A Vision for Missions Must Be God-Centered

Tom Wells, A Vision for Missions: The Character of God and the Missionary Motive. Banner of Truth, 1985. 160 pages.

In 1992, John Piper penned Let the Nations Be Glad! The first paragraph alone reshaped the motivation of many readers to take the gospel to the nations.

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. When this age is over and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever.^{11 .} Piper, John, Let the Nations Be Glad! The Supremacy of God in Missions, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 35.

The idea that God’s glory must motivate missions was a shocking challenge to our man-centered assumptions. However, if we had read Tom Wells’s book A Vision for Missions several years prior, Piper’s opening paragraph might not have been paradigm-shifting. Though his thesis is less pithy than Piper’s, the strength of Wells’s sustained argument defending a God-centered vision of missions puts his book among my favorite missions texts.

Divine Worthiness and Missionary Work

Like Piper, Wells contends, “God is worthy of being known and proclaimed for who he is, and that fact is an important part of the missionary motive and message. . . . Those who know the most about God are the most responsible and best equipped to tell of him” (viii).

To defend this thesis, he commits the first nine chapters to investigating God’s attributes. After looking at the worthiness of God to receive worship, Wells then turns in chapter ten to the need of humans to be saved by God.

The book concludes with three brief accounts of exemplary missionaries who deeply understood divine sovereignty and joyfully declared God’s glory to the ends of the earth. Throughout the work, Wells directs attention to God’s excellencies, demonstrating that God’s nature governs our labor.

The Sovereignty of God and the Work of Missionaries

One of Wells’s key insights is that the most stable missionary motivation emerges from knowledge of God’s sovereignty (10). Even though God needs nothing, in his wisdom, he chose to create. He made a world where he might be known and sent his creatures to make himself known (24). Wells writes,

Why is mission work meaningful? Here is the reason: it is work that arises from the wisdom of God. The God who knows all sends us to it. God has chosen this way to bring the knowledge of himself to the world. His choice was wise. We know that, not because we are keenly intellectual, but because he is “the only wise God,” to who “be honor and glory for ever and ever” (1 Tim. 1:17). That alone settles the question. (50–51)

We share the knowledge of our good God with others because his intention to be known is right and good.

Centering our missions on the proclamation of God constrains our missionary work. Wells rightly stresses that our purpose as humans is not just to know God’s salvation, but to know and enjoy God himself. Of course, Wells is clear that we cannot know and enjoy God apart from knowing the cross and resurrection by which we might be saved. God’s righteous acts in the gospel are what reveal his glory to us (60–61). Yet missionaries need to be reminded that they are tasked not merely with sharing the gospel, but with sharing the knowledge of the glory of God to which we are introduced in the gospel. If we who proclaim God have a truncated understanding of him and his work, that’s what we infuse a future generation with (28).

Wells condemns a pragmatic approach to evangelism that presents a palatable view of God and the gospel to solicit a positive response. If the goal of missions is to deliver what God has revealed about himself to his creation, then the messenger does not have the liberty to proclaim anything else. Declaring the goodness of God is a delight regardless of how our audience responds.

Sovereign Salve for Weary Workers

The importance of a God-centered missionary motivation is practical for those in the throes of wearisome labor. I wish I had read Wells’s book before my wife and I spent time on the mission field. Wells’s confidence in the goodness of God puts steel in the spine of evangelists as he writes,

This God, who is King, is worthy to be known and to be proclaimed for who he is. The missionary who proclaims this God cannot fail. If his message extols the sovereign God, it will be significant even supposing it is never the means of winning one soul. The message will not be lost. It cannot be lost. It will remain as something precious. Before men and angels—yes, and before the demons of hell—it will be praise to God! (43)

To sum up the whole book, one might say missions begin and end with the wisdom of God to share the knowledge of his goodness with his world. Where delight in that knowledge is lacking, missions exist. What Wells’s argument might lack in pithiness compared to Piper’s, it makes up for in profundity.

A Church-Shaped Hole

I commend Wells’s book as a rich theological treatment of the theology of missions rooted in God, his glory, and his goodness. If I were to offer one critique of Wells’s work, it would be that he fails to point to the church as the center of God’s wise mission to make himself known.

Except for one passage where he mentions that God intends to display his manifold wisdom to the inhabitants of the cosmos through the church (52), Wells is silent about the church as the pillar and buttress to the truth. This omission is both unfortunate and odd, particularly since Wells closes the book by citing Ephesians 3:20–21, which focuses on God’s glory in Christ and the church (155).

Missions as Worship

In the final analysis, Wells’s book deserves to be read and appreciated as much as Let the Nations Be Glad. As long as one keeps in mind that the knowledge of God’s glory is guarded and displayed in the church, Wells’s book serves as a well-argued defense of Piper’s pithy summary: God is worthy of all praise. When and where it is denied him, missions exist. Those who know most about God’s glory are best equipped to proclaim his excellencies. To this God be the eternal glory in Christ and the church forever.