On the morning of Ibironke’s send-off service, Rev Ekanem asked her to take a short walk with him before the congregation arrived. He was seventy-eight, retired after thirty-one years of pastoring in Calabar, and he walked slowly with a stick he pretended not to need. Ibironke was a nurse who had come to Calabar for her service year, stayed on at the teaching hospital, and become part of his church. In two weeks she would leave for a small town in southern Niger Republic, where a local congregation ran a clinic and had asked for a nurse who would stay at least five years and learn Hausa properly.
He took her to the old cemetery where Mary Slessor is buried. The grass had been cut, and a few schoolchildren were reading the inscription on the monument.
“She came from Scotland in 1876,” he said. “A mill girl from Dundee. She stayed nearly forty years and died up-country. She fought against the killing of twins when everyone told her to mind her own business.” He tapped the ground with his stick. “And thirty years before her, the first missionaries came to Calabar from Jamaica. Many of them were the children of slaves. Think about that. People who had been carried away from this coast in chains came back across the same ocean with the gospel.”
Ibironke said nothing. He went on.
“Some of them looked down on us. Some of them called our drums the devil’s music and gave our children English names as though our own names were a sin. Some of them loved us more than our own people did. Many of them were both at once.” He turned to face her. “You are going the way they came. Take their courage. Leave their pride here. And when you get there, remember that the church is already there. You are going to serve it.”
Ibironke told me later that she had expected a blessing that morning, and she had received one. But it was not the blessing she expected. It was a charge, and she has thought about it nearly every day since.
This teaching is about that charge. Why should the gospel reach every nation? What does it mean for a church that once received missionaries to become a church that sends them? And how do we cross the boundaries of our familiarity without carrying our own pride with us?
Where the nations begin
The story of missions begins long before the New Testament. In Genesis 10 and 11, humanity spreads across the earth and divides into nations, languages and families. At Babel, people try to make a name for themselves, and God scatters them. The chapter ends with a long genealogy and a childless couple in Haran. Then, without warning, God speaks:
Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee: And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.
Notice the contrast with Babel. The builders at Babel said, “let us make us a name” (Genesis 11:4). God now says to Abram, “I will make thy name great.” What humanity grasped for, God gives. And He gives it with a purpose that reaches far beyond Abram’s family: “in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.”
The word families is significant. God is not thinking only of empires and states. He is thinking of clans, households and peoples, the very groups that were scattered at Babel. The God who divided the nations in judgement is already planning to bless them in mercy.
Paul saw the gospel itself in this promise. He writes that “the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed” (Galatians 3:8). The call of Abraham was the first announcement of a plan that would reach Calabar and Kano and Kathmandu. Missions is not an optional programme added to the church’s life when the budget allows. It is written into the first promise God made to the father of the faithful.
Notice also that Abram was blessed in order to be a blessing. “I will bless thee... and thou shalt be a blessing.” The blessing was never meant to stop with him. A church that receives the blessing of the gospel and keeps it for itself has misunderstood why it was given.
A God who pities the city we avoid
PunchlineThe nations are not abstractions. They are people beyond the boundaries of our familiarity, and the book of Jonah shows how reluctant God’s people can be to cross those boundaries.
Jonah was a prophet of Israel, and God sent him to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, a cruel and powerful enemy. He ran in the opposite direction. When God finally brought him to Nineveh and the city repented, Jonah was furious. He sat outside the city sulking, and God caused a plant to grow over him for shade. When the plant withered, Jonah was angry enough to die. Then God spoke:
Then said the LORD , Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?
The book ends with that question. We never hear Jonah’s answer. God leaves the question hanging so that every reader has to answer it for himself.
Jonah cared about a plant that gave him comfort. God cared about a city full of people. “More than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand” probably refers to young children, or to people in deep moral confusion. Either way, God looked at an enemy city and felt pity.
Every one of us has a Nineveh. For some it is another tribe. For some it is a region of the country where they have never been and would rather not go. For some it is a religion they fear, or a class of people they find distasteful. The heart of God reaches into those places. Before we can be useful in missions, we often have to let God deal with the Jonah in us.
