Day Seventeen: What is a “world missionary”?

So what sets those the church typically calls missionaries apart from the rest of the church? It is not that they have a calling (the missionary part), but what they are called to (the world part). World missionaries or what the contemporary church calls missionaries are those who are called to the world.

 Again, this terminology is never used in Scripture. Instead, the Bible uses phrases like “appointed as a prophet to the nations” (Jeremiah 1: 7) and “chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles” (Acts 9:15) to describe those people whose mission is the nations.

The life of Paul gives us more insight into the process of someone becoming a world missionary. First, there has to be a call to it. For Paul, this happened on the road to Damascus at the time of his conversion (Acts 26:15-28); it was confirmed several days later by Ananias (Acts 9:15). This pattern of confirmation is a continuation of the Old Testament law, which says that “in the mouth of two or three witnesses let every trust be established.”

Then Paul starts serving God right where he was--- in Damascus (Acts. 9:20-22). If you cannot serve God where you are, you will never be able to serve God in whatever area you believe is your mission (Matthew 25:14-30). 

Next, Paul submits himself to the church authorities and obeyed their directions even when it seemed to go against what he knew his calling was (Acts 9:26-29). Today, if the church leadership seems not the embrace someone’s calling, that person just leaves and starts his own church.   

One of the things the church leadership told Paul to do is return to his hometown of Tarsus. Paul basically disappeared from the picture for about ten years there, while God was preparing him for the mission he had already been given. This pattern of preparation is not popular in the church today because it requires patience (ouch!) and death to our own desires and expectations of what this calling will look like (double ouch!). 

Often, we confuse ambition with calling and our own dreams with God’s dreams for our lives. Or we tangle the two up. God relieves a portion of the dream to us, and we try to “help” Him fill in the “missing” pieces with our own ideas. Or we take God’s mission and try to fit into our timeline. These don’t work. If it is God’s mission for my life, it is His responsibility to fulfill it; mine is to obey what He tells me to do. Paul had that yielded attitude that even if God’s direction didn’t seem to be leading him to God’s mission for his life (to Tarsus instead of the Gentile world); he obeyed because He trusted God.

When Paul shows back up in the picture, he is still serving faithfully wherever God put him--- now it is in Antioch.  If nothing else is learned from Paul’s time of preparation, it is the importance of faithfully serving God wherever He chooses to put you. At Antioch, Paul’s calling is again confirmed and this time, the church sends him out. Notice that he is not called out of the church, but he is sent out from it as an extension of its ministry. Never does Paul separate himself from the accountability or authority of a home church family. Finally, Paul is released into the fulfillment of the calling God gave Him years before. Finally in our timeline; in perfect timing in God’s timeline.