Why Your Marketplace Skills Are Missionary Skills

There’s a 99.99% Muslim island in the Indian Ocean where no indigenous church existed until a few years ago. Today, multiple generations of believers worship Jesus there. The catalyst? Not a traditional missionary. An English school.

This is the power of marketplace missions, and it challenges everything we’ve been taught about who gets to fulfill the Great Commission.

The Great Commission Isn’t Just for Professional Missionaries

For decades, we’ve operated under a false assumption: that the Great Commission belongs primarily to pastors, evangelists, and full-time missionaries. Meanwhile, marketplace professionals have been relegated to the role of “supporters,” writing checks and praying for the real missionaries to do the real work.

But here’s the truth that’s reshaping global missions today. If you belong to Jesus, the Great Commission belongs to you. Not as a side project or a financial obligation, but as a central calling woven into your everyday work.

The marketplace isn’t where you go to make money so you can fund ministry somewhere else. The marketplace is the ministry field. And your business skills, your entrepreneurial mindset, your professional expertise are not obstacles to missions. They are the very tools God intends to use to reach the unreached.

The 42% We’re Not Reaching

Let’s talk about a staggering reality that should break our hearts. Two thousand years after Jesus commanded his followers to “go and make disciples of all nations,” 3.5 billion people in over 7,000 different people groups remain unreached with the gospel. That’s 42% of the global population.

These aren’t just unbelievers. They’re unreached, meaning they could be born, live, and die without ever hearing the name of Jesus. They don’t know a person who knows a person who knows a person who could tell them the good news. This is gospel poverty, and it represents one of the greatest injustices in the world today.

Here’s what makes this even more urgent. Less than 4% of all missions resources, including money and people, go to these unreached areas. We’re sending 96% of our missions resources to places where the gospel already has a foothold while billions of people have zero access to Jesus.

Why? Because most of these unreached people groups live in places where traditional missionaries can’t go. They’re in creative access nations that don’t give out missionary visas. They’re in regions where churches and Bible schools don’t exist, where street preaching would get you arrested or worse.

But here’s what these nations do welcome: business.

Business as Mission Changes Everything

Business as Mission (BAM) is the intentional integration of business and ministry to create a sustainable missional presence of the kingdom of God in a particular community. It’s not a clever workaround or a trick to sneak the gospel past border guards. It’s a return to God’s original design for the marketplace as sacred space.

The marketplace as God designed it is already a legitimate value add, both economically and relationally. A gospel-redeemed marketplace brings people together and creates human flourishing. When marketplace professionals operate with kingdom values, they don’t just create jobs. They create platforms for discipleship.

Right now, BAM missionaries around the world are engaging unreached people groups through CrossFit gyms in North Africa, coffee shops in East Asia, preschools in communist strongholds, and manufacturing companies across Southeast Asia. There are coworking spaces in the Arab world, travel companies along the Silk Road, and business English schools throughout Muslim communities.

These aren’t front organizations. They’re legitimate businesses creating real economic value while making disciples and planting churches among unreached people groups.

The Story That Changes How You See Your Work

Let me tell you about Charlie. He lived on that 99.99% Muslim island I mentioned earlier, a tourist destination off the coast of Africa. The locals discovered that learning basic business English opened up job opportunities and allowed them to move up the socioeconomic ladder.

A group of BAM missionaries opened a for-profit English school on the island. They hired Charlie as a translator. Through his ongoing relationship with the school and its staff, Charlie left Islam and gave his life to Jesus.

The cost was immediate and devastating. His wife’s family dissolved their marriage even though she was pregnant with their first child. His brothers abducted him, beat him, confiscated all his possessions, and barred him from his home. When asked why he would endure such persecution, Charlie said, “Where else would I go? Jesus is everything.”

That day, Charlie was baptized in an inlet of the Indian Ocean, the first known believer of his unreached people group. He came to Jesus through a business.

Today, multiple generations of new believers have come to faith through Charlie’s witness, even among horrific persecution. A disciple-making movement has been planted on that island, all because a group of missionary entrepreneurs believed what Jesus said about making disciples of all nations. And they did it through the marketplace.

The Biblical Foundation You’ve Been Missing

This isn’t a new strategy or a modern innovation. The marketplace has always been part of God’s plan for the Great Commission.

In Acts 17:17, we read that Paul “reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there.” Paul saw the marketplace as essential territory for gospel proclamation, not just the religious spaces.

Aquila and Priscilla weren’t apostles in the traditional sense. They were tentmakers, business people who worked with Paul and traveled with him, taking their business wherever they went. These marketplace professionals actually discipled Apollos, one of the most powerful voices in the spread of the New Testament church.

