Equipping a Generation of Global Leaders
By Jim Jeffery, President of Baptist Bible College, Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, DC, has a guard on duty 24 hours a day. Every hour on the hour, 365 days a year, a new soldier reports. When the new guard arrives, he receives his orders from the one who is leaving. The words are always the same: “Orders remain unchanged.”
That is also true of every generation of believers. Our Lord and Savior left His orders in the Great Commission for every church and every Christ-follower in every generation. If we are going to perpetuate an effective missions strategy, we need to prepare a generation of global leaders who take Christ’s unchanged order as their primary cause. They will be Christ-centered and biblically rooted. They will have convictions regarding biblical truth, character that reflects Christ, commitment to Christ and His global cause, competencies to make specific contributions, and capacity to make a personal difference in the work of missions.
The local church is central to Christ’s global mission. The Savior stated in his words to the disciples, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Mt. 16:18).” The New Testament bears clear witness to the local church’s priority in missions from the day of Pentecost, the church planting missionary journeys of Paul, the epistles written to churches or church leaders, the vision of Christ’s position in the midst of the churches, and in letters to the churches in Revelation 1-3. The local church identifies, commissions, sends, and supports missionaries.
Effective local churches are those that are intentionally equipping global leaders. With purposeful preparation and excellent team leadership, they involve teens and adults in missions trips and short-term opportunities, then follow up with personal and team evaluation. One of my joys as a pastor for twenty-six years was seeing teens, young adults, second-career adults, and senior citizens catch a burden for missions when they were personally involved in a missions trip or short-term opportunity. In order to identify and equip a generation of global leaders churches are creatively emphasizing effective missions, placing missionaries in homes of potential Timothys, sacrificially giving to missions, informing and inspiring with news of God’s actions, encouraging all to read missionary biographies, presenting missions dramas, and having outstanding missionary speakers.
Bible colleges, seminaries, and other Christian colleges need to educate and equip a generation of global missions leaders. They need to provide excellent biblical education to prepare future ministry leaders, and give pastors a global perspective and passion for the work of Christ around the world. They need to prepare missionary personnel for the challenges and opportunities in Christ’s global work today, teach church planters the principles and practices of effective church multiplication in the classroom and in church-planting laboratories, train church members who attend and graduate from our schools to become functioning members of the local body with a commitment to missions, and impart national leaders with theological education to multiply leaders among their people for church-planting movements.
Last summer, through the generous gifts of two families, we were able to put a high-tech missions display in one of the highest trafficked areas of our campus to remind our students of global, great-commission ministry. The video images continually show what God is doing on many fields around the world. The touch-screen monitor links to missions web sites, short-term opportunities, and world missions information. This provides another way in which we can say to our students, “Orders remain unchanged” from Christ regarding the great commission. In what greater way could we make an eternal difference than to raise up a new generation of global leaders?
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