What Are The Top 3 Priorities In Global Mission Today?
These top three are taken from the thinking of Dr. Ralph D. Winter. I add in some of my own thoughts as well in this updated look at an important question.
Priority One: More Mission Mobilizers
We need more pastors, churches, and movements focused not only on their own cities, but also on the places and people groups that still have little to no access to the Gospel in this generation.
We need more missionary education at the local level. Only a crash education can stem the downward spiral of those who want to become missionaries, and mission supporters, but don't know where to begin.
This is why the Perspectives course, which has impacted well over 200k people globally, is such a strategic resource for local churches and movements such as the prayer movement.
Ralph Winter is famous for saying,
"Anyone who can help 100 missionaries get to the field is more important than one missionary on the field."Ralph Winter
This is the work of the mission mobilizer.
And this work is critical to seeing a mission renewal movement emerge again in our day, from all nations to all remaining unreached people groups.
Priority Two: Missionaries staying where they are, turning to mobilize the overseas churches for missions.
Winter says that mobilizing oversees churches for frontier mission is the greatest single under-utilized resource for missions in the world today.
He also writes, "Our missionaries need to be not just church planting but mission planting missionaries." New missionaries can and should focus on mobilizing workers in and from emerging cross cultural contexts.
Missionaries can be sent to help build new mission movements and strengthen existing ones. They can challenge movements to look to the regions and peoples beyond the current outreach of the national movement and to also consider new ways of approaching and contextualizing the Gospel.
Priority Three: Missionaries sent to the pioneer fields, at home or abroad, but especially at home.
Winter points out that most missionaries cannot do this type of work in their home countries due to local churches being unwilling to support them reaching truly unreached people groups in their own back yard.
There are over 360 unreached people groups in the United States and 180 in Canada. It will take a special kind of evangelism to reach them.
Beyond our own home countries, there are still over 7,000 unreached people groups totally nearly 3 billion people who have little to no access to the Gospel in this generation, and only this generation can reach them.
The Church's Greatest Priority
The unreached peoples of the world must become the Church's greatest priority.
We have more potential manpower, resources, and ability to travel than ever in history, what we don't have is the concerted focus from the Global Church.