Challenges on the Journey

After engaging in hundreds of conversations, we were able to identify seven “challenges” people face when considering a role in missions. These seven challenges are: Faith, Finances, Family, Fit, Future, Fight and Fear. The purpose of examining these barriers is to examine how God is carefully managing our journey. How do we avoid getting in the way of His goals for us? How have others dealt with all these obstacles?

A study of the challenges of the Christian life should not be easy. The Apostle Paul promised it would be a fight. But any time we reach for something that is a big deal, it will be a battle – mostly against ourselves. God is at work in us, but we are always growing toward Christ or moving away from Him. We all live with degrees of misplaced loyalty, confusion, and temptation. The way of the cross is difficult, and taking Jesus seriously means looking honestly at how we fall short of God’s best hopes for us and seeing how much we need God’s grace. Christ is our saving grace. Like breathing, it is a constant activity to recommit ourselves to the journey of faith, rediscovering, again and again, the life-giving purpose offered freely by Jesus.

Here is a 2020 article on the status of the Great Commission. We have a long way to go before it is completed.

The bottom billion around the world still fall into the category of the unreached. “We are not even close,” says Marv Newell, Senior Vice President of Missio Nexus, the largest Evangelical mission network in North America.

Of the thousands of culturally linked people groups around the world, the Gospel has not spread to all of them, and really is not even close to doing so. Especially since the Great Commission is not about people just hearing the Gospel, but being discipled in it as well. “And that is far from the status of so many people groups. Jesus was the one that said, go and make disciples of the nations. And how do you make them? By going, by teaching, and by baptizing. Those go hand in hand for us to consider that they have actually been made disciples.” [See the full article on Mission Network News …]