Let all the peoples praise
Israel’s hymnbook carries the same vision. Psalm 67 begins with words that echo the priestly blessing of Numbers 6, and then it turns outward:
God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and cause his face to shine upon us; Selah. That thy way may be known upon earth, thy saving health among all nations. Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee. O let the nations be glad and sing for joy: for thou shalt judge the people righteously, and govern the nations upon earth. Selah. Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee. Then shall the earth yield her increase; and God, even our own God, shall bless us. God shall bless us; and all the ends of the earth shall fear him.
“God be merciful unto us, and bless us.” It sounds like an ordinary prayer for blessing. But the next verse explains why the psalmist wants it: “That thy way may be known upon earth, thy saving health among all nations.” Israel asks to be blessed so that the nations will see God’s goodness and come to know Him.
Then the psalm becomes a call to worship that sweeps across the whole earth. “Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee.” The refrain comes twice. The psalmist cannot bear the thought of God being worshipped by only one people when He is worthy of the praise of all.
This is the deepest reason for missions. The nations need the gospel, and that is reason enough to go. But underneath it lies something greater: God deserves to be worshipped by every people He has made. John saw the fulfilment in his vision of “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” standing before the throne (Revelation 7:9). Missions exists because that worship is not yet complete.
The risen Lord’s commission
After His resurrection, Jesus met His disciples on a mountain in Galilee and gave them their commission. He began with His authority: “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth” (Matthew 28:18). Then He sent them: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20). And He closed with a promise: “lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20).
The word translated nations is ethnē, from which we get ethnic. Jesus was not thinking of modern countries with borders and passports. He was thinking of peoples, the same families of the earth promised to Abraham. Nigeria alone contains hundreds of such peoples, with their own languages and histories. Some have had churches among them for over a century. Others still have very few believers.
This was no new idea that Jesus invented on the mountain. The prophets had spoken of a Servant of the Lord whose mission would reach far beyond Israel:
And he said, It is a light thing that thou shouldest be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel: I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth.
“It is a light thing.” Restoring Israel alone would be too small a task for God’s Servant. His salvation must reach “unto the end of the earth.” When the infant Jesus was brought to the temple, old Simeon took Him in his arms and recognised Him as “A light to lighten the Gentiles” (Luke 2:32). And when Paul and Barnabas were rejected by the synagogue in Pisidian Antioch on the journey we will look at shortly, they quoted this very verse as their marching orders: “For so hath the Lord commanded us, saying, I have set thee to be a light of the Gentiles” (Acts 13:47). Christ is the light, and His church carries that light where He sends it.
The commission rests on Christ’s authority, and it is carried out in His presence. That should give us courage and humility at once. Courage, because we go under the authority of the risen Lord. Humility, because the mission is His, and He is already present wherever we go. We do not take Christ to a place where He has never been. We go where He has sent us, and we find Him already at work.
Antioch: the church that sent
The first great sending church in the New Testament was not in Jerusalem. It was in Antioch, a large city in Syria, and its story begins with believers whose names we do not even know:
Now they which were scattered abroad upon the persecution that arose about Stephen travelled as far as Phenice, and Cyprus, and Antioch, preaching the word to none but unto the Jews only. And some of them were men of Cyprus and Cyrene, which, when they were come to Antioch, spake unto the Grecians, preaching the Lord Jesus. And the hand of the Lord was with them: and a great number believed, and turned unto the Lord.
The persecution after Stephen’s death scattered the Jerusalem believers. Most of them preached only to fellow Jews. But “some of them were men of Cyprus and Cyrene.” Cyrene was a city in North Africa, in what is now Libya. These unnamed believers crossed a boundary that the others had not crossed, and they “spake unto the Grecians, preaching the Lord Jesus.” The result was the first mixed church of Jews and Gentiles, the church where believers were first called Christians.
Africa was present at the beginning of the Christian story. A man from Cyrene carried Jesus’ cross (Mark 15:21). An Ethiopian official was among the first Gentiles to be baptised (Acts 8:27). And among the leaders of the church in Antioch, Luke names two more:
Now there were in the church that was at Antioch certain prophets and teachers; as Barnabas, and Simeon that was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen, which had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them. And when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away. So they, being sent forth by the Holy Ghost, departed unto Seleucia; and from thence they sailed to Cyprus.
“Lucius of Cyrene” was another North African. “Simeon that was called Niger” bore a Latin nickname meaning black, and many scholars think he too may have come from Africa. These men were among the prophets and teachers who laid hands on Barnabas and Saul and sent them out on the first great missionary journey.
