What does it mean to successfully plant a church? If you build a church of 200 people, is that success? If it becomes financially self-sustaining, is that success? If you have your own building, is that success? If you accomplish all three of those things, but it takes 10 years, is that failure?

Almost two decades ago, my wife and I had a houseguest for the weekend. He was a pastor friend from our days serving together in the mainline Presbyterian Church (USA) who’d recently moved his credentials from the PC(USA) to the more evangelical Presbyterian Church in America. Our congregation had just made the same denominational transfer, so we’d invited him to fill our pulpit and speak to our congregational meeting about the culture of the PCA...

Recently I was asked the following question on this blog: “Of the 15 people attending your group, how many had a completely non-church background before you arrived?”

The question looked to me like a passive aggressive challenge. I might have been wrong about the motivation behind the question, but regardless, the question itself is flawed.

When we think of missions work, we often think of working in a far-off country like Peru or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In other words, we think of foreign missions. But if we define a missionary as someone fulfilling the great commission, sent to share the gospel with those who have not heard the good news of Christ’s salvation, we will remember that missions work is truly global. If you are reading this, you are, more than likely, somewhere on the globe, and if there are people around, you’ve almost certainly found a good place for missions work.