The Character of God: Greatness
Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales; behold, he takes up the coastlands like fine dust.
Isaiah 40:14 (ESV)
We believe in sending the Gospel to the ends of the earth and in making it available to every man, woman, boy and girl on the planet. The Savior of sinners is a Savior to all types of men, people of every nation, tribe, and language. We also believe it is the duty of every Christian to pro-actively endeavor to share our faith with all we possibly can in our own lives in an effort to rescue perishing sinners and to bring them into the wonderful experience of knowing the Lord Jesus Christ as we have.
Planting “three-self” churches is the bottom-line goal of our missions philosophy. As in the New Testament, the Apostles went to places where the Gospel had not been preached. In doing so some believed. The apostles gathered those believers and formed local churches where they could be preserved in their faith, offer ongoing worship to God, and join the efforts in Gospel proclamation. These churches were developed in maturity to the point they could be “three-self” – “self-governing” where local leadership was trained and the native church governed itself apart from outside influence, “self-supporting” where the financial support came from within the local body and not from foreign sources, and “self-propagating” where this national church became the greatest means for winning the rest of their own country for Christ. This is the missions of the New Testament and the kind our church is committed to engage in.
In obedience to the Great Commission, Grace Baptist Church supports foreign and home missionaries who proclaim the gospel and plant New Testament churches. And we are committed to send and support more and more men to do this. This takes a great deal of money and personal care in order to accomplish this in an ongoing way, but it is our serious commitment under the blessing of the Lord to see that it does happen.
Presently we have just placed a missionary-church planter in Asheville, North Carolina, and we hope to send out another “home missionary” next year. These home missions works are in addition to the “foreign missions” Gospel efforts we support in Canada, Germany, Spain, Brazil, and Argentina.