Does sending missionaries still make sense today?
When I first joined Mission to the World, a relative asked me, “With all of the needs that we have here in the United States, why are we sending missionaries overseas?”
It’s a fair question. In my hometown of Colorado Springs, less than 20% of the population attends a church. Our neighbors, our coworkers, and our friends need the gospel.
But here is the staggering difference.
Colorado Springs has a robust Christian influence including 2,500 members of PCA churches. Hundreds of other evangelical churches serve the metropolitan area and thousands of staff work for locally based ministries like Focus on the Family and The Navigators. Similarly, places like Chattanooga, Tennessee, have over 8,000 PCA members. We aren’t lacking “missionaries” in most U.S. cities—we simply need to be more effective at deploying the army of believers already sitting in the pews.
However, that is not the case in many regions of the world. Recently, I visited a city of several million people in the Middle East. If all the Indigenous Christians of that city were to gather together, they would fit comfortably in the choir loft of many of our churches. Throughout Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, there are entire communities without a single gospel-proclaiming church or even a single professing Christian.
Sadly, the story in Europe is not much better. One of our workers in Scotland (the mother country of Presbyterians) told me that he has never met a Christian “in the wild,” that is, outside of a church context. This is not surprising because only 3% of the people in Scotland are evangelical Christians.
The needs are great in our own cities and communities in the United States. It is true we must be serious about engaging our neighbors with the gospel, and we can do that. We have all the resources we need to reach our communities for Christ. However, in much of the world, there is no viable gospel witness. That is why we must send missionaries to the world. As the Apostle Paul writes,
How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” (Romans 10:14-15).
We are not choosing between reaching our neighbors and reaching the nations—we are called to both. And especially in areas where Christ is not yet named, we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to send.
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Mark Bates
Mark Bates is MTW's senior director of Missions Engagement. Mark has a B.A. in Greek from Bryan College and a master's degree from RTS. He served as youth and singles pastor at Orangewood PCA, and founded University Presbyterian Church in Orlando. From 2007-2021, Mark served as senior pastor of Village Seven PCA in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Mark and his wife, Tricia, have three daughters.