Church historian Justo Gonzalez notes that one of the key ways the gospel spread in the early days after Jesus’ resurrection was through merchants who traveled with their businesses from city to city, town to town, nation to nation. They took the name of Jesus and the proclamation of the gospel with them as they went.

Everyday marketplace people and merchants were always key to spreading the good news. This is true for you in your community today, and it’s true for missionaries around the world.

How to Engage the Great Commission Through Your Work

You don’t have to quit your job and move overseas to engage the Great Commission through the marketplace. Though some of you might be called to do exactly that, and if the Lord is stirring your heart, it’s time to explore that calling seriously.

But there are multiple ways to leverage your marketplace position for kingdom impact:

Give strategically. Maybe you run a business that can give a portion of its proceeds to see unreached people reached with the gospel. Remember, less than 4% of missions giving goes to unreached places. Your strategic giving can change that ratio.

Pray specifically. Take on a region of the world and pray for the people there who don’t have access to Jesus. This isn’t a throwaway suggestion. Prayer changes the spiritual landscape and opens doors for the gospel.

Learn intentionally. Study the Great Commission and let the Lord speak to you about how he has equipped you to engage it. Your business degree, your entrepreneurial skills, your professional expertise are not disconnected from God’s mission. They are part of it.

Reimagine your role. Start seeing your work through a Great Commission lens. Who you are and how God made you is part of God’s redemptive story for the world. You’re not God’s B-team leftover. You’re not who got the sacred callings after God ran out. You are called, equipped, and positioned for kingdom impact right where you are.

The World Needs What You Have

The world is clamoring for our attention. Social media demands we look here, care about that, pay attention to this. But we need to be concerned about what Jesus cares about. And Jesus has chosen, for reasons we may never fully understand, to partner with us to see that the whole world hears the good news about him.

Your marketplace skills are not secular. They are sacred tools in the hands of a kingdom-minded professional. Whether you’re C-suite or blue collar, highly compensated or volunteer work, you can make Jesus known at work and around the world through your role in the marketplace.

Marketplace skills are missionary skills. The question isn’t whether you’re called to the Great Commission. If you belong to Jesus, the Great Commission belongs to you. The question is how you’ll engage it with the unique gifts, skills, and opportunities God has placed in your hands.

The world is waiting. 3.5 billion people are living and dying without access to the gospel. And God is inviting you, marketplace professional, to be part of the solution.

What will you do with that invitation?

Video Transcript

Erik Cooper: Well guys, good morning. My name is Erik Cooper, the president of this organization called The Stone Table. And I really am honored that you guys would be out here this morning. It was kind of funny working with the team last night. I was talking to my friend Roger over here, who’s a pastor. And I felt a little like a pastor last night. It was like, you know, why does it have to snow? You know, it always seems like it snows on Saturday night, right? For the pastors. It’s like, why does it always snow on Saturday, why can’t it snow on Tuesday? You know, I don’t know why it couldn’t have snowed on Tuesday this week, but it decided to snow last night. So I am grateful for those of you who are here today. What do we call you? The frozen chosen or something like that, right? So such an honor guys. And just on behalf of the Stone Table, I’ll start out this way too by just saying Merry Christmas. I hope this is an incredible season and time for you guys.

We’re going to dive right into our morning this morning. For the last year now we’ve had four of these. This is our fourth CBB of the year. We do these quarterly. We have been walking through what we call the missional marketplace framework at these CBBs. And if you haven’t been here, if this is your first one, this may feel a little like you came in on the last chapter of a story and that’s kind of true, but you can actually go to our YouTube channel. All of the teachings and the workshops from the last three CBBs that have kind of built up to where we are today are on our webpage and on our YouTube page. And so you can kind of get caught up, you know, if you’re just sitting around in the office, want to play them in the background. But let me just give you a quick recap.

You guys have the sheets there, the little booklet, you can write these things down. We give you these fill in the blanks, honestly, just to help you stay engaged and pay attention. I’ve had a few friends come up to me afterwards and be like, I missed that one and I can’t go home until the blanks are all filled in. So if you want to fill these out as you go, I’m just going to give you a quick recap of the last three CBBs.

The Missional Marketplace Framework Recap

The first one we talked about was work and the great separation, work and the great separation are what we call the sacred secular divide. And what we know, right, is that work was created by God. It was part of God’s original design and intent for his world. It was not a result of the fall of man. And you’re like, man, you don’t have my job, right? You don’t know how bad it can be, right? No, but work was not a result of the fall. Work was created by God and in Christ there is no such thing as secular work. We believe your work is sacred work. And so that first session we talked about tearing down this pagan, sacred, secular divide that is really kind of the operating system that runs under the surface of many of our lives.

CBB2 was work and the great story. We talked about work and the great story that we need a gospel revolution to kind of flip the script of our lives, that we have to see ourselves not as main characters in our own story, but actually as beloved members of the supporting cast and this grand meta-narrative that God has been writing since the beginning of time, right? We also discussed a biblical framework for the marketplace and marketplace work. We talked a little bit of theology in CBB2. So if you want to go back and catch up on that, you can.

Then CBB3 was work and the great commandment. Work and the great commandment. We talked about how our everyday work is actually a daily opportunity to fulfill the commandment that Jesus said summed up all the other commandments in scripture, to love God and love our neighbor as ourselves. We talked about the word Avodah, you guys remember that? Were any of you here for that one? The word Avodah, the Old Testament Hebrew word for work. That means labor. Yes, it means labor, but it also means worship and service. That our work was actually meant, all of those things to be tied up together. That when we go to work and we labor, that we can actually worship God and we can love and serve our fellow man. And we always, we love to say around here at the Stone Table, we don’t just fulfill the great commandment through acts of charity, that we can actually fulfill the great commandment through acts of commerce as well. We believe that with all of our hearts. Your everyday work is an opportunity to fulfill the great commandment.

Work and the Great Commission

But today, we’re going to take what may feel like a little bit of a left turn, but it’s actually not. We’re going to wrap this up with what we call the fourth leg of the Missional Marketplace framework, and that is work and the great commission. Work and the great commission. And friends, this is really the driving passion for our organization going back over three decades now. In fact, Ryan mentioned it, it’s right in our mission statement that the Stone Table is a great commission organization, that we proclaim the gospel from the marketplace. We are marketplace people, but the gospel and the global glory of Jesus really is our passion and our heart.

So today we’re going to talk about, I mean, how does the marketplace play a role in making Jesus known to the ends of the earth? All right, we’re going to talk about that a little bit today, but let me pray for us, okay? Can we pray?

Jesus, I thank you so much for these people who brave the weather and also for those who didn’t make it out this morning, Lord, and we just pray your blessing over all of them today. And God, I just pray that your spirit would be here. Lord, that you would illuminate our hearts and minds that this would not just be another breakfast today, but Lord, that you would stir us for the things that you are passionate about. And Lord, that our lives could count for the kingdom. Lord, we thank you, Lord, for what Jesus has done. We thank you for this season, Lord, that we celebrate a God who pursued us, who chased us, who came for us when we could not get to you. Lord, you came for us. And so Lord, we want everyone in all the earth to know this good news that Jesus has done for us, what we could never do for ourselves. And so Lord, today, illuminate our hearts and our minds and be blessed Lord by what happens in this room today we pray in Jesus’ name, amen.

A Global Missions Obsessed Church

So I grew up in what I like to call a global missions obsessed church. The church I grew up in, like when you pulled onto the parking lot, we had the flags of the nations. I didn’t know if I was going to church or to a UN meeting, you know, sometimes. You go into the lobby and there was this giant fountain with a globe that sat on it. And the globe said, we’re touching our world with his hands, right? Like that was the motto of the church. There were pictures of the hundreds of missionaries that our church supported on the walls and the old wood paneled walls, right? Like that back in the 70s and 80s that everyone decorated with. We had missions conventions, we had tastes of missions, we had missionaries in our home. There was not really a Sunday when we did not have a missionary sharing a five minute window or something in our Sunday school classes, even for the kids. And being obsessed about the global mission of God was just part of who we are.

And in the midst of that church, my parents were there and my dad, my dad was a, my dad’s in the back of the room. He hates when I talk about him. So he’s probably burying his head in the back. He’s the guy burying his head in the back. But my dad was a preacher’s kid. My grandfather was a pastor, pastor of little churches, New York, New Jersey. And so that was the environment my dad grew up in and says he always remembers the itinerant missionaries coming through town and he would have to give up his bedroom and go sleep on the couch so the missionary could have his room. That was kind of the way he was raised.

But you know, my dad did not follow his father into full-time ministry. My dad became a businessman, became an entrepreneur, you know, and had kind of a little run of success in the 80s and 90s. He was in the nursing home business, owned a restaurant, which was really cool. Like when you’re a high school kid and your dad owns a restaurant, that was really cool. But in the early 1990s, my dad was approached by a young real estate developer that also went to our missions obsessed church. And Tim had this idea. He had been noodling around with this idea. There was a government grant program that was available in the early 1990s for nonprofit real estate companies to acquire apartment complexes from the original for-profit developers.

