As leaders in the church we must insist on maturity that translates into sending our best people. We must send mature disciples that meet the scriptural qualifications of leadership. The scriptures give us clear examples and marks of godliness that a mature disciple must have that equate to us sending our best.
One of my earliest experiences as an overseas missionary was being yelled at by a colleague because I stowed a bicycle in a different spot than he had imagined. Bewildered and confused I knew that night that the Lord had allowed my wife and I to join an immature missionary team. For the next several months the situation got worse as we understood that the lost community around us disliked our team leader due to his offensive and sinful behavior. I can’t forget the day that our team leader got into an open fight with a young man at an event we were putting on. Eventually, this sort of behavior was so bad that it led to our team leaders being deported from the country. It turned out that even a lost society would not put up with foreigners behaving badly in their country.
Looking back it is sad how some of the first Christians to ever enter the area were deported. The poor behavior of our team leader perpetuated the narrative that Christians were crude and immoral people. Though traumatizing to my wife and I, this experience galvanized our belief that we must send mature believers to the mission field that the name of Christ might be praised among the nations. We unwittingly joined a team that had given a poor witness to what it means to be a follower of Christ. Continuing on alone, it took the rest of our term to show and model to the community what a Christian really was. Living through the animosity we were able to speak and model the gospel clearly by the Lord’s sustaining grace.
As leaders in the church we must insist on maturity that translates into sending our best people. We must send mature disciples that meet the scriptural qualifications of leadership. The scriptures give us clear examples and marks of godliness that a mature disciple must have that equate to us sending our best.
Sending our Best
In sending our best we must follow the pattern of scripture by raising up and sending mature, proven leaders to the mission field. We should sacrifice by sending our best that others may benefit. This is the pattern we see from the Church in Acts of sending qualified men to strengthen new works and planting new churches.
In the book of Acts we see that those sent out from the church were godly people of proven worth.1 A pattern is seen where qualified men are sent into new works, new converts are built up in the faith, new people come to faith, and the fruit is a church that is organized in that place. Clearly those sent were strongly vetted for the task. In many cases, men were already serving the church in a pastoral role.2
Teammates then join these elder-qualified men working and serving in invaluable ways. One such couple that joined Paul was Aquila and Priscilla. According to Romans 16 Aquila & Priscilla served so well that all the churches of the Gentiles gave thanks3. Men and women that give themselves to the advance of the gospel that resulted in other churches being born that went on to do likewise.4 This gives us a clue as to what sort of people we should be sending into the mission field. We should sacrifice and send mature disciples.
