Truly understanding the Great Commission

    It's hard to understand what the Bible tells us, even when it is being point blank with us. Jesus said in the Great Commission, that we are called to "go and make disciples". There isn't a cliffnote in there saying that He meant countries that didn't have a sufficient GNP or those who have the worst healthcare, Jesus meant what he said by all peoples and all nations. So why, as Americans, do we often confuse missions with international instead of a domestic task?

   "Somehow we think that getting on a plane to host a children's camp in Africa is doing missions, while hosting a Sunday morning children's program is just "doing church". It is a mistake to lose sight of the fact that the church - wherever it may be - is God's missional vehicle for redeeming the world. Intersecting our faith with real life is about recapturing the church's missional identity." [Mike Tatlock, faith in real life, 61]

   I've grown up in church my whole life, and I never quite understood that a missions' field is wherever God puts you. I thought that it was somewhere far away: in the jungles of the Amazon, the plains of China, or in the grasslands of Africa, that God calls us to give some of our time to helping others know Christ. Apparently I had an adventurer mentality (and still do!) however, my perspective of "missions" has been aligned to cover my geographical position.

   Two years ago I went to on a missions trip with my Christian college group to California and we heard a pastor, who was from South America, tell us how he and others like him were being called to the United States. This stunned me at first because I thought that people were being called from the U.S., not to it. But then I realized that there are people living among us here who need to hear the gospel as crucially as those who are living in nomadic tribes or in skyscrapers in other countries. No one is immune to sin and therefore everyone needs the salvation which is in the blood of Christ.

Next month I am taking a road trip down to Louisiana. I was told that Florida doesn't count as the real South, so this will be my first experience. In a small way, I still feel like the adventurer of my childhood; going to a land that I've never been before, getting to experience things I've only been told of, and capturing it on paper like a sociologist. The Life of the Southerners.