Worship begets worship. Missions is simply the process by which worship multiplies—the doxology of one congregation becoming the doxology of the nations. Which means the diagnosis for missionary apathy is not first a diagnosis of zeal but of worship.

In the summer of 1727, a ragged community of religious refugees gathered on a Saxon nobleman’s estate called Herrnhut.

Lutherans, Reformed, separatists, and Moravian exiles had lived together on this crowded property for five years, and their bickering over doctrine and practice seemed ready to tear it apart. Then, during a communion service on August 13, the Spirit of God fell on them in power. Within weeks, the Moravians organized a round-the-clock prayer watch that would continue, hour by hour, for a hundred years. 

Five years into that vigil, two of their number—a potter and a carpenter—boarded a ship for the Caribbean to bring the gospel to enslaved Africans, having declared themselves willing to become slaves if that was what the work required. We rightly honor William Carey as the father of modern missions, but the Moravians were planting mission stations around the world before Carey was born—and it all began in a prayer meeting.

Through the years, many have pondered John Piper’s famous line that missions exists because worship doesn’t. He is right. Worship is God’s goal for the world, and missions is a temporary necessity—the church’s labor to gather worshipers where there are none.

But there is another sense in which the opposite is also true: missions exists because worship does.

When God’s people faithfully and fearfully worship the triune God in spirit and in truth, walking in obedience out of gratitude for his all-sufficient grace, the natural overflow is joy carried to the nations.

This is true because it follows the order of love. When we are faithful in the small and near things first—loving our families, our churches, and our neighbors—those loves do not stay contained. They overflow outward in concentric rings, from household to congregation to community to the ends of the earth. When the fruit of Christian love is borne in this proper order, we may prayerfully expect that our charity will extend beyond our immediate circle.

Our capacity as created beings is limited, but God’s is not. The one who multiplied a few loaves and fishes to feed the multitudes is able to take the ordinary loves of people and places and deploy them to reap his harvest among the nations.

To speak of Christian living—or of Christianity itself—apart from love is a contradiction in terms.

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