People often ask me: “Is such and such a good idea in missions?” The reason for this question is that there are thousands of different things going on in the missions world today. It makes sense why pastors are at a loss in sorting through the good and bad. How do we know what amounts to “good” missions?
Several friends and I are presently working on a series of books on church-centered missions. In that series, we define missions as church planting across significant barriers, barriers that are usually linguistic, geographic, and cultural, or some combination thereof.
Yet contained within that big picture are four different channels we can view as “missions.” Before I explain all four, which is the goal of this article, we should remember that not every strategic missions effort is an “ends of the earth” effort. This is where John Piper helps us in distinguishing between Timothaine and Pauline missions.[1] Timothy and Titus left their homeland and went to places where churches already existed in order to strengthen and build them up. Timothaine missions, therefore, are when you leave your homeland, culture, language, etc. to strengthen existing churches and establish more churches in areas where the
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