We Don't Know What We Are Doing

This week, our team of 8 gathered in a room, having signed up to travel to the other side of the world to serve in the Philippines. We asked ourselves, “What do we imagine the Lord will have us do?” The answer was unanimous. We don’t know what we will do, but we know the Lord called us to go.

In modern day missions, we are used to a model where people sign up for a short-term or long-term trip with a set agenda, tangible goals, and expected outcomes. Granted, rarely do things go exactly as planned. Yet still, we enter into endeavours under an expectation that we will return with a shinny report on the number houses we built, gospel presentations we gave, and hearts that were saved for Christ. Do you know that this is largely a western mindset and not necessarily a biblical one?

Throughout the entirety of scripture, we see God’s heart for missions. From his first charge to Abram to “leave your native country...and go to the land that I will show you”, to his scattering of the Israelites throughout the known world, to Jesus’ call to go into all the world to preach the Gospel, to the Apostles charge to preach from Jerusalem to the Ends of the Earth, the Lord has this grand plan to bless all the world by sending His people to share His good news with everyone.

One common theme we see throughout all the instances where the Lord called his people to “go” is he rarely told them what they would be doing -- sometimes he barely gave the specifics on their destination! Since, in recent years, the missionary movement has progressed largely from the western church, we have superimposed our cultural values on top of God’s mission. We value results, growth that can be measured, and reports that assure donors of their return on investment. But God doesn’t promise us we will see immediate results. God asks us to obey and “go”.

The author of the book of Hebrews provides an account of the many people throughout scripture who faithfully followed the Lord’s call. After listing all the ways they obeyed the Lord, he says, “All of these people died in faith without receiving the promises, but they saw the promises from a distance and welcomed them.” (Hebrews 11:13). Did they obey what the Lord asked of them? Yes. But transport their stories into our churches today, and how many saints would we write off as “failures” simply because we were not able to see their results? How many of them would we have not even endorsed their mission in the first place because it wasn’t specific enough. Too many. We see the fruit of their labor now -- some 3000+ years later -- but in their lifetime, the perception could have been much different.

So as our team gathered and determined that our only confidence was in the Lord is calling us to this particular trip, we were encouraged. We are stepping into the unknown in an unprecedented way for this culture but a way modeled well in scripture. The only expectation we carry is that the Lord will show up and they Lord will transform our hearts in the process.

Will we witness God on the move? Absolutely, but not because we came to the Philippines with a killer program to reach people for the Lord. We will simply witness God on the move because he is already moving there, and we are walking into it with eyes ready to see what’s happening. Will we have great stories to tell? I don’t doubt it for a minute, but not because we are anything special. We will have great stories to tell because God loves to write stories using average people who are willing to show up, take risks, and be available to be used by him.

We don’t know what we will be doing, but we know whom we are serving, and that is enough.