What Are Missions?
The term mission has been misused by the church for many years. As Stephen Neill has said, “When everything is mission, nothing is mission.” Missions cannot be a catch-all for everything church related. Parking cars, shaking hands, ushers, kids’ teachers, nursery, and so on cannot and should not be labeled as a mission. These are positions of serving and have their rightful place in the kingdom of God.
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Missions in the traditional sense is a term reserved for those who have been called by God for full time ministry of the Word and prayer (Acts 6:4), those who have crossed geographical and/or cultural boundaries (yes, that means you do not have to travel the world to be a missionary) to preach the gospel to all creation. It is a longing given by the Holy Spirit to reach the lost, the helpless, the forgotten who live in the utter most parts of the earth.
I must not be hesitant to say, that the call of missionary does not come easy. It is full of heartaches and letdowns. Jesus said in Luke 9:23, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” This means you must put away every fleshly desire, goal, and lifestyle of the world. In order to truly follow Christ and be used by him, we must lay everything we have spiritually, mentally, and physically at Jesus feet. This action does not come without reproach from the world. In fact, in 2 Timothy 3:12 it says, “everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.”
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Don’t let that deter you, let that be your motivation to strive harder, to grow stronger in God’s word, and to reach as many lost souls as possible. Let your mission be one of obedience and faith and let nothing stand in the way of you fulfilling your God given purpose.
Why Missions? Why Now?
The call of God has been weighing heavy on our hearts for many years. We knew that we needed to be involved in missions, but we could never seem to make it work. There was always some kind of excuse of why we couldn’t go. We needed to get married first, finish college, finish remodeling our house, we needed to wait until we were established in our jobs, then we had to wait until we finished remodeling our second house. The excuses could go on forever…
Last summer we knew that something was starting to shift inside of us. We were both dealing with a lot of things in our personal lives and in our jobs. We were both in a place we had never been before. On October the 9th 2021 God came and spoke directly to our hearts. He told us that we needed to do something radical. He spoke the word “GO!” to both of us. We knew it was a take or leave it moment and neither one of us wanted to miss it. That day was such a monumental day in our lives. It literally changed everything. -Lizzie Pickle
The Bible says in Mark 16:15 that “we must “Go” into all world and preach the gospel to all creation” Those words never rang truer than in the moment that we grasped each other closely and said its time to “Go.” We knew that the times where we tossed off the notion to answer Gods call on our life was over. Lizzie and I had never been more in sync than in that moment when God said, “The time is now you cannot wait any longer.”
If there ever was a positive to Covid-19, which honestly there are several within the Pickle household, it would be the moments, the extra moments God gave us to spend together as a family. Our daughter began to walk and talk during this period. We wouldn’t trade those moments for anything else in the world. Beyond, the family memories, God also began to move us into the next phase of our life. What exactly this meant we weren’t sure.
Every October, our church has a conference, known as Elevate Conference. We have several ministers come in from all over the country. It is a week of revival, we look at it as a renewing period, a moment to go to another level in our walk with God. In the days leading up to Elevate conference, words began to flow into our spirit. Obviously, the word “Go” was one of utmost importance. Other words began to fill our minds as well. Such as, new languages, sacrifice, authenticity, unity, dreams, visions, and faith. These words were words that our foundation was beginning to be built on. In addition, a word that had been stirring in our spirit for years began to manifest and take shape right before our eyes, missions.
-Alex Pickle
