Sending out Missionaries Without Creating Spiritual Elites

Recently, our church commissioned three members to be sent out as missionaries to strategic global cities in Europe and South America where they’ll plug into local churches and work to strengthen churches, pastors, and advance the gospel through the local church. Being newer in my role, I’ve only gotten to spend marginal time with them before they move but by all accounts, they’re amazing people. They love Jesus and are loved by our church. All three of them were discipled, trained, and even employed by our church. It always hurts when great people leave but it’s a real joy to send them out with the gospel to cities that are desperate for healthy churches and missionaries.

But our church isn’t sending them because they’re amazing people or because they reached a higher tier of Christianity. We’re sending them because their ordinary discipleship has taken shape into a particular missionary calling recognized by our church.

Why does this matter? 

Most churches that care deeply about the Great Commission genuinely want to honor the missionaries they send out. We commission them publicly, tell their stories often, and hold them up as examples of sacrificial obedience because, well, they are, and we should!

Yet over time, the missionaries we send can begin to occupy a unique spiritual category in the church’s imagination. I’ve been particularly guilty of thinking this myself, describing them as “radical,” “fully surrendered,” “set-apart,” or “especially called.” Meanwhile, for the average church member, remaining in their vocation, loving their neighbors, ministering to their coworkers, serving weekly in kids ministry, raising children to follow Jesus, or persevering in a difficult local ministry can feel second tier, or even unimportant.

If we’re not careful, this can inadvertently create a culture where we celebrate others being sent out to engage in God’s mission but never actually see ourselves as

sent. A common symptom of this culture is that when missionaries are being commissioned you hear something like “I could never do what they do.” Most of the time it’s well intended but underneath that statement is another assumption: “The Great Commission belongs to them in a way that it doesn’t belong to me.” But when we imagine the responsibility of missions as the work of unusually gifted or surrendered Christians, everyday believers naturally relocate Great Commission responsibility onto specialists.

My point isn’t that we need to stop celebrating the missionaries we send or lower the standard Scripture calls them to. We must champion the sending of tested, qualified, obedient disciples who are accountable to the local church and committed to planting churches and making disciples where Christ isn’t yet known.[1] But we’ve got to learn how to rightly celebrate and send missionaries without unintentionally communicating that missionary service is the highest (or only) form of Christian faithfulness. Doing so requires a clearer biblical vision of the interdependence of missions and discipleship, the understanding of witness, and the church’s missionary identity.

Missions begins with obedient disciples, not Amazing Christians.

Missionaries are not Christians who have moved on to a higher level of spirituality. They are disciples whose obedience has taken a particular geographic and cultural expression. They still have doubts, wrestle with sin, and need the common grace found in belonging to a local church. This doesn’t, however, eliminate the reality of particular callings, gifting, or church affirmation for sending out missionaries, but the natural outflow of the gospel making deep roots in our lives is that we take it wide in our world.

Jesus doesn’t give us the Great Commission by identifying a special class of Christians. He simply speaks to His disciples:

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples…” Matt. 28:18–19

The command to “make disciples” flows directly from a prior reality: belonging to Christ, under His authority. The New Testament consistently presents mission [2] as the outward movement of discipleship, not its replacement. In other words, missions and discipleship are inextricably linked. Divorcing the two leads to something like a theologically informed bystander (discipleship without mission) or an overzealous and under formed practitioner (mission without discipleship).

If you’re in Christ, you have been called to participate in the Great Commission. Your discipleship has a missional shape to it and that’s by design. We must reorient ourselves to see engaging in God’s mission as the ordinary expression of faithful discipleship to Jesus and what it means to exist as his people. If engaging in God’s mission is the outworking of discipleship, then witnessing isn’t simply one activity disciples engage in, it’s part of what it means to belong to Christ.

Witness is who we are as disciples of Jesus, not just what we do. 

We often think of witnessing as something we do when we’re feeling courageous. For example, sharing the gospel with a neighbor, giving a testimony, or engaging in some evangelistic activity. While these are accurate representations and it would be an overcorrection to imagine witness as less than activity, the New Testament presents witness as something more than just activity (Acts 1:8, 1 Peter 2:9-12, Matt 5:14-16).

