In John 16, Jesus tells his disciples that He must leave them, and the Comforter (who we often call the Holy Spirit) will be sent to them. He knew that while He remained in His human form, He would continue to be bound by the rules of gravity and physics that He set up. He could only be in one place at one time, ministering among local groups of people. This was part of the restriction He placed on Himself in order to live among us as model and Savior.
The Holy Spirit, being spirit, is not so bound. He can be (and is) everywhere at once. He can carry the prayer of a man in Ohio to the throne room of Heaven and bring wisdom and strength to a woman in Africa as a response to that prayer, faster and clearer than any email transmission. At the same time, He can reach Texas, Canada, Puerto Rico, China, and the remotest camp in Siberia. That is just some of the awesomeness of our everywhere God.
When Jesus left, He didn’t tell His disciples to lean back & let God do all the work. Rather, He gave two commands:
1. Go wait & pray until the Holy Spirit fills you with power.
2. Go out to every nation, teaching them what I taught you.
Finally, He gave this promise: I will be with you, always.
From that point, the joint work of God and dedicated humans began to reach around the world. They worked locally in whatever place their bodies were in – ships, synagogues, prison cells, private homes, gardens, and town squares. They worked globally by sending messages, often in the form of written letters, to communities well beyond their physical locations. We still have some of these letters, as the Holy Spirit both inspired and preserved them, in the collection of books we call The Bible. As we sit to read, Jesus continues to keep His promise, and the Holy Spirit continues to breathe into the words and whisper into our understanding. We are thus inspired to reach our communities in our time, with parables and models more familiar in our very different cultures, while God and His Word remain the same. That, too, is part of the awesomeness of our everywhere God.
Technology has provided a way where one person can reach several places at once. From hand-copied scrolls to the printing press to the blogosphere, the message of Redemption has been around the world and back several times. Still, we have not reached everyone. Some tribes, some locales, and some languages & cultures are still unaware that the Creator became a creature to redeem His broken creation. For this reason, the work of missions continues in two avenues.
In one, which I’ll call direct missions, missionaries learn the language and culture of a people group then live among them and share the gospel, person to person. God did this when He entered our world as Jesus, both Divine and Human. Missionaries go to various parts of the world and join communities to be Jesus’ representatives in those places. It’s the generally understood paradigm of missions, since most of the time, missionaries would pack their belongings and disappear onto another continent & write letters back home. It’s the familiar way, but not the only way…
In the other, which I’ll call indirect missions, missionaries learn the language and culture of a people group then use translation or creativity to develop resources for those people. God did this when He inspired and preserved the scriptures through the Holy Spirit. Missionaries may work from an office in familiar surroundings or an office in the foreign field, alone or in concert with others, to produce texts, radio broadcasts, or video resources that can be used in many places at once, multiple times over. The work Rachel Saint did in Ecuador lives beyond her as the tribes there read the Bibles she translated. The story is repeated with the names Livingstone, Wycliffe, Aylward, Tyndale, and others.
Both are necessary. Without resources that can be distributed and reused, we are limited to the time and place one person can reach. Without personal interaction and someone to model Christ, the resources remain unread and unknown on a shelf. Sure, the Holy Spirit is everywhere at all times, but God has declared His choice to work in partnership with us, so we need to be active in both avenues.
When God called me, He told me first that I would bring broken people to Him, and second that I would be a Missionary to the Deaf. Beyond this, He has said that He will be with me, and He has shown Himself faithful to provide, in ways that could only be Him. He provided my current assignment(s), both that I might serve, and that I might grow.
One of my assignments is joining Silent Blessings Deaf Ministries in the development of resources that bring the gospel to deaf children in ways that are linguistically and culturally appropriate for them. We have letters that tell us the ministry has reached children in India, a place I never expect to visit personally. We have a letter that tells us a little girl began praying once she learned that Jesus understands Sign Language. If not for resources developed by this ministry, these children and more would continue to believe that the gospel of Jesus is not for them.
Occasionally we go out and interact directly with kids. This summer, our team was involved directly with 250 kids in 5 states, testing our new VBS curriculum. I hugged many of them, chatted with several of them, and visited some of their parents, in both languages. We also spent a lot of time before and after those tests in our offices and studio, developing and enhancing that curriculum. We expect it to reach nation wide, giving churches the much needed capacity to bring the gospel to the deaf children in their neighborhoods. We now have the opportunity to join a partnership of deaf ministries to develop a Sunday School curriculum which will be made available to churches around the world and to remote homes and communities via the internet. These accessible resources will reach where, and when, we cannot.
I am also working directly in the community, among adults who grew up without access to such resources. I enter their world, where I can find them, with an eye toward representing and introducing them to Jesus. It may mean asking for a drink of water, or telling stories of love and forgiveness to one or more people who are starving for grace. It could be sharing my testimony of the God who guides, provides, and calls His own to trust Him farther than their eyes can see. It may mean taking the time to listen to their heart, though it is expressed through their hands.
I’ll be honest with you, my heart is to do the direct mission work – to live among and communicate with people in the deaf culture, to participate in those glorious moments when God and human work together to bring a new soul into His eternal kingdom. That’s my dream….but like Jesus, that binds me to the location and time that my body is in. Between those moments, I will do the indirect mission work – to develop resources so that many more people can experience and participate in God’s ministry of redemption.
Local and global, direct and indirect, through personal contact and resource development… That is what it means to be on mission with our everywhere God.