Home Outreach Leaders Articles for Outreach & Missions John Piper: God Is Finishing His Mission Now

John Piper: God Is Finishing His Mission Now

The generation just past was one of the most remarkable in the history of missions. Things thought impossible have become reality. For example,

Patrick Johnstone, when queried in 1979 about the most difficult places for gospel breakthrough, named Mongolia and Albania. Today, there are at least 40,000 Mongolian believers. Albania is open and churches are growing. Who among us, 30 years ago, could have envisioned over 100 million Chinese Christians, massive people movements in Iran, Algeria and Sudan, breakthroughs in Mozambique, Cambodia and Nepal, and the beginnings of freedom for hundreds of millions of oppressed in India? Only God! (Operation World, 4)

This recent history is unprecedented not only because of breakthroughs in who has been reached, but also because of who is being sent. Missions is not from the West alone, but from everywhere to everywhere. There has been an explosion of sending countries and sending agencies. Consider these remarkable facts:

1. “Today, there are over 4,000 known evangelical mission agencies sending out 250,000 missionaries from over 200 countries. This is up from 1,800 known mission agencies and 70,000 missionaries in 1980.” (Global Network of Mission Structures)

2. “And nearly half of the world’s top missionary-sending countries are now located in the global South.”

3. “Of the 10 countries sending the most missionaries in 2010, three were in the global South: Brazil, South Korea and India.”

4. “Other notable missionary senders included South Africa, the Philippines, Mexico, China, Colombia and Nigeria.”

5. “The United States still tops the chart by far in terms of total missionaries, sending 127,000 in 2010 compared to the 34,000 sent by No. 2-ranked Brazil.”

6. Looked at another way, not in raw numbers, but missionaries sent per million church members—Palestine comes out on top at 3,401 sent, followed by Ireland, Malta and Samoa.

7. “South Korea ranks No. 5 at 1,014 missionaries sent per million church members, a sign of the continued strength of its missions movement compared to the No. 9-ranked United States at 614 missionaries sent.”

8. “The country that received the most missionaries in 2010? The United States, with 32,400 sent from other nations.” (These bullet points are from a helpful article in Christianity Today.)

This is a fraction of the bigger picture that the Cross conference is a part of. We have no illusions of grandeur. God’s world is massive. And God is infinitely more massive in power and wisdom and goodness. He will finish his mission. The peoples of the world will be reached. And he will use people of many different Christian persuasions to do it, not just Calvinists.

Glory Gone Global

God is passionate for his glory among the nations. He raised Jesus from the dead and exalted him over all “so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow … to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9-11). In other words, God exalted Jesus for the glory of God. Nothing will stop him from having a people who love to ascribe all glory to him in the great work of salvation.

Some theologies are driven more fully by this vision than others. The Cross Conference is a dream come true because this is the engine that drives everything—the glory of God’s sovereign grace in salvation—accomplished, applied, heralded, globally.