From Doing Missions to Being On Mission

by Dan Witwer

Hershey Free Church is now 38 years old and has a long history of international ministry. Like your church, we are living through quantum changes in resource availability, questions of what is a mission field, and what are best practices in gospel declaration and doing good. During the past 38 years, God has raised up (or the West has finally recognized) godly, skilled, vision-filled national leaders. The contour of missions has changed and continues to do so even as you read this brief update. Hershey Free is in the process of thinking how to be strategic and effective as Christ’s church in the world. Here are two areas that we are working on:

1. We are blurring the line between local and global disciple-making. With the shrinking embrace of a Christian worldview at home, as well as clusters from many people groups arriving in North America, it is tempting to focus all of our outreach efforts at home. These culture shifts present tremendous opportunities at our doorsteps, but we do the glory of God a disservice if we ignore the remaining continents. At Hershey, we have renamed our outreach ministry Engage3. Engage is ‘how’ we do outreach with and among the lost, the least, and the last. The exponent 3 indicates ‘where’ we do ministry—in our neighborhood, region, and the nations.

2. We are emphasizing next steps in relational discipleship. Hershey’s staff and elder leadership have been casting a vision away from an individualistic approach to following Jesus to a cooperative, communal, and together-oriented journey of faith that emphasizes next steps. As Christ-followers grow together, we seek God for ways to engage with others who need to see and hear the forgiving mercy of Jesus Christ. We do this when life’s routine is steady as well as times when floods and fires interrupt that routine. Sometimes the engaging next steps take place in our community (recently flooded by Tropical Storm Lee), or in earthquake-ripped Haiti, or Christian-persecuting locations in Central Asia.

These two emphases are causing us to rethink our leadership structure for missions and past policies, but we fully expect that outreach will increasingly be a normal part of life at Hershey Free.