Recently one of our partnering churches asked us to send some comments on the theme for their mission meetings. That theme was The Heart of Missions. We thought many of you would be helped by this. We shared that there are several ways to approach this topic:
1. A Big God has a Big Heart for Missions – God knows the fallen nature and the mess people and the world is. Even though we did not deserve any of it, God sent his Son to be the solution. God loves everyone and has done everything to bring everyone on the planet to Him to worship. (John 3:16)
2. The heart of the church is for Missions. The local church is to be involved in going and sending this marvelous message from God to everyone. As one has said, “sending from everywhere to everywhere.” This is the church of America and the church of Japan.
3. The heart of missions is the sent one’s (missionary’s) love. God sent us to incarnate this love in their language, their customs, and communicate to Japanese heart to heart. Our desire is to love God and share that love with the Japanese. To love the Japanese is to feel their pain, joys, hopes, fears, and struggles and point to them the Jesus of the cross as their answer.
The heart of the missions is sharing the love of Christ with others that they may believe and form their own Christ communities (the church) which worship the one true creator God.
Hope that is helpful. We can write more.