What Is a
Missionary?

The word missionary gets used loosely. People call almost any believer with a burden a missionary. That blurs a term that carries real weight. At its root, a missionary is a sent one. He or she is sent across a boundary, cultural, linguistic, or geographic, to carry the gospel where it is not yet known and to gather those who believe into churches. The sending is the heart of it. A missionary does not simply go. A missionary is sent, with a purpose, to make disciples among people who have not heard.

The word beneath the word

Missionary is not a biblical word. You will not find it in an English concordance of the Greek New Testament. It comes to us through Latin. The Latin verb mittere means to send. From it we get mission and missionary, the sending and the one sent.

Behind the Latin stands a Greek word that the New Testament uses often: apostello, to send out with a commission. From it comes apostolos, one sent. We usually translate that as apostle. But the word is broader than the twelve. It means a sent one, a messenger dispatched with authority to carry out a task. When we say missionary, we are reaching for the same idea in a different tongue.

So a missionary is a sent one. That definition sounds thin until you feel its weight. Sending implies a sender. It implies authority behind the going. It implies a message the sent one did not invent and is not free to change. The missionary carries something entrusted to him. He is under orders.

Sent by God, sent by the church

Scripture shows two senders standing together. The first is God. Jesus said the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few, so ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest (Matthew 9:37-38). The verb there is a strong one, to thrust out, to send with force. God is the one who raises up and sends the missionary.

The second sender is the local church. In Acts 13 the church at Antioch worshiped and fasted, and the Holy Spirit set apart Barnabas and Saul for the work. The church laid hands on them and sent them off. Both senders are present. The Spirit calls; the church confirms and releases. A missionary sent by neither is not a missionary. He is a traveler with a Bible.

This matters for how we think about the work. A sent one remains accountable to those who sent him. He is not a free agent. He answers to God and reports to a body of believers who prayed him out and hold him up. You can read how we think about that responsibility on our accountability page.

Crossing a boundary

Every Christian is a witness where he lives. Not every Christian is a missionary. The difference is the boundary. A missionary crosses something, a culture, a language, a geographic frontier, to reach people who are not his own.

The clearest picture is the unreached people group, a people among whom there is no established church able to carry the gospel to its own without help from outside. Reaching them means crossing over. It means learning a language that is not yours, sitting in homes that are not yours, and staying long enough to be understood. If you want the fuller definition, see our post on what an unreached people group is.

The aim is not a single sermon or a handful of conversions. The aim is disciples and, in time, churches. Jesus commanded his followers to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to obey everything he had commanded (Matthew 28:19-20). A missionary crosses a boundary in order to plant something that will still be standing when he is gone.

A widening picture

For a long stretch of history, the word missionary called to mind a particular image. A Western family boarding a ship, sailing to a distant land, learning the language over years, and giving their lives to a people far from home. That picture is real, and the church owes an enormous debt to those who went that way. It is costly. Supporting a Western missionary family on the field often runs $100,000 or more per year, once travel, housing, schooling, and support are counted.

But the picture has widened, because the church has grown. There are now believers and pastors in nearly every country, including many that once only received missionaries. A national or indigenous worker often stands much closer to the unreached than any outsider could. He may already speak a related language. He already knows the culture from the inside. In parts of Asia, a national pastor can be supported for something on the order of $85 a month, a fraction of the cost of sending from the West.

This does not make the Western missionary obsolete. Both are needed. The point is that the sent one no longer wears only one face. We think the wisest strategy often runs through those already near, which is why our work centers on national pastors. You can read the distinction we draw in national pastors versus missionaries, and see how we approach it in our vision.

So who is a missionary

Pull the threads together. A missionary is a sent one, dispatched by God and confirmed by a church, who crosses a boundary of culture, language, or geography to carry the gospel where it is not yet known and to make disciples who gather into churches.

That definition holds whether the sent one comes from the West or from the next valley over. It holds whether he is supported by many churches or by a few. What it does not stretch to cover is everyone who happens to serve God near home. Those are good and needed callings. They are not, strictly, the missionary task.

The task remains unfinished. There are still peoples with no church, no Scripture in their tongue, and no one near enough to tell them. The question the word missionary presses on the church is not merely who fits the definition. It is whether we will keep sending until the sent ones have reached them all. If you want to be part of that sending, our start here page is a good first step.