So, Where Should the Gospel Go?
Credit: Madison Hargett
Recently, our campus ministry sent a team of students led by staff members to Nice, France for a week of serving the local church, interceding for the city by prayer walking its streets, showing hospitality to millennials and Gen Z’ers by throwing a western-themed party, and interviewing college students on Nice’s four campuses on cultural issues they face on a daily basis.
This was coupled with what God was doing in the team members themselves. Getting out of the everyday American college bubble and using a week that they could have instead used to go home and sleep and catch up on Netflix, they chose to work hard to raise the funds needed to go on this trip and serve with gracious hearts. They didn’t know what God would deposit in their heart and spirit along this trip, and perhaps the full fruit of that is yet to be seen.
All in all, this was a wonderful trip and one that we will go on again.
But, leading up to the trip, I heard something coming from the team members that hasn’t sat well with me since then.
As the students worked to raise their funds by reaching out to family members, friends, churches, and general acquaintances, some of them said their fundraising conversations had remarks from those they were asking like, “I’m not sure why you’re going to France,” or “There are more deserving places than France for a mission trip.”
And it is this mindset that has disturbed me: that a modern, secular country like France is not worthy of sending teams or raising dollars to go and give the French (and other modern peoples across the globe) a proper gospel presentation and draw their awareness of their need for God.
Nice, France. Home to nearly 345,000 people. Credit: Anna Alexander
If I had to guess, I would say that those who made the negative remarks about the France trip think that missions is working in places like the African bush among a tribal people who have never heard the gospel. To be sure, that is missions and just as important. But we can’t put one people group over another, especially when God Himself doesn’t do that. He is “not willing that anyone should perish.” (2 Peter 3:8-9)
God cares about the city and its people. God loves them with a “never-stopping, never giving up, unbreaking, always and forever love.” And if God is like this, who are we to cast judgment on where missions is needed?
There are several biblical examples of God sending His missional heart to people in well-to-do cities. The Apostle Paul alone planted several house churches in big places of commerce. Corinth alone was not some grand church, but rather a small group of believers gathering together in houses to worship the risen Christ, embedded in a city steeped in sin.
But I want to look at the book of Jonah to make my point.
Most people know Jonah from him being swallowed by a large fish and living to tell the tale. However, the book of Jonah starts with these two verses: “The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: ‘Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.’” We then read about how disobedient Jonah was in not going to Nineveh; instead he went in the opposite direction and this is where we get our giant fish story.
After Jonah spends three days in the fish, he’s spat out. In Jonah 3, Jonah gets a second chance to obey God…
“Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time: “Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.” Jonah obeyed the word of the Lord and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very large city; it took three days to go through it. Jonah began by going a day’s journey into the city, proclaiming, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. When Jonah’s warning reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust… When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.”
So the people end up repenting and God ends up relenting the destruction he threatened. Jonah, however, is not happy one bit about it. He goes off to have a pity party, knowing that if these people (who are not good people) hear God’s message, they have a chance to repent. And, lo and behold, they do! Jonah would rather them burn in effigy like Sodom and Gommorah, but instead he sees a people who are now in the grace of God.
God addresses Jonah’s pity party with the verses that compose a cliffhanger to this prophet’s book…
“But the Lord said, “You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?”” Jonah 4:10-11
(Side note: I’ve always wondered why the book ended like this. One of God’s great mysteries, I suppose.)
So, some things to address from this short book of the Bible.
God has a heart for the city.
He could have easily wiped out the enemy of His people, but chose to send someone to be His ambassador so that they might hear the message and have the opportunity to repent.
City people are just as deserving as anyone to hear the message and have a chance to repent.
We may think, “Oh, they’re so civilized and technologically advanced. Why waste money, people, and resources on them?” But that would be missing the heart of God.
Large cities = large impact.
For Jonah to go through all of Nineveh, it would have taken him a full three days. Instead, he gets a days’ length into the city (speculation here, but maybe he ventures into the center of the city?) and uses that place as a means to preach. It works because word gets back to the king who issues the edict for everyone to follow. The city is spared.
Ignorance is not bliss.
In refuting Jonah’s anger, God shares that he has concern for the “more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left” In other words, there has been no adequate gospel witness for these people to awaken them from their everyday lives and wake up to kingdom reality. They do not know any better; they were civilians in the kingdom of darkness. And yet, all it took was one guy going in and giving a punctual message of repentance, bringing them out of ignorance, for people to respond positively.
So, when we hear of people today saying things like, “I don’t know why you’d go to France…” or some other negative connotation regarding a modernized location, we must remember that God is concerned with the Ninevehs of today and He is looking for those who would take up the call to go into these places to speak words of kingdom life. We also must remember that God cares for those who are in remote places and longs to send people into those places as well. For missions to have its full effect in the world today, it is not a question of “either or” but “both and” God cares for both the city and the desert. The cultured and the not-so-cultured.
If we cannot move past our prejudice in who gets the gospel and who doesn’t, we must be willing to answer the question of who gets the gospel and who doesn’t.
