Sent: The Fifth Habit

I will journal throughout the week all the ways I alerted others to the universal reign of God through Christ.

The final habit is to begin identifying yourself as a missionary —a sent one —by journaling the ways you’re alerting others to God’s reign. You can make daily journal entries or set aside some time at the end of each week to look back over the last seven days to recall how you’ve either announced or demonstrated God’s universal reign, even if it’s in the smallest of ways.

Earlier I mentioned that our English term mission comes from the Latin missio, which means to send or to be ejected or pushed out. The word was almost exclusively used to describe a person who travels overseas attempting to spread Christianity. More recently, we’ve adopted the term to describe all Christians who attempt to glorify God in their daily lives. If our mission is to alert others to the universal reign of God through Christ, then all believers should see themselves as missionaries.

Again, this doesn’t mean every believer is a gifted evangelist. But it does mean that every believer needs to take seriously his or her calling to alert others to God’s reign and rule. In my book The Road to Missional, I refer to our lives being like a trailer or a preview for an upcoming feature film:

Trailers are tasters, short film versions of the soon-to-released feature, and they usually include the best special effects or the funniest scenes or the most romantic moments, depending on the film, of the upcoming feature. Now, watch those around you in the theatre at the end of each trailer. If it has done its job, usually one person will turn to the other and say, “I want to see that movie.”

This is a great metaphor for the missional church. If it does its job well, people will see what it does and say, “I want to see the world they come from.”[30]

Michael Frost, Surprise the World: The Five Habits of Highly Missional People (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2016)

.I have just completed a series of lessons based on this book. They are available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions, as well as part of my Good Questions Have Groups Talking Subscription service. For a medium-sized church, lesson subscriptions are only $10 per teacher per year. Lessons correspond with three of Lifeway’s outlines as well as the International Standard Series.

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