How should funding and sending structures be established? Should the Church spend most of her money at home or abroad? Should people be sent to reached or unreached areas of the world? Or, are all locations equal? How should pastors be involved in sending church members to the nations?
People are making inquiries about the Church in the West. Is the West a mission field? If so, it is unlike anything that has been traditionally labeled a mission field. If the West is a mission field, then how should the Church which operates from a pastoral hegemony function in contexts that demand apostolic work and not pastoral work? What about the role of the Church in the West in a post-colonial age? If the Church is larger and growing at a faster rate in the Majority World, then how should Western churches consider the future of their Kingdom labors? What does biblical partnership look like in the twenty-first century?
I published Apostolic Imagination: Recovering a Biblical Vision for the Church’s Mission Today. My reason for writing is the Church has lost her way in the disciple making task. She has ventured away from the path of the apostolic and continues down a road involving numerous important and good activities labeled missions. The need of the hour is to ask what is the apostolic imagination that influenced much of the first century labors and how does it affect the Church’s global task today?
This article on the fog of missions originally appeared here, and is used by permission.
