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HARVESTFORCE 2021 • 2
GOD’S END GOAL for THE WORLD
Lyndon Gan MMS ExCo Member. He serves as a Lay Ministry Staff at Kampong Kapor Methodist Church. Over 30 years ago, he told God he would be happy to do Christian mission anywhere except in country X. He has since been involved in Christian mission in country X for over 30 years and enjoying it.
O
ne of the key goals of MMS Vision 2025 is to enlarge the Tent of God among the unreached or least reached peoples of the world so that “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11:9, NIV) MMS is currently involved in seven countries in Asia. Within these countries and others in Asia, the harvest is plentiful and there are still vast numbers of unreached people in our region. This region includes some places that are challenging to access and where there may be higher inherent risks for traditional missions activities. Add on the current pandemic with its restriction on travel, and there seems to be a host of obstacles to our goals of bringing the gospel to the least reached people.
“Take your stumbling-blocks, and turn them into stepping-stones.” John R. Mott (1865-1955), Evangelist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Mott was a Methodist layman and one of the key organisers of the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh, Scotland in 1910. Over a hundred years later, we see plenty of obstacles to missions and yet each of these obstacles can be God opening our eyes to new opportunities. Opportunities we would not have considered if the obstacles were not there. Perhaps the presence of obstacles to Christian missions forces us to look again at what the Bible picture of the Mission of God is. The Bible sees that the goal of God’s mission is for the new heaven and new earth to be joined together in a single whole. The final scene in the Bible is that of the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth, so that “the dwelling place of God is with man.” (Revelations 21:1-3, ESV) Since it is God’s mission to put the whole world right in the end by the power of the gospel so that He can dwell with humans, it follows that God places human beings who have been made right with Himself in this world with a mission to become part of his putting-right project for the earth. And the putting-right project must include putting right everything that is wrong with creation.
