The following post is written by an East-West missionary on our short-term mission trip team.
Often times when we talk about missions, we think of the most unreached people groups in the hardest-to-get places.
In fact, when I talk with churches about mobilizing their congregations for missions, the context always revolves around going to the most remote places to share the gospel. This is a good thing.
Reaching the hundreds of millions of people who have never heard the Name of Jesus with the gospel is a critical task in fulfilling the Great Commission. Whether we go or send, I believe foreign missions absolutely needs to engage the populations that need exposure to Christ for the first time.
As someone who serves with East-West to mobilize churches and believers to those fields, I can attest to the inspirational feelings of witnessing God stir up believers to engage in His mission to the unreached. It’s a truly beautiful thing.
But can I confess something? I’m completely failing at home.
There are twelve houses on my street and I’ve only met one of my neighbors. I have one friend who doesn’t know Jesus, and I hang out with him maybe once a month. I live in a city overflowing with coffee shops, microbreweries, hole-in-the-wall restaurants and small business start-ups, yet I can’t tell you the name of a single person who works at any of these places.
As great as sharing the gospel and making disciples overseas is, there are people who need Jesus just as much in my own community, and I am severely dropping the ball here.
When Christ commissions his disciples to be His witnesses in Acts 1, he starts with Jerusalem. Before I’m a missionary to the unreached in India, I’m called out to be a missionary in my city and neighborhood.
The root of my sin here is not idleness or inaction. I’m not talking to my neighbors about Jesus because honestly I don’t truly love my neighbors.
I’ll venture to conclude that my failures to share the gospel always stem from a fundamental lack of love for people—for the very neighbors God has sovereignly placed in my city.
For those of you who resonate with this—I assume I’m not alone—rather than mustering up the courage to share the gospel more in order to check off your “evangelized to my neighbor” box and feel less convicted, let’s take our first steps toward the Father and ask Him to fill us with a kind of love for our neighbors only He can provide.
It’s only by the love of Jesus that we’ll be compelled to share the love of Jesus.
