All Articles For A Goal in the Philippines

Previous article in this series: March 15, 2013, p. 282. What is a self-supporting church? How is the goal of having such churches at­tained? Does this preclude all financial assistance? If not, how can we give money in such a way as to avoid dependence? Obviously a “self-supporting” church supports itself. The church supports its own ministers and ministerial training. The church supports and does its own benevolence work. The church supports its own building projects and mission work. In a nutshell, a self-supporting church does not depend upon financial support from others. To accomplish this, we need first of...

Previous article in this series: May 1, 2012, p. 356. Money plays a significant role in missions. In fact, we could not do mission work without it. We need money in order to investigate fields. We need money to prepare men to be missionar­ies, and to support those men and their families as they do the work on our behalf. We need money for mission field expenses, such as travel, literature, conferences, ministerial training, etc. Few would disagree that the work of preaching the gospel in all the world with a view to establishing Reformed congregations cannot be accomplished without...

Previous article in this series: April 1, 2012, p. 295. A self-propagating church, as we noted last time, is one that is faithful to the great commission. She is mission minded. She is busy in the work of spreading the precious truths of the gospel in her own land and to her own countrymen. Last time we saw that certain pitfalls must be avoid­ed, especially as regards the use of foreign funds. We now turn to the positive aspects of working toward the goal of establishing such churches. The first step in establishing a self-propagating church is to teach the...

One of the main goals in foreign mission work must be to establish indigenous churches, churches that are able to exist on their own. The goal must be churches that are self-governing, self-propagating, and self-supporting. In a previous article (November 15, 2011, p. 90) we looked at what it means to establish churches that are self-governing. Now we consider the second characteristic of an indigenous church, namely, self-propagating. What is a self-propagating church? Every church of Christ on earth is called to carry out the great commission. Every church must go forth into the world and preach the gospel. Beginning...

Mission work is done in foreign lands with the goal of gathering the elect of God out of the nations of the earth. This is accomplished through faithful preaching of the gospel. The Spirit of Christ works mightily through this to bring the elect to a saving faith in Jesus Christ. But that in itself is not enough. In addition to the salvation of the elect, the goal of missions is also to gather God’s people together into congregations, for outside the instituted church there is no salvation (Belgic Confession of Faith, Art. 28). Churches must be organized. Congregations must...