Christians love missionary stories.  There is something exotic about them.  Even a little scary.  The idea of traveling to an unusual place like Pisidia or Attalia, not to tour but to testify of Jesus is magnetic.  

Magnets, of course, push as well as pull.

On the one hand we are drawn in by stories of missionaries because we know the messenger of Christ is doing the primary work God wants done in the world, but we also stand off in fear of being reminded that every Christian is a missionary.  And too many of us don't want to touch that with a ten-foot pole.

We get anxious when a missionary story turns from third person plural, "They" spoke the word in Perga, to first person singular, "This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ." (17:3)

There is no getting around it.  Missionary work is always first person.  We may talk about it, tell stories about it, give funds to enable it, train others to conduct it, but in the end there will always be a Christian on the front line to proclaim the name of Jesus.  Missions can't be done by proxy or remotely with clickers and buttons.

I think remote missionary work is an oxymoron.  Yes, missionary work is done in far-flung places.  But that's just the problem; we too often leave it there.  To think even in terms of "foreign mission work" is not very helpful if it permits us to distance ourselves from this central vocation of Christian believers in this world.

As long as we think of missionary work as a distant thing belonging to tribal territories, faraway in the sticks someplace, we can rationalize the Great Commission as being functionally impractical for the most of us.

Untrue.

"Go into all the world" (Mark 16:15) includes Bay and Midland counties.  Since when did our town or our neighborhood stop being a mission field?  I know the charter members of Grace fifty years ago thought of themselves as a mission congregation.  Shall we not still? 

We've never had to "phone in" the Lord's means of grace here.  In fifty years we've never been told, "Sorry, the Gospel is too inaccessible today.  Jesus is somewhere out in the boonies this month, so come back later.  It is the Reformed who say Jesus is "up yonder," not us Lutherans. 

Christ is very much local.  He is the resident Lord and Savior of this congregation.  Jesus is here with us in the first person.  We receive the true and real body and blood of Christ in these home confines of bread and wine.  Jesus is not away on some island or in his body limited to a 3 by 6 box in heaven.

And because He dwells right with us, the work He calls us to do is also indigenous and local.  Mission work is necessarily Christ's work, and if He is indeed here with us, then the mission work will be as well.  It will be native, natural, and local.

Yes, it's a bit scary.  But don't you suppose it was scary for Jesus to leave His place in paradise and come to this alien world to adopt the limits and weaknesses of fallen humanity, to do God's work despite the fact that many would repel Him in favor of something less intimate and more layered with bureaucracy?  Don't you suppose it was daunting for him to be the missionary of peace, to look at the cross as local, to treat his enemies as friends, and not only touch men of sin but embrace them?

He didn't do this long-distance.  Our entire hope leans on his being here for us, with us, and in us -- which He is.

And this is the way we must see mission work as well, as spontaneous and normal to us as breathing.  For we can do neither without Christ.

Notice how the missionaries who gathered in Antioch with the church told their missionary stories.  It wasn't really their story.  It was the Lord's.  Not by accident they declared, "all that GOD had done with them, and how HE had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles."

If God can do this in Pamphylia and Perga, He can certainly do the same in Auburn, Midland, and Bay City too. 

We love missionary stories.  Let's not just tell them; let's live them.

"For so the Lord has commanded us, saying, 'I have made you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth.'"  (Acts 13:47)

That is the Lord's first person commission.  And here is our first person response, "This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ."