the God Who Sends: Evangelism, Mission, and Calling to Make Christ Known

Every book in this series has begun with a conviction about what its subject actually is, because the word in question has too often been worn thin by careless use. The God Who Speaks began with the conviction that revelation is God's own deliberate self-disclosure. The God Who Answers began with the conviction that faith is not the abandonment of reason but its fulfillment. The God Who Listens began with the conviction that prayer is genuine communion with a Person who is actually present. This book begins with a parallel conviction about mission: that evangelism is not a technique to be mastered or a program to be run, but the natural, inevitable overflow of a people who have themselves been found by a God who goes looking, and who now cannot help but go looking for others in turn.The book's method mirrors its companion volumes, adapted for a different purpose. Each of its thirty chapters is anchored in Scripture - Old Testament and New, law and prophecy, Gospel and epistle - read closely, in its own original languages where that illumines the text, and always in the conviction that the whole of the Bible tells a single missionary story rather than a collection of separable religious insights. Where key Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic terms illuminate what is being claimed, they are introduced with their transliteration and their theological weight, exactly as in this series' earlier volumes. All Scripture quotations are taken from the New International Version (NIV).The book is organized into four parts. Part One establishes the theological foundation: mission begins with God, not with the church. Part Two turns to the gospel itself - the message every act of Christian mission ultimately exists to proclaim. Part Three considers the church as a sent and witnessing people, addressing evangelism, discipleship, testimony, hospitality, service, and the particular pressures of a skeptical age. Part Four widens the lens to the nations, tracing the biblical vision of a gospel that crosses every cultural and geographic boundary until it reaches the ends of the earth.I do not write as one who has mastered this calling but as one still learning it - still, on many days, more Jonah than Isaiah, more reluctant than eager, and grateful beyond words that the God who sends is also the God who patiently pursues his own sent people when they, too, are tempted to flee toward Tarshish. My hope for this book is not that it would produce better technicians of evangelism, but that it would help its readers fall in love again with the God who sends, and discover, perhaps for the first time, that they already are what every believer has always been: sent.- Andrés Morantes