Despite the persecution, ironically, the plan to eradicate religion in the People’s Republic of China may have contributed to the greatest explosion in Christianity ever.
And what of Christian witness? I am very hopeful. The Christian witness is especially vibrant in places like Singapore and South Korea and China. We may be witnessing the greatest explosion of Christian life and faith ever in Christian history—both in the recognized three-self church and in the underground house church.
Keeping in mind that The Great Commission is not a command to go, but a command for all to make "reproductive" disciples, world evangelism could be, and should be, accomplished by believers obeying our Lord's command to make "reproductive" disciples.
World evangelism started with only one believer. What if, instead of starting with one believer in the entire world, every local church and every mission started with one believer who would win and disciple to reproductive maturity one person each year? The result would be reproductive explosion, not starting with one believer and spreading around the world, but explosive reproduction occurring simultaneously at thousands of places around the world.
What interests us most is the fact that in failing to exploit the power of the sodality, the Protestants had no mechanism for missions for almost three hundred years, until William Carey proposed “the use of means for the conversion of the heathen.”
His key word means refers specifically to the need for a sodality, for the organized but non‑ecclesiastical initiative of the warmhearted.
Thus, the resulting Baptist Missionary Society is one of the most significant organizational
developments in the Protestant tradition. It set off a rush to the use of this kind of “means” for the
conversion of the heathen, and we find in the next few years a number of societies forming along
similar lines: the LMS and NMS in 1795, the CMS in 1799, the CFBS in 1804, the BCFM in 1810, the ABMB in 1814, the GMS in 1815, the DMS in 1821, the FEM in 1822, and the BM in 1824—twelve societies in thirty‑two years.
Once this method of operation was clearly understood by the Protestants, three hundred years of latent energies burst forth in what became, in Latourette's phrase, "The Great Century."
The "final era" of frontier missions lean on the insights of Ralph Winter, who has identified three major eras in Protestant missions history. The Third and final era, according to Winter, is that period, sparked by Cameron Townsend's and Donald McGavran's pioneering efforts in the 1930's and continuing at least to the year 2000, characterized by a focus on the establishment of church movements among "hidden" or unreached peoples at a cultural (but not necessarily geographic)
distance from existing church and mission outreach. Once such church movements have been established, the distinctively missionary task is over, yielding to the "follow-up" initiatives of
national churches in evangelism, renewal, and social concern.
A biblical Greek word, kairos, describes a unique season of possibilities. By sovereign grace, God
has chosen that your life be woven into “the kairos hour" for world evangelism. When Scripture uses
this word, it is usually in reference to a brief, specific season of God’s favor.
Using this word, Jesus refers to a “time of harvest” in Matthew 13:30 (NKJV) and Paul speaks of a “due season” for reaping in Galatians 6:9 (NKJV). And in such kairos seasons of opportunity, the Bible urges us to be “redeeming the time” (Eph. 5:16 NKJV). One translation reads, “Buy up the opportunities.”
Emerging world missions is a phrase recently popularized to avoid the often-offensive phrases third-world missions and non-Western missions. People in Latin America might ask, “How do you define Western?” They also live in the West.
The practical definition of emerging world missions is: Encouraging our sister national churches around the world to participate in world missions, not because they have a strong economy, but because Jesus said to.
The practical definition of emerging world missions is: Encouraging our sister national churches around the world to participate in world missions, not because they have a strong economy, but because Jesus said to.
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