Best 238 quotes in «missions quotes» category

outside of Paul’s work itself, we do not know of any organized Christian missionary work—not just for the first century, but for any century prior to the conversion of most of the empire. As MacMullen has succinctly put it: “After Saint Paul, the Church had no mission.” That may be hard to believe, but in fact, if you were to count every Christian missionary about whom even a single story is told, from the period after the New Testament up through the first four centuries, you would not need all the digits on one hand. We are not talking about armies of volunteers knocking on doors. We know of three, all in a different isolated region. And, as we will see, even the stories told of them are highly legendary.

Mothering or nurturing is not just a calling for women who have biological or adopted children. Mothering is a calling for all women. Every Christian woman is called to the spiritual motherhood of making disciples of all nations.

On a dangerous seacoast where shipwrecks often occur, there was once a crude little life-saving station. The building was just a hut, and there was only one boat. But the few devoted members kept a constant watch over the sea, and with no thought for themselves went out day and night tirelessly searching for the lost. Some of those who were saved, and various others in the surrounding area, wanted to become associated with the station and give their time and money and effort for the support of its work. New boats were bought and new crews trained. The little life-saving station grew. Some of the members of the life-saving were unhappy that the building was so crude and poorly equipped. They felt that a more comfortable place should be provided as the first refuge of those saved from the sea. They replaced the emergency cots with beds and put better furniture in the enlarged building. Now the life-saving station became a popular gathering place for its members, and they decorated it as sort of a club. Fewer members were now interested in going to sea on life-saving missions, so they hired lifeboat crews to do this work. The life-saving motif still prevailed in this club`s decoration, and there was a liturgical lifeboat in the room where the club initiations were held. About this time a large ship was wrecked off the coast, and the hired crews brought in boatloads of cold, wet and half-drowned people. They were dirty and sick and some had black skin and some had yellow skin. The beautiful new club was in chaos. So the property committee immediately had a shower house built outside the club where victims of shipwrecks could be cleaned up before coming inside. At the next meeting, there was a split in the club membership. Most of the members wanted to stop the club`s life-saving activities as being unpleasant and a hindrance to the normal social life of the club. Some members insisted upon life-saving as their primary purpose and pointed out that they were still called a life-saving station. But they were finally voted down and told that if they wanted to save lives of all the various kinds of people who were shipwrecked in those waters, they could begin their own life-saving station down the coast. So they did just that. As the years went by, the new station experienced the same changes that had occurred in the old. It evolved into a club, and yet another `spin-off` life saving station was founded. History continued to repeat itself, and if you visit the sea coast today, you will find a number of exclusive clubs along the shore. Shipwrecks are frequent in those waters, but most of the people drown.

Other major world religions are still centered in the same general geographic area from which they originated except for Christianity. Even more intriguing, the center of Christian growth continues to move. Why? This author suggests that Christian principles bring prosperity but then the prosperity brings a temptation to chase stability and respectability. Thus, Christian growth moves to an area where people are desperate enough to trust Christ alone.

Stay safe. I want to see you again when all this is done.

Persecution for Christians is not a possibility, it's a promise, it's not a maybe, it's a surely! Following Jesus can mean finding the trouble you've been looking for!

Afghanistan is very satisfied with Croatia's participation in the NATO-led peace mission and expects Croatia to expand its contribution to peace restoration in Afghanistan to other areas as well.

The mission of God’s people is not simply directed at saving people’s souls from a bad life-after-death into a good life-after-death, but it addresses and hopefully touches the injustice and violence around us—poverty, racism, sexism, economic exploitation, war, environmental destruction—where salvation, justice, and peace can merge.

The secret to following God's will, I discovered, usually is wrapped up in rejecting the good for God's best.

