Sermon quotes on mission
Sam Alberry
People don’t enter a church; the church enters a building.
Why Bother with Church? And Other Questions About Why You Need It and Why It Needs You, Good Book.
David Bosch
Mission [is] understood as being derived from the very nature of God. It [is] thus put in the context of the Trinity, not of ecclesiology or soteriology. The classical doctrine of the missio dei as God the Father sending the Son, and God the Father and the Son sending the Spirit [is] expanded to include yet another “movement”: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit sending the church into the world.
Carl E. Braaten
This trinitarian grounding of mission should make clear that God and not the church is the primary subject and source of mission. Advocacy is what the church is about, being God’s advocate in the world. The church must therefore begin its mission with doxology, otherwise everything peters out into social activism and aimless programs.
The Mission of the Gospel to the Nations
Tim Dearborn
Lack of interest in mission is not fundamentally caused by an absence of compassion or commitment, nor by lack of information or exhortation. And lack of interest in mission is not remedied by more shocking statistics, more gruesome stories or more emotionally manipulative commands to obedience. It is best remedied by intensifying peoples’ passion for Christ, so that the passions of his heart become the passions that propel our hearts.
Tim Dearborn
God desires that we be like living signs of the kingdom, to provide visual aids of what life will look like one day when the kingdom is here fully. We will not bring the Kingdom or build the kingdom, but our privilege is to live out previews of “coming attractions,” revealing what this Kingdom will look like.
Darrell Guder
Mission is the result of god’s initiative, rooted in god’s purposes to restore and heal creation. “Mission” means “sending,” and it is the central biblical theme describing the purpose of God’s action in human history. God’s mission began with the call of Israel to receive god’s blessings in order to be a blessing to the nations.
God’s mission unfolded in the history of God’s people across the centuries recorded in scripture, and it reached its revelatory climax in the incarnation of God’s work of salvation in Jesus ministering, crucified, and resurrected. God’s mission continued then in the sending of the spirit to call forth and empower the church as the witness to God’s good news in Jesus Christ.
Darrell Guder
The term “missional” is an attempt to move the discussion beyond too-narrow definitions of mission as merely one among the various programs of the church, and to find ways to think about the church’s calling and practice today in light of the fact of the multicultural global church, what Archbishop Temple famously called “the great new fact of our time.”
To describe the church as “missional” is to make a basic theological claim, to articulate a widely held but also widely ignored consensus regarding the fundamental purpose of the Christian church. Rather than seeing mission as, at best, one of the necessary prongs of the church’s calling, and at worst as a misguided adventure, it must be seen as the fundamental, the essential, the centering understanding of the church’s purpose and action.
Darrell Guder
Our greatest priority, particularly in our theologies of salvation, should be to rejoin the benefits of salvation with the responsibilities and call to the saved to enter into God’s mission in the world.
Darrell Guder
In North America, what might it mean for the church to be such a city on a hill? to be salt? to be a light to the world? It means, first of all, that the inner, communal life of the church matters for mission.
Darrell Guder
It has taken us decades to realize that mission is not just a program of the church. It defines the church as God’s sent people. Either we are defined by mission, or we reduce the scope of the gospel and the mandate of the church. Thus our challenge today is to move from churchwith mission to missional church.
Steve Hawthorne
You can do something other than working with God in His purpose, but it will always be something lesser, and you couldn’t come up with something better.
Jonathan Hayashi
Christianity detached from mission leads to either lifeless moralism or joyless legalism.
Ordinary Radicals: A Return to Christ-Centered Discipleship.
Alan Hirsch
If we’re going to impact our world in the name of Jesus, it will be because people like you and me took action in the power of the Spirit. Ever since the mission and ministry of Jesus, God has never stopped calling for a movement of “Little Jesuses” to follow him into the world and unleash the remarkable redemptive genius that lies in the very message we carry. Given the situation of the Church in the West, much will now depend on whether we are willing to break out of a stifling herd instinct and find God again in the context of the advancing kingdom of God.
Alan Hirsch
You can do more with 12 disciples than with 1,200 religious consumers.
Walter C. Kaiser Jr.
Up until the 1950s the subject of the missionary movement was referred to as “missions” in the plural form. In fact, the term “missions” was first used in its current context by the Jesuits in the sixteenth century. But the International Missionary Council discussions in the 1950s on the missio- Dei convinced most that the mission of the Triune God was prior to any of the number of missions by Christians during the two millennia of church history. Consequently, since there was only one mission, the plural form has dropped out of familir usage and the singular form, “mission,” has replaced it for the most part. Nevertheless, most churches and lay-persons hang on the plural missions.
Mission in the Old Testament: Israel as a Light to the Nations.
Abraham Kuyper
There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!
qtd. in Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Eerdmans, 1998)
David Livingstone
God had only one Son, and He was a missionary.
Winkie Pratney
Every Christian a missionary; every non-Christian a mission-field.
Jamie Arpin-Ricci
This emphasis is directed primarily at the here and now, as Christ-embodying communities of active love in the midst of the world. All of creation is caught up in the restorative work. The mission of God’s people is not simply directed at saving people’s souls from a bad life-after-death into a good life-after-death, but it addresses and hopefully touches the injustice and violence around us—poverty, racism, sexism, economic exploitation, war, environmental destruction—where salvation, justice, and peace can merge.
