Christians have long referred to the “ordinary means of grace.” Churches should not work to make disciples through extraordinary means, through dynamic and exciting new techniques never mentioned in the Bible. Rather, they should use the ordinary, everyday practices like preaching, teaching, singing, praying, and practicing the ordinances.

Origin, Means, and End of Missions

In Scripture and throughout history, churches have been central to the missions enterprise. Neither movements nor parachurch agencies nor unaccountable individuals are the God-ordained method—churches are. Indeed, they are:

• the origin of missions, equipping, training, and sending missionaries into the harvest;
• the means of missions, functioning as Jesus’s discipleship program for new believers everywhere; and
• the end of missions, since local congregations serve as the focal point of God’s glory on earth.

We can summarize this by saying churches are the means and ends of missions. This phrase provides one of the foundational planks in the church-centered missions paradigm.

Our Doctrine of Salvation and the Church

Why are the church and missions so intertwined? Because the gospel makes us church members. The church is part and parcel of our very doctrine of salvation. Listen to Peter, and notice the two parallel lines:

Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. (1 Pet. 2:10)

Usually, when Christians tell their testimonies, they focus on that second line. “I was living a life of sin,” we say, “but then God showed me mercy.” What a glorious story that is.

But it’s not the whole story, Peter says. Something else happens in that exact same moment: When we receive mercy, we are also joined to a people. Conversion is corporate. It adds you to a family through adoption.

Maybe we could tell our testimonies like this: “I was living a life of sin, and I wanted nothing to do with other Christians. But then God saved me. He showed me mercy and added me to his family.”

Paul tells the same story in Ephesians 2. The first half focuses on our vertical reconciliation with God by grace: “But God…raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places” (Eph. 2:4, 6). Yet that vertical reconciliation brings with it a horizontal reconciliation too. This is Paul’s focus in the second half of Ephesians 2: “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Eph. 2:13). Notice that this horizontal reconciliation occurred in the same place and at the same time as the vertical reconciliation: when Christ shed his blood on the cross.

Again, conversion is corporate, and the gospel makes us a people. Christ accomplished this—past tense.

This means the Christian life is the church-member life. It means that if missions is all about the gospel, then it’s also all about the church. If the gospel and the church are bound up together, then so are missions and the church. This is why all the authors writing in this church-centered missions project agree that Christianity is church shaped.

Downplaying the Church

Sadly, the Christian life in the West has become more individualistic over the last sixty or seventy years. How? Churches have adopted the devices of the marketplace to attract customers, and a “customer” is hardly the same thing as a “family member.” Several generations of missionaries have grown up in these kinds of churches. Seminaries, too, teach pastors and missionaries to adopt pragmatic, marketplace methods. And what we manufacture at home, we export overseas.

As a result, modern missions often overlooks the church. First, missionaries overlook the church for their own lives and discipleship. Many have a sending agency but not a sending church. Once missionaries have been sent, agencies sometimes ignore their church experiences on the field. In extreme cases, agencies sometimes prohibit missionaries from joining a church on the field. People can do something as dramatic as cross an ocean, obtain a residence visa, begin to acquire the local language…and yet forsake the churches that already meet in their new home. Such neglect sadly hinders the missionaries’ own growth and endurance in the faith. It also hurts their parenting and their marriages.

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