mission (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2001), 268-269. [/footnote]

God, out of the overflow of his character, is a Sender. We then, by nature, are sent. The imago Dei makes it pulse in our veins. The missio Dei moves us to get on our feet and go. So that’s why we go. We’re sent.

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Loving Like Jesus Cross-Culturally (Part 1)

By Megan Lunsford • 23 Apr, 2024

When seeking to serve cross-culturally with an authentic love for others, there’s no better example for us than Jesus. If we sat around a table and threw out the question, “How do we love like Jesus?” I think we would have several commonalities as we respond. For example, Jesus loved all people right where they were. He loved those who were deemed the least, those hardest to love, or those who were His enemies. These are all beautiful realities of the heart of Jesus. When we step into relationships, it can be easier to take on the warmer, more gracious gestures of Jesus’ love, especially in cross-cultural relationships. Think about it––when doing life with those who look and act differently than us, we are already out of our comfort zones and would rather keep things as simple and familiar as possible. But there are other facets of Jesus’ heart we often overlook that can transform us and others even more into His likeness. Jesus is love because God is love. Everything Jesus did was out of love; it’s the mere definition of who He is. As followers of Jesus, He calls us to the same: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” (1 John:7-12) Every display of love we offer to others is an opportunity for them to encounter the ultimate love of the Father. That’s a pretty big deal! In this article, we’ll look at three expressions of Jesus’ love that we tend to overlook when engaging others cross-culturally. (Next month, we’ll look at three more.) 1. Jesus loved sacrificially. Everywhere Jesus went, crowds followed Him. We even see times in Scripture where Jesus had plans to step away for time alone but those who were hurting found Him and He had compassion on them and stayed with them. Can you imagine rarely having any time to yourself but, instead, constantly being surrounded by crowds of people wanting help from you? Jesus loved sacrificially. He welcomed all who came to Him with love and compassion, never turning anyone away. “When He saw the crowds, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” (Matthew 9:36) In the same way, we can make room in our lives for Jesus to bring sacrificial interruptions which, in His eyes, are orchestrated encounters to transfer His love to others. It can be tempting to be so “on mission” that we are full steam ahead and find ourselves frustrated when the Holy Spirit sends an interruption into our path that we feel we don’t have time for. Or, perhaps, we have scheduled a meet-up but it’s the norm in another culture to be 30 minutes or an hour late. We anxiously think through how it will affect whatever we have planned next. While it’s normal to feel a little stressed, what if the very "interruption” standing in front of you was really a divine appointment sent by God? Or what if that person running late experiences how peaceful and gracious you are in adapting to their culture and therefore, they can encounter a beautiful display of Jesus’ love? To truly represent Christ, we should remain ready and willing for each assignment the Lord sends into our path, no matter the cost or how much we will have to re-route our day. He is always a hundred steps ahead and will work all things for His glory and our good. 2. Jesus loved by discerning each situation well. Think about how many situations Jesus had to respond to on a daily basis. We read in Scripture that there were lines of people waiting to be healed by Him, talk to Him, hear His teachings, or simply touch the hem of His robe. Jesus was fully dependent on His Father to discern each situation before addressing it. “Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner.” (John 5:19) Another temptation we can have when in a relationship with those God has sent us to is to think we already know the solution or what God wants to do before we’ve even asked Him. We believe we are full of knowledge, so we just pull from the bank we have stored within and go with it. However, when we access what is familiar to us as our default, we risk missing out on a God-given solution that might truly be the key to unlocking whatever challenge is in front of us. What does this look like when interacting with others? We can simply ask, “God, what is on Your heart for the person standing in front of me?” Then we listen and respond as He speaks. When we make it a daily habit to pause and hear God’s heart for each situation before responding, we are guaranteed to be effective in loving those around us. He knows the heart of every person that will cross our paths. Imagine how impactful we can be if we first lean on His wisdom and discernment before moving forward. 3. Jesus loved by speaking truth. Most of us are familiar with the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. If we are honest, this conversation makes us a bit nervous as none of us would be comfortable with Jesus calling out intimate details of our lives that we would prefer to hide. But Jesus went further than just airing her dirty laundry. He offered her the hope of the Gospel and a relationship with Him - a divine fulfillment that could never be found in an earthly relationship. Jesus modeled a powerful example of loving others well cross-culturally. He took the low place and spoke truth, truly out of love––speaking to her heart from His. Like Jesus, our goal in sharing the truths about Him and His Word is to bring hope and satisfaction through Him alone. When we speak truth from Scripture, we are calling others higher into all God has for them. The tricky part here is we should avoid speaking truth if it isn’t first fueled by compassion. If it merely comes from a place of judgment, condemnation, or self-righteousness, it will fall flat 100% of the time. But if it truly comes from love, you are likely to not only win a heart back to the Father but, like the story of the Samaritan woman, even an entire village! If you see someone living outside of God’s best for their lives, ask God to show you your heart before engaging theirs. Once your heart is properly postured, you can speak truth out of an overflow of God’s love and trust Him for a transformation in their lives.

Hospitality, Help, and the Hope of the Gospel

By Suzanne Pearson • 16 Apr, 2024

TEAM Canada provides warm welcome and trusted friendships for diaspora populations living far from their native countries. As TEAM Canada workers Peter and Ruth (names changed) drive from their home to a nearby community center, they pass numerous apartment buildings and townhouses. Most of the families who live there are immigrants. They’ve left their countries of origin due to political unrest, trauma, and other difficulties. They’ve left family, friends, homes, jobs, and personal wealth behind. They search for peace, justice for the oppressed, and rest from fear and weariness. And as they adjust to a new country and a new language, they are often very isolated from others around them. “The sad reality is most immigrants are never even invited inside a Canadian home,” says Ruth. Peter and Ruth and their team try to change that reality. For the last nine years, the team, which includes workers from partner organizations as well as volunteers, has held English classes at the community center. Three days a week, over 60 students from more than 20 countries come together to learn English as well as to fellowship together and receive practical help in assimilating to a new normal. Meeting Needs and Building Trust That practical help may come in the form of procuring furniture, clothes, or dishes for newcomers, assistance with creating a resume and finding a job, or teaching people how to navigate Canadian laws and the medical system. As these tangible needs are met, relationships are built. “We invite them into our homes for meals and games,” Ruth shares. “We take them on hiking trips, picnics, outings, and out for coffee.” This is particularly important in this type of ministry because most immigrants come to Canada from cultures that value hospitality. Conversely, Canadians do not typically prioritize hospitality and consequently many newcomers feel lonely and isolated. Inviting folks to various gatherings and outings allows the team to spend extended time hearing people’s stories, struggles, hopes, and dreams. When she speaks about building friendships, Ruth’s heart for the people she serves is evident. “Hearing their stories, it’s easy to love them, and many have become close friends,” Ruth says. “We recognize the value of steady one-on-one relationships.”