How to Help Your Church Love the Nations Through Preaching

Remember Missions Sunday? 

It was a unique day in the church I grew up attending. The whole Sunday service revolved around the work of cross-cultural evangelism and church planting. There were flags hung representing the nations supported by our church’s missions offerings. There was a special video or testimony from a worker. A sermon exhorting people to go and give. An offering designed to support the work. 

Now that I’ve been pastoring for two decades, I’m learning these special Sundays are helpful, but a steady diet of expositional preaching that brings missions to the forefront is a far better way to help your church love the nations. 

While we likely know that a steady drip of missionary preaching is best, it can still be difficult to weave missions into the rhythms of normal Sundays. Here are some suggestions that might help:

LIVE ON MISSION PERSONALLY 

One reason the theme of mission doesn’t make its way into many of our sermons may be because we aren’t setting the pace with our own lives.

If I, as the preacher, am actively praying for, building relationships with, and sharing the gospel with non-believers, then it’s likely these missionary instincts will find their way into sermon illustrations or application. And if some of the people I’m evangelizing are in the room listening to me preach, I’m likely to preach with an evangelistic passion that others in my church can model.

EXEGETE WITH AN EYE FOR MISSIONS 

Our impulse could be to consider the subject of missions only when it’s overtly mentioned in the passage we’re preaching. 

But one could make the case that the whole of the Bible is a missionary document, especially Acts and the New Testament Epistles. These letters were written as the Word spread, people came to faith, and churches were planted. The mission is the backdrop for all we read and preach. Wise pastors slow down their exegetical work and ask, “How does God’s mission inform or shape the central message of this passage?” 

FOCUS ON PRECISE APPLICATION

If the passage you are preaching addresses topics related to missions, go there with great intentionality. This should be second-nature for faithful expositors. 

We follow the argument the author is making to the intended outcome. If that outcome is missions or evangelism, preach that theme clearly. There’s a temptation with any text to get overwhelmed with all of the forms of application that could come from the text. But it’s imperative to take the line of application most warranted from the passage, and not get lost in rabbit trails that may be valid points of application but are not central to how the author applied the ideas of that text.

FORM INTENTIONAL PARTNERSHIPS

The greater the connection to global workers, the more likely they show up in your preaching. You might think about the unique way that someone laboring in Morocco might apply a text to their context and use those challenges to illustrate an apparent challenge in your place. You might highlight a way to pray for a known worker while speaking about Paul’s missionary partnerships. You may even reach out to a global worker and ask them about how they might preach the same passage you are preaching in their context. Odds are, their eyes will see things you’ve missed.

SHARE THE PULPIT WITH TRUSTED PARTNERS

As much as possible, give trusted missionary partners a voice to the church you pastor. This may happen through online newsletters or social media blurbs, but far better is the time you allow them to share directly from the pulpit. 

Any time we have a worker with us on a Sunday, I try to celebrate them. This may be planned, or it may be spontaneous when I look over the church and see someone during my sermon. 

Each week, our church has a mission’s moment baked into our liturgy. We put the picture of a partner on the screen, suggest three ways the church can pray for them, and then all pray out loud, together, for those needs. 

Finally, at least once a year I try to have a cross-cultural missionary preach in our church on Sunday morning or during a conference. This allows the church to see that every Sunday is a Missions Sunday.