Understanding our Mission

This is the first in a series of blog posts which will explore the various facets of the Church's mission, how our role in mission can be understood, and the terms used to describe our mission.


Our world knows a lot about mission. Successful businesses form mission statements, international spies are sent on secret missions, and NASA is planning a mission to the planet Mars. There are also military missions, diplomatic missions, and fact-finding missions. Each of these missions consists of someone or something being sent to accomplish a specific task.

In the church, we also talk a lot about missions. We speak of missionaries who work on overseas mission fields and of congregations that reach out missionally in their local contexts. We support missions at home and abroad. We assist rescue missions and develop mission statements. Our teenagers go on mission trips and raise money for mission projects.

With so many interpretations of the term mission in the church alone, it is vitally important that we in the church understand our mission in order to better engage in it. If we fail to understand our mission, then the ministries of the church are repeated for the sake of tradition or routine, rather than to accomplish our mission. In such cases, mission becomes one of many programs of the church rather than the driving force behind all of our programs. We may continue unhealthy practices which are not rooted in God’s Word and God’s nature. One such belief is that mission originates in human dedication rather than in God’s nature. Another is that the goal of mission is to make Christians in other countries worship like Christians in America.

Without a proper understanding of our mission, we may limit missions to apply only to work overseas, rather than recognizing how all of us everywhere are to be engaged in mission in our own contexts. On the contrasting side, being engaged in mission in our own context could eclipse the need for supporting overseas missionaries.

Over the next few weeks, I will be posting a series which can help us as the Church to understand how we can participate in God’s mission. I will do this by exploring the terms “mission,” “missions,” “missionary,” and “missional.” As we will see, how one understands these terms influences how we understand how we are to participate in God’s mission.

A Linguistic Introduction

Merriam-Webster’s Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary provides five definitions (and multiple sub-definitions) of the word “mission.” The first definition given is “obsolete: the act or an instance of sending.”(1) Although the dictionary may consider this definition obsolete in favor of how the term is commonly used in the present, it is from this origin that the study of mission terminology begins. The English term comes from the Latin word mission, which means “act of sending” or “assigned task.” Mission is a derivative of the Latin verb mittere (to send), which comes from the translation of the Greek apostello (also, “to send”) – the same root from which we have the word “apostles.”(2) Thus, by its most basic definition, mission is about being sent, with the goal in mind of accomplishing a specific task. When relating mission to the church, we must ask the following questions: who is doing the sending, who is being sent, and why are they being sent?

1 Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition. 2003.
2 A. Scott Moreau, “Mission and Missions” in Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions. ed. A. Scott Moreau (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 636. See also Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition and Charles R. Gailey and Howard Culbertson, Discovering Missions (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 2007), 9.