Notice how the sending happened. “As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul.” The call came in the middle of worship and prayer. The church did not invent a strategy and then ask God to bless it. They were seeking God, and He spoke.
Notice also who was sent. Barnabas and Saul were the church’s two most gifted teachers. Antioch did not send its spare people. It gave its best. “And when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away.” The word means to release, to let go. And yet Luke immediately adds, “So they, being sent forth by the Holy Ghost.” The church released them, and the Spirit sent them. Both were true.
Every nation was once someone else’s mission field. The church that received the gospel through the sacrifice of others is now called to carry it, humbly, to those who have not yet heard.
Africa’s missionary story, told honestly
NuggetWe cannot talk about missions in Nigeria without telling our own story, and we must tell it honestly.
The gospel came to much of West Africa in the nineteenth century through missionaries from Europe, from the Caribbean and from Sierra Leone. Many of them paid a terrible price. West Africa was known in Europe as “the white man’s grave,” because so many missionaries died of malaria and other fevers within months or a few years of arriving. Some mission societies lost most of their early workers. They came anyway, and others came after them.
But the story is not only a story of Europeans. Among the most important figures was Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a Yoruba boy captured by slave raiders around 1821, freed by a British naval patrol, and taken to Sierra Leone. There he came to faith, was educated, and eventually returned to his own people as a missionary. He worked on the translation of the Bible into Yoruba, and in 1864 he was consecrated as the first African bishop of his church. Freed Africans returning from Sierra Leone to Badagry, Abeokuta and Lagos carried the faith with them. Countless African catechists, interpreters and evangelists, most of whose names are known only to God, did much of the work of planting the gospel in villages the foreign missionaries never reached.
We must also be honest about the failures. Some missionaries confused the gospel with their own culture. They treated African music, dress, names and customs as heathen in themselves, rather than distinguishing what needed to be redeemed from what simply needed to be respected. Some were entangled with colonial power and shared its assumptions about race. Crowther himself, in his old age, was pushed aside by younger European missionaries who did not believe Africans were ready to lead. These were real wrongs, and the church has every reason to name them.
Yet the gospel the missionaries carried was greater than their failures. They brought the Scriptures, often in our own languages. They built schools and hospitals. Mary Slessor and others stood against practices that were destroying human lives. And above all, they brought the news of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. Many of us are believers today because someone crossed an ocean, buried their children in a foreign land and kept going. We can honour their sacrifice and learn from their mistakes at the same time.
From receiving to sending
The story has turned. Africa, which received missionaries, now sends them. The centre of gravity of world Christianity has shifted southward, and Nigeria is one of the nations at its heart.
Nigerian believers now serve as missionaries across Africa, in Asia, in Europe and in the Americas. Nigerian mission agencies send cross-cultural workers to unreached peoples within our own borders and in the countries of the Sahel. Nigerian-led congregations have sprung up in London, Houston, Dublin, Johannesburg and many other cities, and in parts of Europe some of the largest congregations are now led by African pastors. Students, nurses, engineers and traders carry their faith into places where it has grown cold.
This is a cause for gratitude, and it carries real responsibility. Four cautions belong here.
First, migration is not automatically mission. Many of our diaspora churches serve Nigerians abroad, and that is valuable work. But mission in the full sense means crossing boundaries of language and culture to make Christ known among those who do not yet know Him.
Second, we must not repeat the mistakes made with us. It is possible for a Nigerian missionary to confuse the gospel with Nigerian church culture, just as some European missionaries confused it with theirs. Our styles of worship, our dress codes, our way of organising services and our church politics are not the gospel. A believer in a Fulani community or a Japanese city does not need to become Nigerian to follow Christ.
Third, sending carries obligations. Too many Nigerian missionaries have been commissioned with great celebration on a Sunday and then forgotten by Monday. They serve in hard places on irregular support, their children’s school fees unpaid, their letters unanswered, their health neglected. When they come home exhausted, some are treated as though they had failed. A church that sends must also sustain: praying regularly and by name, giving faithfully, communicating, visiting where possible, and receiving its missionaries home with honour and care. Antioch sent Paul and Barnabas out, and when they returned, the church gathered to hear “all that God had done with them” (Acts 14:27). Sending is a long partnership.
