By Thomas C Miersma
Read the whole article here:The commission is not given to private individuals or parachurch organizations but to the church. Even the believer’s personal witness to his neighbor is not an independent activity in isolation; he bears witness as a member of a specific body of Christ. Likewise missionaries labor only according to a calling of God under Christ, and that calling is through the church who calls and sends, in God’s name, men to labor in missions.
To the church, therefore, belongs the calling and sending of missionaries. The Lord of the harvest sends forth laborers into His field to labor in the gathering of His elect and in the building of His church. Jesus trained His apostles for that work and sent them out. An aspect of the training for the ministry is training for the work of missions. Paul and Barnabas were called by the Spirit to do mission work, through the church in Antioch (Acts 13:2). This included their being set apart and sent to that work by the laying on of hands (Acts 13:3), though both men were already ministers of the Word and Paul an apostle. This laying on of hands was a token not only of their calling and sending but of the qualifying work of the Spirit to equip them for their specific calling as missionaries.
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