Book Recommendations on Missions
May 1, 2025
May 1, 2025
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. (Matt. 28:19–20)
Zeal to “go” is noble. But before the plane touches down in a foreign land, missionaries must know what Jesus requires of them.
9Marks asked two missions-minded pastors and one head of a missions organization for book recommendations to equip missionaries and sending churches to obey the Great Commission. Some of their recommendations are entry-level while others are intermediate or even academic. We hope this range of books means there is something useful for every reader.
Dr. Sequeira is senior pastor of the Evangelical Community Church of Abu Dhabi.
Johnson’s book is a great beginner’s guide to healthy missions for pastors, church members, and aspiring missionaries. It serves as an excellent introduction to the basics of missions, providing helpful instruction on the sufficiency of Scripture in shaping missions and the primary role of the local church in doing missions.
This statement might be the single most important document written on missions in the last 100 years. Responding to several trends in 20th century evangelical missiology and missions praxis, TSF’s statement presents a more compelling alternative in the form of a biblical vision for Christian missions. This document should be required reading for all elder boards, missionaries, church members, and missions board personnel. Pastors, elder boards, or missions committees might find TSF’s statement a useful confessional and methodological standard to require of potential missions partners.
Although all believers and churches must be committed to missions, most Christians in fact will never go to the mission field. The large majority of Christians are instead called to be faithful “senders”—those who stay, send, pray, and support the work of missions. Samuel Pearce, a Baptist pastor in the 18th century, was a part of the circle of men who “held the ropes” for William Carey on his mission to India. While most missions biographies focus on those who go, this memoir, compiled by Pearce’s close friend Andrew Fuller, provides an example to emulate from one who stayed, sent, prayed, and supported. Weep, burn, and be inspired by the passion of a man whose heart yearned for the nations and whose life was a model of faithfulness as a sender.
In a day when most missions thinking is marked by pragmatism, Kocman and Vegas take us back to Scripture to show us that our missions efforts must be shaped by God’s Word rather than by human strategies. Missions by the Book provides a clear, accessible, and biblical response and alternative to the many “movement-based” missions strategies that dominate the landscape today.
As the gospel crosses cultures, discussions abound concerning the best way to communicate the gospel message. Missiologists argue that the atonement must be reframed in honor/shame or fear/power cultures to appropriately contextualize the gospel where categories of guilt and righteousness are absent. In this accessible and persuasive little book, Burns shows that the Bible’s judicial categories provide the indispensable foundation for communicating the gospel. Other categories such as honor/shame are helpful and necessary but must be subservient to penal substitutionary atonement—the heart of the gospel message. (Advanced readers can also pick up Burns’s more expansive academic volume, Ancient Gospel, Brave New World).
“Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man.” The impact of these opening words from Let the Nations Be Glad! on 21st century Christian missions is immeasurable. Piper’s clarion call summoned a whole generation of evangelicals to share God’s passion for his global glory in Christ. One may take issue with Piper on exegesis (“What does panta ta ethnē actually mean?”), theology (“Is it appropriate to view Cornelius’s conversion as paradigmatic of unsaved, unreached peoples seeking God in extraordinary ways and finding pointers to truth from within their own religious systems?), or ecclesiology (“Does Scripture regulate how churches and worship should be ordered across cultures?”). Nevertheless, this classic must not be neglected by anyone wanting to think and talk about missions.
Dr. Johnson serves as a pastor in central Asia.
Thornbury gives us a gem of a book with his five short biographies of giants of missions from the past. Henry Martyn, John G. Paton, John Eliot, David Brainerd and William Chalmers Burns are each profiled, with a view to the crucial role of their theology and motivation. A great book especially for lighting the fire of passion to make the name of Christ known, even amidst suffering and opposition.
In this somewhat obscure and often overlooked book, we get a fascinating reflection on the link between God’s nature and the missionary imperative. Christ’s church does missions not merely to “add to God’s team” but as an outgrowth of the implications of God’s own attributes. An easy, modern, and compelling volume.
Tim Keesee gives us the tight storytelling of a journalist and the careful reflections of a theologian in this missionary page-turner of a book. As the author chronicles his travels among missionaries around the world, we get a ring-side seat to see the way simple, biblical faithfulness is making a lasting gospel impact around the world. We know from the Bible that God’s cause will triumph, but it’s wonderful to read about how it is triumphing through the work of unflashy, unsung heroes.
This is not exactly a book about missions, but it forms a much-needed foundation for what churches should be doing regardless of where they’re located. To put it bluntly, if you don’t know what a church is and what it should be doing in your own backyard, you’re likely not ready to go plant a church somewhere else.
Yes, reading books translated from Dutch is not always easy. But this book is worth persevering through. The author, a veteran missionary, international church pastor and theologian, has important things to say about timeless biblical principles for missions. And precisely because he is writing to us from eighty years in the past, there is extra power when his clear, biblical principles keep unintentionally undermining contemporary missionary errors. He is not arguing with modern missionary apostles of overly pragmatic, man-centered methodologies at all. Rather, Bavinck just keeps demonstrating the superiority of God’s plan for careful, biblical, church-based missions over any idea that human pragmatism might concoct in the future.
Buser is president of missions training organization Radius International.
For thiry years, this has been the best book on developing the theological underpinnings of God’s heart for the nations. I have yet to meet a serious, long-term missionary who was not impacted by this book.
This biography of Adoniram Judson is quite possibly the most powerful book I have ever read. While it comes from another era, the lessons are timeless and the story tends to put steel into the spine of aspiring missionaries and sending churches.
This book speaks to the necessary quality and caliber of those who are being sent out and the methods they employ. Faster is not always better, especially when the gospel and the church are at stake. Rhodes masterfully weaves the past and present together in a compelling missions argument.
Packer brings to the fore the supremacy of God in salvation and thereby relieves the missionary of a burden that he was never meant to carry. Over sixty years since first publishing, this book remains a sweet balm to those who will labor in difficult circumstances around the world.
Paton’s autobiography is the gold standard in missionary biographies and is a high recommendation. Schlehlein, though, is able to take a more expansive look at this well-known missionary and draw conclusions and lessons that are quite helpful to aspiring missionaries.
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For more book recommendations from pastors, professors, and counselors on a variety of topics, click here.
Keeping missionaries as members at the home church can hurt the missionary’s ability to meaningfully join a church on the field.
Until Christ returns, language learning will be essential to fulfilling Jesus’s command to make disciples.
The fact that any people remain in gospel darkness under God is the responsibility of his churches.