They [the church] wanted us to give food out to malnourished mothers and children, but they didn't want us to question why we were malnourished to begin with. They wanted us to grow vegetables on the tiny plots around our houses, but they didn't want us to question why we didn't have enough land to feed ourselves. [p. 16]

This emphasis is directed primarily at the here and now, as Christ-embodying communities of active love in the midst of the world. All of creation is caught up in the restorative work. The mission of God’s people is not simply directed at saving people’s souls from a bad life-after-death into a good life-after-death, but it addresses and hopefully touches the injustice and violence around us—poverty, racism, sexism, economic exploitation, war, environmental destruction—where salvation, justice, and peace can merge.

We are not bringing Christ to poor communities. He has been active in these communities since the creation of the world, sustaining them, Hebrews 1:3 says, by His powerful Word. Hence, a significant part of working in poor communities involves discovering and appreciating what God has been doing there for a LONG time.

We need people who will go, and stay until the end.

We shouldn't ignore being missional for the sake of being confessional and we shouldn't ignore being confessional for the sake of being missional.

Yielding to God's will can be hard. And sometimes, it really hurts. But it always brings peace.

You see, it doesn't matter if they're wrong. From 9/11 to recent shootings here in the United States, there's nothing more dangerous than a true believer on his own crazy mission.

A continuing narrative throughout Australia's history that says it is better to build up than to tear down - this is the continuing mission of Labor.

The missions were always changing- sometimes collecting jars of rain, paper bags of hiccups, adopting lost moonbeams and folding them into cake batter. Or perhaps investigating glittering slug trails left in the moonlight, finding the owners of abandoned buttons, or playing the sousaphone for caterpillars still in their cocoons.

The reason many fail to joyfully proclaim Jesus Christ is because deep down they fail to joyfully adore Him

There is nothing in the world or the Church — except the church's disobedience — to render the evangelization of the world in this generation an impossibility.

We are called to proclaim His great Salvation and rescue the captives…. But we are busy spending 33 billion a year in diet products for ourselves or for our over weight cats. We are busy redecorating our temporal housing, We are spending every evening for our own pleasure, and every spare dollar for our won retirement. And somehow the unreached in their life and death eternal struggle slip our minds and concern… we never get around to being serious about Jesus and his command to take the good news to them.

We have taken the holistic message preached in the Old Testament and New Testaments and reduced our message to the entry point into the Kingdom.

What's your dream and to what corner of the missions world will it take you?

You can get in anywhere if you go to serve.

A fundamental responsibility of leadership is make sure that everybody knows the mission, understands it, lives it.

All it takes is one person who is committed, focused, and on a mission to spark an entire team into believing in themselves.

All the resources of the Godhead are at our disposal!

All my friends are but one, but He is all sufficient.

A person is either a missionary or a mission field.

A man with money is no match against a man on a mission.

A missions conference is a business meeting to decide the fate of the heathen.

A nation will not be moved by timid methods.

Another way of looking at this, is that the best companies are almost always mission oriented.

A personal mission statement becomes the DNA for every other decision we make.

A lot of composers before me have been on this mission to change the world by getting off equal temperament, and I'm definitely one of those.

Any time I have seen someone accomplishing something magnificent, they have been a monomaniac with a mission. A single-minded individual with a passion.

A warrior's mission is to foster the success of others.

A related advantage of mission oriented ideas, is that you yourself will be dedicated to them.

Being on a mission-not thinking about myself and focusing on serving other people-is what brought me closer to God than anything else.

Being highly invested and preoccupied by an emotionally consuming mission tends to steal resources from other aspects of your emotional life.

Each of us is merely a small instrument; all of us, after accomplishing our mission, will disappear.

Building weapons that we don't need, don't work, and aren't necessary, and have no mission — that's not bad politics, that's robbery.

Breakthroughs happen when the insight comes that I can do something right now to improve things. I am constantly looking to do something to provide people with strategies to create those immediate breakthroughs. That's my mission.

Christ not only died for all: He died for each.

Christ is either Lord of all, or He is not Lord at all

Diplomacy should always be the first option, and every mission should have a clear, achievable objective that is in the interests of the United States.

Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.

Elite warriors, when they accomplish their mission, they celebrate.

Europe lacks leadership and a sense of mission and too many people don't feel a part of it.

God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission.