Military members are sent on missions. Secret agents are sent on missions. NASA astronauts are sent on missions. Specific people, sent on behalf of someone in authority, to accomplish strategic objectives.

The Church is sent out on a mission as well. We’re on a mission from God.

Just consider thispassage in Mark 16:15–20:

And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.” So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. And they went out and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by accompanying signs. 

Every believer and every church is on a mission from God, but is it clear to you and those you serve? To help you craft a compelling mission statement and avoid mission drift, your mission should acknowledge Christ’s mission, be inclusive, and be worthy of the resources at your disposal. 

1. Your mission should acknowledge Christ’s mission for His church

I love how the great missiologist Lesslie Newbigin said it, “It is not that the church has a mission, and the Spirit helps us in fulfilling it. It is rather that the Spirit is the active missionary, and the church (when it is faithful) is the place where the Spirit is enabled to complete the Spirit’s work.” It’s not that the church has a mission, but the mission has a church.

Every believer and every church is on a mission from God, but is it clear to you and those you serve? 

The church already has a mission statement from Jesus called Great Commission. We can try to re-word it for our own contexts, but to stray too far from Jesus’ stated mission for His church would be a mistake. In Church Unique, Will Mancini notes, "One irony of trying to capture God’s mission in a meaningful [mission statement], is that the mission ought to be continually capturing us.” 

Any statement we come up with must acknowledge the priority of Christ’s words recorded multiple places in the gospels. The mission is from God. Is His mission our mission?

2. Your mission should be inclusive rather than exclusive 

The nature of mission statements is usually to focus our ministry work on a particular context such as a city or people group. The result can sometimes be that someone gets excluded. But Jesus’ mission mandate was inclusive. 

• “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation” (Mark 16:15, emphasis added). Inclusive.  
• "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matt 28:19, emphasis added). Again, inclusive.

We’re part of a global body of believers with a stated mission to reach all the world, the whole creation, in all nations. Sure, we all have to start somewhere. We all live in a place. We’re locals. But the mission established by Jesus won’t let us just think local. What we do locally should have ripple effects that reach around the globe. The people we send out should impact beyond our own locale. The resources we share from our churches should serve to make disciples in places we’ll never physically go. We’re commanded to have ministries that are both global and local…glocal.

3. Your mission should be big enough to be worthy of Christ

Are our mission statements worthy of Jesus and the incredible resources He’s placed at our disposal? Most of the time our mission statements are pretty benign. But what would your mission be if you knew there were no limits? If you knew God would give you divine power and help, how would that affect your mission? You’d feel unstoppable. You’d believe anything was possible and your mission statement would reflect that. 

Read Mark 16:20 again: ^"And they went out and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by accompanying signs." What happened when the disciples went out to proclaim the gospel on their mission from God? 

Jesus. Worked. With. Them. 

If our mission can be accomplished in our own strength, wisdom, money and manpower, we really don’t need Jesus to work with us. But if the mission is so massive, so complex, and so impossible (like making disciples of all nations) we can only do it when He works with us.

But He doesn’t work with us on our mission; He works with us on His mission. He’ll only work with us if we’re working for Him.