What are the advantages of long-term missions?
How can I know if God is leading me to become a missionary?
Are there missionaries who have gone even though initially they had no desire to go?
» more related questionsQ: How much should I consider the needs of the world and my gifts?
A: Recognize the need. Realize God has especially equipped you.
When I was trying to decide what to do with my life I began to pray and meditate. But I didn't hear a voice and I didn't see a verse jump out of my Bible. I simply received a growing realization that God was leading me to be a missionary. I think some make too much out of this concept of special direction to be a missionary.
Guidance is seeing a need and realizing that God has especially equipped you to meet that need. You discover a growing desire in your heart. And as you pursue that desire, you find a peace that surpasses understanding. His direction is confirmed as He opens the door and you walk through it. God's direction is confirmed through your action.
Then when you follow God unreservedly you give up control. Whatever it costs, be bold enough to do whatever God wants you to do. The bottom line is not where you'll serve, but if you'll go when He directs. God doesn't interview applicants for the position of missionary; he drafts.
Guidance is seeing a need and realizing that God has especially equipped you to meet that need. You discover a growing desire in your heart. And as you pursue that desire, you find a peace that surpasses understanding. His direction is confirmed as He opens the door and you walk through it. God's direction is confirmed through your action.
Then when you follow God unreservedly you give up control. Whatever it costs, be bold enough to do whatever God wants you to do. The bottom line is not where you'll serve, but if you'll go when He directs. God doesn't interview applicants for the position of missionary; he drafts.
A: Ask God to use you and watch Him open doors.
Guidance is very personal. At a Christian university I began to learn about missions and felt a strong desire to take the gospel to where it had never been given (Romans 15:20). Therefore, I basically asked God if I could become a missionary. However, while I didn't feel supernatural guidance, the interest certainly must have come from God.
After asking if I could be a missionary, I felt no negative response, so I simply began heading that way and God opened doors. I had to get appropriate education, some practical ministry experience, and join a mission. So from the time I really began pursuing missions until we joined WEC, we spent four years preparing.
After asking if I could be a missionary, I felt no negative response, so I simply began heading that way and God opened doors. I had to get appropriate education, some practical ministry experience, and join a mission. So from the time I really began pursuing missions until we joined WEC, we spent four years preparing.
A: God’s priority is to use your gifts for His purposes.
God normally calls us along the line of our giftedness, but the purpose of giftedness is stewardship and service, not selfishness. Giftedness does not stand alone in helping us discern our callings. It lines up in response to God's call alongside other factors, such as family heritage, our own life opportunities, God's guidance, and our unquestioning readiness to do what he shows.
This is also why it is wrong to treat God as a grand employment agency, a celestial executive searcher to find perfect fits for our perfect gifts. The truth is not that God is finding us a place for our gifts but that God has created us and our gifts for a place of his choosing--and we will only be ourselves when we are finally there.
To the extent that through worship, listening to God, and discovering our giftedness we grasp what God is calling us to be and do, there will be a proper clarity in our sense of calling. But to the extent that we blithely rush to be explicit, we betray our modern arrogance and forget the place of mystery in God's dealing with us.
In many cases a clear sense of calling comes only through a time of searching, including trial and error. And what may be clear to us in our twenties may be far more mysterious in our fifties because God's complete designs for us are never fully understood, let alone fulfilled, in this life.
This is also why it is wrong to treat God as a grand employment agency, a celestial executive searcher to find perfect fits for our perfect gifts. The truth is not that God is finding us a place for our gifts but that God has created us and our gifts for a place of his choosing--and we will only be ourselves when we are finally there.
To the extent that through worship, listening to God, and discovering our giftedness we grasp what God is calling us to be and do, there will be a proper clarity in our sense of calling. But to the extent that we blithely rush to be explicit, we betray our modern arrogance and forget the place of mystery in God's dealing with us.
In many cases a clear sense of calling comes only through a time of searching, including trial and error. And what may be clear to us in our twenties may be far more mysterious in our fifties because God's complete designs for us are never fully understood, let alone fulfilled, in this life.
A: Consider the greatest need.
I encourage you to look overseas: the need is so much greater, just about any way you put it, then in the west. Nutrition? A homeless person in Los Angeles gets more calories of quality food per day than the average person in Calcutta. Justice? Fifteen million children are sold into sexual slavery each year, primarily in Asia. Access to the gospel? There are more Bibles, Christian books and radio stations in North America than we know what to do with. You are never more than a mile from a church in any city in the USA. Jesus is doing amazing things in an amazingly desperate world.
A: No special guidance is necessary.
If people are going to draw lines of division between different kinds of service, what preposterous reasoning leads them to think that it requires less divine sanction for some to spend his or her life easily among Christians than it requires to go out as a missionary to the unreached?
Is it not absurd to suggest that a special guidance is necessary to become a missionary, but no direction is required to gratify personal ambitions?
There is something wonderfully misleading, full of hallucination and delusion in this business of missionary guidance. With many of us it is not a missionary call at all that we are looking for; it is a shove. There are a great many of us who would never hear a call if it came.
Is it not absurd to suggest that a special guidance is necessary to become a missionary, but no direction is required to gratify personal ambitions?
There is something wonderfully misleading, full of hallucination and delusion in this business of missionary guidance. With many of us it is not a missionary call at all that we are looking for; it is a shove. There are a great many of us who would never hear a call if it came.