Fourth, there are still unreached peoples close to home. Some communities within Nigeria have very few believers, very little Scripture in their language and no church that speaks their heart language. The commission to the nations begins wherever we find people beyond our familiar boundaries, and some of them live a day’s journey away.
Crossing boundaries humbly
Paul had a clear sense of the pioneer task. He wrote to the Romans:
Yea, so have I strived to preach the gospel, not where Christ was named, lest I should build upon another man’s foundation: But as it is written, To whom he was not spoken of, they shall see: and they that have not heard shall understand.
Paul’s ambition was to preach where Christ had not yet been named. That is a healthy reminder that missions must keep the unreached in view. But notice the reason he gives: “lest I should build upon another man’s foundation.” Paul respected the work that others had already done. He did not walk into a city where a church existed and set up a rival operation.
That principle matters greatly today. In many parts of the world, there are already local Christian communities, sometimes small and struggling, who have laboured faithfully for years. A missionary who arrives with money and confidence can easily overshadow them, draw away their members, or treat them as though they did not exist. The focus of this teaching asks us to respect “the patient work through which local Christian communities grow.” That means asking local believers what they need before deciding what to give. It means serving under local leadership where it exists. It means learning the language, staying long enough to be trusted, and measuring success by the strength of the local church rather than by the size of our own photographs.
Humility also governs how we treat people of other faiths. In many of the places our missionaries go, the majority hold another religion. The gospel must be offered freely, never forced. We must not exploit poverty by attaching conditions to food, medicine or education. We must respect the dignity and freedom of every person, honour their families and communities, and speak of their beliefs truthfully and with courtesy. A missionary who serves the sick without asking about their religion, who learns their proverbs and eats at their tables, and who explains the gospel clearly when he is asked, carries the fragrance of Christ.
And humility means remembering that mission is God’s before it is ours. He loved the nations before we did. He was at work among them before we arrived. We are privileged to join Him, and we go as servants.
Ibironke has been in Niger Republic for almost three years now. She lives in two rooms behind the clinic and has been through one dry season she describes as “the sun sitting on my head.” Her Hausa is good enough now that the women in the market laugh at her jokes instead of her accent. The local pastor, a quiet man who was himself trained by an earlier generation of missionaries, is her supervisor, and she brings him every decision that affects the congregation.
Last year she sent Rev Ekanem a voice note. She had been treating a woman from a family of another faith whose baby had pneumonia. The baby recovered. Some weeks later, the woman came back to the clinic with nobody sick. She wanted to ask Ibironke why she had come so far to work in such a hot place for so little money. “I told her about Jesus,” Ibironke said in the voice note. “I told her slowly. She listened. Then she said she would think about it. I did not push. I said what you told me, Rev. The church is already here. I am only serving it.”
PunchlineRev Ekanem played that voice note to me three times. Then he said, “That is how it happened to us, you know. Someone came, and stayed, and served, and told us slowly.”
The nations are people beyond the boundaries of our familiarity. God’s heart reaches them. Some of us will go. All of us can pray, give and send. And wherever we go, we go the way the best of them came to us: with courage, with humility, and with Jesus at the centre.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- What is your “Nineveh”, the people or place you would rather God did not ask you to love?
- How does Psalm 67 change your understanding of why God blesses His people?
- What do you find most moving, and most troubling, in Africa’s missionary history?
- How can Nigerian missionaries avoid confusing the gospel with Nigerian church culture?
- What would it look like for your church to give its best people, as Antioch did?
This Week
This week, learn about one people group that has few or no believers, either within Nigeria or beyond. Find out their location, their language and their situation, and pray for them by name every day. If your church supports missionaries, find out who they are and send one of them an encouraging message. Then ask God honestly whether He is calling you to pray, to give, to send or to go.
A Prayer
Father, You promised Abraham that in him all the families of the earth would be blessed, and You have kept that promise in Jesus Christ. Thank You for those who crossed oceans and buried their children to bring the gospel to my people. Forgive us where we have kept the blessing to ourselves. Deal with the Jonah in me. Give Your church in Nigeria courage to send its best and humility to serve where others have laboured before us. Let Your way be known upon earth, and let all the peoples praise You. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.