(With my friends in Clarksville, TN this morning, preaching a message from Romans 15 about the unchanging and changing face of missionary work. There's a lot more to this message than what's here.  But here are some random snippets.)

The face of the globe is changing in radical ways.

People groups are migrating. 

Globalization is escalating. 

In the next five years, we are going to see the most hyper-connected world we’ve ever seen in history. 4 billion people will be connecting to the Internet.

Poverty.

War.

Climate change — and 1 million other things are changing the way we need to think about reaching the unreached and reaching the least reached.

These global issues don’t change our purpose and our mission.  They do change our methodology.

In 2006 my family and I moved to Mongolia with the missionary sending organization. Currently, Renee and I work for a different missionary sending organization. However, missionary sending organizations must rethink the way they’re sending global workers around the world. There are new paradigms for this work.

Sending organizations are shrinking their numbers and their budgets.

We need to rethink our systems for placing Paul and Timothy-type workers in the least-reached and most difficult parts of the world.

Mobilizing Christian business people and Christian development workers in unreached and difficult parts of the world is going to be more effective than mobilizing traditional, church planting, theology degreed “missionaries”.  People need should be challenged to take their talents, their skill-sets, their education, and their jobs to places where the unreached are now within reach. 

The issue is not whether people stay or whether they go.

The issue is whether Jesus-followers obey with compassion.