EMQ » April – July 2025 » Volume 61 Issue 2
Topic: New Models of Mission
Summary: In this era of missions, we do not have to move house and jobs to connect with people in other countries. Using social media to respond to questions from people overseas provides an opportunity to make friends and share the gospel. Anyone, at any age and from any background can do this.
By Aaron Myers
When William Carey boarded a ship bound for India in 1793, he rode the wave of technological innovation that had produced the vast expanse of British colonial power. Carey was a pioneer in almost every regard. While we look back on his time and see the vast problems of colonialism, we must understand that Carey in his day, as we must in ours, did the best he could to live in obedience to God’s call to complete the Great Commission. Carey “was an evangelist who used every available medium to illuminate the dark facets of India with the light of truth.”[i]
If you’ve taken the Perspectives Course you will have learned a bit about William Carey, but you’ll also remember that there have been three eras in mission history. The first, initiated by Carey, took the gospel to the coastlands of those places on earth where the gospel was not yet known. The second era, credited to Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission, continued to carry the gospel from the coastlands into the inland areas of the unreached continents of Asia, Africa, and South America. A third era of mission history began with the recognition that these geographical regions were filled with great numbers of people who were from different people groups.
The first two eras focused on where missionaries would go, expanding the vision ever deeper into a world lost in darkness. The third era expanded this vision beyond geographical areas to the actual people who lived in those areas, recognizing that the world was filled with ethnically and linguistically diverse groups of people. These three eras were driven by pioneers who left home and family to respond to the call of God to give their lives to the completion of the Great Commission. One era did not replace another but rather expanded our understanding and vision for our efforts to obey Jesus and make disciples among all nations.
Missiologist Doug Birdsall reminds us that, “The Great Commission is for every church in every culture in every generation. There are no exclusions. But … every church in every culture in every generation must determine the way in which they respond to this responsibility in a way that is appropriate to time and context.”[ii] For the past 200 years, western Christians and now, increasingly, Majority World Christians have been sending missionaries to the geographical places where the gospel had not yet taken root. This was the appropriate response for those times and contexts. In this understanding of missions, the missionaries go, and the local church supports them with prayer and financial support. Missionaries do their work overseas among people who have yet to respond to the gospel. The local church stays busy with ministry and life back home. There is little overlap and few opportunities for a local church to do more than pray for and send money to the missionaries they support. We praise the Lord for the legacy of those faithful missionaries who went and the churches that sent them. The rapid growth of mission sending from the Majority World is a great testimony to the efforts of previous generations.
But now we must work to determine new ways in which we can respond to the responsibility of the Great Commission. These ways are appropriate to our time and our ever-changing context. Globalization, with its movement of people around the globe, and the rise of new technology, have changed the Great Commission context in extraordinary ways. While we surely must continue to send missionaries – and to send more – we must also work to find creative ways to respond to these new opportunities. One of the greatest of these opportunities is found in a largely untapped resource for the evangelization of unreached people groups: ordinary saints who may never cross an ocean. This is the laity of the local church.
The first two eras in mission history focused on where to go. The third era focused on to whom Christians should go. Considering the rise of globalization alongside rapid technological innovation, our world is connected like never before. Perhaps the time has come to consider a fourth era in mission history: mobilization of all Christians.
Samantha[iii] is a recent college graduate who has a heart for the nations and hopes to one day go and serve in the Muslim world. While she needs to work for a few years to pay off school loans, her heart’s desire is to reach Muslims with the love of Christ. Samantha heard about the ministry of Embassy, where we equip and then mobilize followers of Jesus to reach Muslims through one on one, online relationships. After working through our online, onboarding training, Samantha utilized a language exchange app to connect with a young university student from Central Asia. This young lady, Fatma, had English classes and a dozen apps on her phone to help her improve her English but was searching for a native speaker to befriend online. They initially connected through text on the app but then moved their conversation to WhatsApp where they had their first video call, getting to know one another. Samantha found that Fatma wanted to know all about her life, including her faith. As they spent time connecting on video calls and texting in between, it became apparent to Samantha that this young lady was struggling with real questions about life and faith. She had come to doubt that Islam had any real answers for her and was left in a dark void of unknowing, lacking any real hope for a life of meaning. As Samantha began to pray for and then with Fatma, she asked if they could read the Bible together and see if it would provide the answers and hope Fatma was looking for. Fatma agreed and together they began reading chapter by chapter through the book of John. Samantha prayed daily that the words of Scripture would penetrate Fatma’s heart, providing hope and pointing her to the Savior. Fatma was soon enamored, saying, “The passages we are reading are more powerful than the whole Qur’an. I don’t know why but it is coming to me that this is the right way to live and to believe.” Samantha was thrilled to hear this and so pressed on, praying for and reading with Fatma. One day she received a voice memo from Fatma which said, “I love studying with you because I love your energy and your kindness. You’re a wonderful friend and it’s showing me that this religion is making people to be a good person, and you are an example of this. I’m so lucky to have you as a friend and I want to learn how to be a good person and I love this religion, so I want to learn more about it.” Samantha was filled with joy when, a few weeks later, Fatma professed faith in Christ on a video call.