Vulnerable Faith: Missional Living in the Radical Way of St. Patrick.
Jamie Arpin-Ricci
The mission of God’s people is not simply directed at saving people’s souls from a bad life-after-death into a good life-after-death, but it addresses and hopefully touches the injustice and violence around us—poverty, racism, sexism, economic exploitation, war, environmental destruction—where salvation, justice, and peace can merge.
Vulnerable Faith: Missional Living in the Radical Way of St. Patrick.
Ed Stetzer
Being Missional means actually doing mission right where you are. Missional means adopting the posture of a missionary, learning and adapting to the culture around you while remaining Biblically sound.
John R.W. Stott
We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God.
Scott W. Sunquist
Mission is from the heart of God, to each context, and it is carried out in suffering in this world for God’s eternal glory
Jeff Vanderstelt
The mission of Jesus is yours to participate in. It has always been God’s intention to choose normal, everyday people, and to show his amazing power and glory through them. He’s not looking for the most impressive person because he already is that person.
Saturate: Being Disciples of Jesus in the Everyday Stuff of Life.
Craig Van Gelder
Mission (if it is biblically informed and validated) means our committed participation as God’s people, at God’s invitation and command, in God’s own mission within the history of God’s world for the redemption of God’s creation.
The Missional Church and Leadership Formation: Helping Congregations Develop Leadership Capacity
Craig Van Gelder
Mission is related to the sending work of God. The Son is sent by the Father. The Spirit is sent by the Father and the Son. To gain a proper view of the church we must understand that God is active in the world. The redemptive reign of God is dynamically leading the church into a power encounter with the forces of evil.
The Essence of the Church: A Community Created by the Spirit, Baker Books, 2000.
N.T. Wright
…left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with entrophy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there’s nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present…is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.
Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church.
Christopher J.H. Wright
Fundamentally, our mission (if it is biblically informed and validated) means our committed participation as God’s people, at God’s invitation and command, in God’s own mission within the history of God’s world for the redemption of God’s creation.
The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative, InterVarsity Press.
Christopher J.H. Wright
The Great Commission is an expanding and self-replicating task, not a ticking clock for the end times.
The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative, InterVarsity Press.
Christopher J.H. Wright
The whole Bible is itself a missional phenomenon. The writings that now comprise our Bible are themselves the product of and witness to the ultimate mission of God. The Bible renders to us the story of God’s mission through God’s people in their engagement with God’s world for the sake of the whole of God’s creation.
The Bible is the drama of this God of purpose engaged in the mission of achieving that purpose universally, embracing past, present and future, Israel and the nations, “life, the universe and everything,” and with its centre, focus, climax, and completion in Jesus Christ.
Mission is not just one of a list of things that the Bible happens to talk about, only a bit more urgently than some. Mission is, in that much-abused phrase, “what it’s all about.
G. Thompson Brown
Mission . . . must take the form of servanthood. Only in this way can it escape the charge of arrogance.
Darrell L. Guder
Daily life becomes a discipline of asking how one may move more squarely into the realm of God’s reign and how one may welcome and receive it into the fabric of one’s life this day more than ever before.”
Hugh Halter
In other words, how “missional” you are is largely determined by the extent to which your people model the life, activities, and words of Jesus.”
Hugh Halter
If you want a safe faith, you will never really know God because He doesn’t hang out in the shallow end much.
Steve Hawthorne
You can do something other than working with God in His purpose, but it will always be something lesser, and you couldn’t come up with something better.
Alan Hirsch
You can do more with 12 disciples than with 1,200 religious consumers.
Alan Hirsch
It’s not so much that the church has a mission, it’s that the mission of God has a church.
Alan Hirsch
Every Christian is a sent one. There is no such thing as an unsent Christian.
Alan Hirsch
A missional theology…applies to the whole of life of every believer. Every disciple is to be an agent of the kingdom of God, and every disciple is to carry the mission of God into every sphere of life. We are all missionaries sent into a non-Christian culture.
Alan J. Roxburgh
What is God up to in our neighborhoods and communities? How do we join with what God is doing in these places? Church questions are a subset of these far more important questions.”
Missional (Allelon Missional Series): Joining God in the Neighborhood
Alan J. Roxburgh
More than anything else, [missional church] is about a people who are continually asking questions about what God is up to in the world about them and experimenting in all kinds of ways with joining God in the mission of the kingdom.
Christopher J. H. Wright
I may wonder what kind of mission God has for me, when I should ask what kind of me God wants for his mission.
Paul DeNeui
As a missionary … it was always comforting to realize that I did not bring God along with my physical and cultural baggage to my new host country.
Christian Communitas in the Missio Dei,” in Ex Auditu: Christianity’s Engagement with Culture, vol. 23 (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2007), 94.
Gary Thomas
Jesus never appears desperate, manipulative, or controlling, as if when people didn’t agree with him, his feelings would be hurt. He is mission-focused and others-centered to his deepest core.
When to Walk Away: Finding Freedom from Toxic People, Zondervan 2019.
Paul David Tripp
God never calls you to a task without giving you what you need to do it. He never sends you without going with you.
Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family (Crossway, 2016).
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