Welcome to our first question and answer section for 2025. I will be asking a question to my very special friend Martin, whom I have known over many years and sharing with us a little bit of his life story and journey of faith.
Hi Martin: I had known and ministered with your parents, who were full time Missionaries, for many years. I was greatly impressed by their commitment and dedication in working and serving as Missionaries in many countries throughout the world. They also worked with other colleagues and local Christian’s in promoting and sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ and establishing lots of church fellowships for new Christians to grow and mature in.
Thank you Wikipedia for this photo of William Carey a Baptist Missionary for forty one years in India.
I wonder Martin what was it like to grow up in such a family environment and did you find it hard or easy to establish your own Christian faith? Also how did you find it in seeking to know what work and career you wanted to pursue and how eventually you entered also into Ministry and Missionary work?
What was it like establishing your own marriage and family life and have your children and grandchildren embraced the Christian faith and even continued a family missionary calling? Lastly in the western and wider world the work and endeavours of Missionaries has been hotly disputed as a disrupted force.
What do you think the benefit and legacy of Christian Missionary work has been in the last two hundred years and is there still a role and place for contemporary Missionaries and what form should and does that take? Thank you Martin
Martin Replies:
Many thanks Graham for the opportunity to share on the first Q & A section of 2025 and yes our friendship goes back a long way!
My parents were missionaries in India for a number of years before returning home where they served at the headquarters of a large missionary organisation. Our home was in the same building so I grew up with missionaries from around the world frequently passing through and I still remember some of the stories they told of the wonderful work going on and how they were seeing lives transformed and churches being established in faraway countries.
I grew up in a wonderful environment and God had always been a part of my life but it wasn’t until teenage years that I began to realise the need for personal faith and commitment. Over the following years deeper commitments were made and I continued to grow in the knowledge of the Lord and my love for Him.
I suppose from a very early age I just assumed I was going to be a missionary. That was the only thing I knew! I even remember telling the careers teacher at school that’s what I was going to do. Probably a first for her! I remember even in those teenage years I did feel a real sense of the Lord’s calling in that direction and making a commitment that if He wanted me to serve as a missionary I was happy to go.
However, as time went on and my studies were finished, I got a job, made some friends and the commitment to serve began to fade! Life was getting very comfortable until one day I was reading the passage where the Lord was calling those first disciples and he told them to leave their work and come and follow Him.
I knew the Lord was reminding me of what I had previously committed to! Through Bible study and the wise counsel of church leaders and good friends the commitment and desire to make Jesus known in places where so few profess Him began to grow.
Three years of Bible College training followed and it was there that I met my wife Isobel. Together with our year-old daughter, Joanne, we headed out to Bolivia where I spent the next ten years teaching in a Bible school training young Quechua Indians as Pastors/church workers who today are serving in some of the remotest of places high in the Andes. Isobel was involved in leading ladies Bible study groups where thirty to forty ladies frequently gathered in our home to study together.
Thank you pixabay.com La Paz Andes in Bolivia
Our son, James, was born in Bolivia and as time passed we knew changes would come as we knew we would have to return home for the children’s high school education. Both kids are happily married now with their own families and involved in local churches.
About the same time I began to think about a bigger picture. In Bolivia I worked alongside a Denomination with over 1000 churches, several Bible Colleges, numerous well-trained workers and an uncomfortable thought began to develop that there were still vast stretches of humanity where there were no churches, no Bibles, no missionaries and millions of ‘unreached peoples’.
We moved home and I began to work with Platform 67, a mission agency based on Psalm 67 that reads. ‘May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations’.
When we approach a piece of scripture like this it’s important to ask what God requires of me. He blesses us in order that we might turn those blessings around for the good of His fame and reputation among all peoples. Then we notice those most beautiful of words in verse three: ‘May the peoples praise you, Oh God, may all the peoples praise you.’
The Bible goes to extraordinary lengths to make us aware of the word ‘peoples’ with an “s.” In fact if you underline that little “s” in your Bible you’ll find it two hundred and thirty times and it underlines the primary reason why we do mission because God is so magnificent, so great and so mighty he will not settle until he is known everywhere and that’s among every people group because that’s what God is all about.
Over the past two hundred years missions have undoubtedly changed. For many of those years we were the missionaries. We sent out workers to the ends of the earth with their Bibles and they faithfully preached the Good News to those who had never heard.
They did a good job because the church was planted, took root and began to grow. These days many churches around the world are alive and dynamic and growing. Today they have caught the missionary vision and are sending missionaries around the world which is quite a legacy.
Not everything however has been perfect! The danger was not just in proclaiming the Gospel but in exporting our culture as well that resulted in Western style churches being established. These days, in many ways mission work has changed. It’s much more common now to work alongside local believers, to help and encourage and supply resources for them to be used in their own cultural setting which is reflected in their worship and church practise.
Thank you nationsoutreach.org
So Graham as you have asked, are missions still relevant in the 21st century? Should we still be going overseas to proclaim the Good News? It’s fairly easy to fall into the trap of thinking, well God has saved me and now I’m on my way to Heaven and everything is fine and that’s true but there’s more to it than that.
When God saves he does it with such great purposes and this is important because this is where we get our justification for our missionary efforts. Missions isn’t some kind of overseas aid programme we’re involved in, it’s not some budget to be tacked on to the side of church finances we do it because God is worthy of praise, by all peoples everywhere. That’s the theology that underpins our missionary activity.
God is worthy of praise everywhere, every tribe, every tongue, every nation and that’s why we do mission. The truth is 99% of people sitting in our churches are unlikely to share the Gospel in Iraq or Afghanistan or Myanmar and yet God, in his wisdom has determined that there must be believers from every ethnic group and God has determined that you and I have a part to play in that. That’s what we sign up to when we become followers of Jesus to do something amazing by making his name great among the nations.
So let me put it like this. If the job of missions is to be completed it requires more than sending out preachers and teachers and occupational therapists and builders. It requires all of us to assume that risk of putting our lives on the alter for our Lord Jesus Christ whatever that entails for us so that we care less about ourselves and our wellbeing, our wealth and reputation and more about God’s fame and glory and honour around the world.
May each of us allow that mission of God to define our lives in this coming year 2025.
(2024 Christian Missionary Statistics)
Selah: (Pause to think calmly on what has just been read) and check out A Time to Worship
Graham
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