Followers of Jesus don’t simply perform certain acts that we call witnessing, we are witness-bearers. Our witness flows from our identity and calling as the body of Christ. [3] In the Old Testament, God’s people bore witness to the one, true God by living as a showcase community through their worship of Him and observance of His law (Deut. 4:5-8, Isaiah 43:10-12). Their witnessing activity flowed from their identity as witnesses.

Jesus ties this idea together in Matthew 4. In his interaction with Peter and Andrew, Jesus tells them “Follow me and I’ll make you fishers of men.” Jesus marries the call to his salvation with the call to his mission as witnesses. [4] The Apostle Paul echoes this reality, reminding the Corinthian church that anyone in Christ is an ambassador for Christ and minister of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:17-21). To belong to Christ is to represent Christ.

What this doesn’t mean, however, is that because every Christian is a witness, every Christian is a missionary. This distinction matters. Calling every Christian a missionary can unintentionally diminish the local church’s practice of recognizing and sending out qualified missionary candidates. While Scripture reserves the missionary role to those set apart by the Holy Spirit and recognized by the church (Acts 13:1-4), it never restricts witness to that role.

We don’t have to call every Christian a missionary in order to get them motivated to participate in the Great Commission. That’s precisely why understanding the weight and significance of witness is so important. [5] You may never be commissioned from a platform as a missionary, but if you’re in Christ, you’ve been called to bear witness to the one with all authority in heaven and on earth to make disciples of all nations.

For example, my friend Joe is a leader at a food bank that serves hundreds of thousands of people every month, providing meals to those facing food insecurity across the region. He sees his role primarily as partnering with God to minister to his coworkers and employees, who otherwise wouldn’t come to a church. He still has deadlines to meet, funds to raise, staff to manage and lots more but he is actively engaged in God’s mission while serving in an executive role.

But witness isn’t just a responsibility for individual believers. Missionaries aren’t solo acts. We bear witness and participate in God’s mission communally as a people. We don’t simply have an individual call to live on mission, we are part of the church that has been sent by God into the world. We are a witness-bearing fellowship.

Missionary is the Church’s Identity, not just the Missionary’s Identity. 

One of the best correctives to spiritual elitism is not to simply redefine what a missionary is but to recover the local church’s own missionary identity. God has sent the church into the world, participating in His mission to make Christ known among all peoples and in every sphere of life.

David Bosch, a 20th century missiologist, argued that rather than the Church being the sender, she is the sent one. The church isn’t just an organization that sends out missionaries. Before she ever sends a missionary, the Church herself is sent. Her mission is not secondary to her being; the church exists in being sent and in building itself up for the sake of its mission, which has been given by God. [6] Missions is not simply relegated to a department of the church, but woven into the very fabric of who she is. Because the church has a missionary identity, missionaries are not the local church’s spiritual elite but rather one visible expression of the church’s shared missionary identity.

Although not every Christian will share in the missionary vocation every Christian shares in the missionary identity of the Church and this is good news. [7] It means that no matter how insignificant we may think our lives are, God uses our ordinary obedience as witness to a watching world.

Many have heard of famous missionaries like William Carey, Adonirum Judson, Hudson Taylor, and David Livingstone, who have taken the gospel to the corners of the earth, but heaven also rejoices over the faithful men and women in our churches we’ll never read about in books, yet who are making disciples right in their midst, working normal jobs, raising families, and leveraging their lives for the sake of the gospel.

Christian maturity isn’t measured by if you’re sent as a missionary, but by whether you obey Christ wherever He has placed you. So before you exalt the next missionary your church commissions, ask yourself:

Am I waiting for someone else to fulfill the Great Commission, or am I embracing my own calling as part of the church to bear witness to Christ wherever I am?

We don’t need more spectators who cheer from the pews while others are sent. We need congregations convinced that the whole church exists for God and His mission, joyfully sending some while faithfully witnessing in the communities we find ourselves in.