Question: When everything a church does is considered “missional“, we find that defining “missions” is difficult. For the sake of clarity, please describe your definition of “missions”.

Answer: The word “mission” comes from the Latin word for sending. So, something is missions if someone is being sent out to do gospel work. We actually should be sending people out for this work (Matt 9:38; Acts 8:14; 13:1-3). Normally, we send people out to areas that have yet to hear the gospel, don’t yet have a healthy church, or need extra support. With that said, I do believe we can talk about local missions as a church–sending our own out into the neighborhood on an afternoon to evangelize the lost by reaching out to contacts we have made during events, or even street preaching. Christ said “go” (Matt 28:19), and we need to be going into our local community if we hope to keep sending missionaries out into rest of the world.

This question, and my answer come from a recent application.