Samantha is an example of the growing opportunities that ordinary saints in local churches have to be a real part of the evangelistic efforts to reach the nations. At Embassy we have stay-at-home moms, engineers, farmers, pastors and, increasingly, retirees serving among Muslims who are living in the geographical Muslim world. For the Muslims we connect with, our volunteers are many times, the first true follower of Jesus they have ever met. They are half a world apart and yet they can share a cup of coffee as they get to know one another and discuss life and, more often than not, faith.
Our volunteers make connections with Muslims online in a number of ways. Secular language exchange sites act as a digital neighborhood where we know Muslims hang out. Many, like Fatma, are there waiting for someone to reach out with an offer of friendship. I recently did a search on one of these apps for Algerians who were looking for a connection with a native English speaker. I found that over 200 had been on the site in the previous 24 hours. This has been the same no matter what country I’ve searched in. While English is popular, Muslims are also looking for native speakers of Korean, Portuguese, French, Mandarin, and many other languages. As they look for friendship and connection on these types of sites, it creates an unprecedented opportunity for those who may never move cross-culturally. Embassy is not an English language ministry; it is a gospel ministry.
Another way we have been connecting with Muslims is through simple Facebook ads that say, “Would you like to practice English by reading and discussing the Bible?” After a short application process, we connect respondents to one of our volunteers. They then begin weekly video calls where they work through a Creation to Christ Bible study. We run these ads in regions where we have partnerships with churches or missionaries on the ground. We currently have 70 active studies going on. The only thing holding us back from more is the lack of volunteers – the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.
Embassy is our strategic effort to mobilize the laity of the local church into the harvest among Muslims. These kinds of connections between Christians and Muslims are happening organically as well. More and more people are connecting online. They also connect in person as the movement of people around the globe increases. Tom is a mechanic and was looking for ways to serve in his local community. He found that he could be a mentor to one of the thousands of new refugees from Afghanistan who had been relocated to his small midwestern city. He now spends a few hours every week helping an Afghan family figure out life in America. Rita is a seventy-two-year-old retiree. She joined our online ministry because she was convicted by the question, “Am I going to crochet my way to heaven?” She volunteered with us. On our orientation call, I was able to open Facebook, search for “crochet Pakistan” and we discovered four private groups of women, online clubs, who love to share the pictures of their handiwork and interact online. Rita asked to join one of the groups and was quickly welcomed by these Pakistani Muslim women, most of whom spoke some English. She was the first follower of Christ any of them had ever met. David, a sixteen-year-old in Texas who loves online gaming, discovered that, as he interacted with other gamers on Discord (an instant messaging app favored by the gaming community), he was interacting with Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. He created his own server where he invited these online friends to Creation to Christ Bible studies.
Samantha, Tom, Rita, and David represent what could possibly be a new era in mission history. It is an era in which senders are also goers. They will not replace the need for long-term missionaries to go to the unreached, but they can be evangelists to these places. Ted Esler has coined the term eccliosystem to talk of the ecclesiastical ecosystem which is the full representation of the body of Christ around the world. It is filled with resources, knowledge, and expertise that, if utilized with cooperation and clear vision, would allow for the Great Commission to be completed in this generation.[iv] Mobilizing and equipping the ordinary saints, the teachers and coaches, bankers and mechanics, college students and retirees that fill the pews of the local church is one way in which our generation can respond to the responsibility of the Great Commission. Through this, more of the world’s unreached will have an opportunity to respond to the gospel and be connected with a true follower of Jesus.
Aaron Myers (amyers@crescentproject.org) is the director of digital outreach at Crescent Project where he leads the Embassy ministry, mobilizing the laity of the local church into online relationships with Muslims living inside the Muslim majority world. You can learn more about Embassy at crescentproject.org/embassy
[i] Vishal and Ruth Mangalwadi, “Who (Really) Was William Carey?” in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement: Reader and Study Guide, 4th ed., ed. R. Winter (William Carey Library, 2009).
[ii] Paul Borthwick, Western Christians in Global Mission: What’s the Role of the North American Church? (InterVarsity Press, 2012).
[iii] Names in this article have all been changed to protect identity.
[iv] Ted Esler, The Innovation Crisis: Creating Disruptive Influence in the Ministry You Lead (Moody Publishers, 2021), 32.
EMQ, Volume 61, Issue 2. Copyright © 2025 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