So Tim came to my dad, he said, hey, I got an idea. We could use this grant program. We started a nonprofit. We could use this grant program to capitalize the acquisition of some apartments. We could start a management company. And we could build a business. And then we could just give all the profits to missions. And so I think my dad thought this would be a nice little two or three year project in between other projects for himself. And here we are 33 years later.

Building Business for Mission

We started this company, really a real estate company. We’re called Community Reinvestment Foundation. That’s the business side. So you guys know us as the Stone Table, but we really work in conjunction with a business and a missions organization. And so we started this company three and a half decades ago now. We’ve bought, rehabbed, and sold now over 2,500 units of affordable apartments and now assisted living facilities as well all over the state of Indiana and the Midwest. And through the business, we’ve been able to give a lot of money to strategic missions initiatives around the world.

In short, we love to say we use business to reach the world with the gospel. We started as a real estate company created for a specific purpose of funding global missions around the world. And so I love to say our founders actually built the great commission right into our business model. And we have stayed faithful to that now for the last 33 years because we believe business and the marketplace is part of God’s global missions calling for all believers and not only through the giving, but through the work itself.

So I want to talk to you for just a few minutes this morning about this and then we’re going to have some fun dialogue around the tables together.

The Unreached Reality

So why are we so passionate about global missions? Isn’t there plenty to do right here in our own city? Yes, there is. But let me talk to you for just a minute, because I think we’ve made an and equation an or equation sometimes. Let’s look at Matthew 28:19. Matthew 28:19, these were Jesus’ last words to his disciples before he ascended into heaven after his resurrection. You can write this down. He said, go and make disciples of all the nations. He said, go. He said, move out, disperse and make disciples, proclaim the good news and train up followers of all the nations.

And when we see the word nations here, I want you to understand something. This is not nation states as we would think of today when we look at the map. This is the word ethne or ethnos, which better translates actually as people groups or groups of people that share the same ethno-linguistic culture and background.

And yet 2,000 years after Jesus gave us this command, write this down: 3.5 billion people in over 7,000 different ethno-linguistic people groups or 42 percent of the global population remain unreached with the gospel. We call these unreached people groups or UPGs for short. If you ever hear us talk about UPGs around here at CBB, you know, we’ve got all these acronyms that we throw around here at the Stone Table, but UPGs is an unreached people group.

And I want you to understand something. This is really important. This is different from people in your neighborhood who don’t know Jesus. I hear people say, oh, we have plenty of unreached people right here in our own city. And I would say, no, you have unchurched unbelievers in your city. Absolutely. And do we need to be reaching them with the gospel? A million percent. But they’re not unreached, at least according to our terminology. And you know why? Because they have you.

And when we say unreached people group, we’re actually talking about gospel access. 42 percent of the world today could be born, live and die without ever as much as hearing the name of Jesus. And these are people who don’t know a person, who knows a person, who knows a person, who knows a person that could tell them the good news of the gospel, right? Friends, this is what we call gospel poverty. I think this is one of the greatest injustices in the world today.

And get this, less than 4 percent, this is what Joshua Project and other missions organizations would tell us that study these things. Less than 4 percent of all missions resources, including money and people go to these unreached areas or these unreached places. And I just want to say we’re not comfortable with that here. We’re not comfortable with that here. And we believe that global gospel deficit belongs to all of us, not just the professional pastors and missionaries. We love to say this around here, if you belong to Jesus, the great commission belongs to you.

The Marketplace Solution

And so in our earlier sessions, earlier in this year, we talked about how God chose to partner with us, with marketplace people like us, in the care and cultivation of his world. We talked about the creation mandate that God for some reason chose to partner with people like us to fulfill his work in the world, right? But I want to say to you as well, we believe he has chosen to partner with us in proclaiming his kingdom to every nation, tribe, and tongue as well. We call this the Great Commission. And this is where the marketplace and business comes in.

See, most of these unreached people groups are in places where you can’t go with traditional mission. We can’t send missionaries to most of these places around the world where this 42 percent or these 3.5 billion people live. They don’t give out missionary visas. There’s no churches or Bible schools there where we can just send people over and say, you know, just go out on the streets and preach the gospel, right? They’re what we call often creative access areas. But here’s what we do know. We can send entrepreneurs. We can send business people that the marketplace is actually welcome, a welcoming place for believers as we go to reach the nations, right? We can send people who have embraced the marketplace as we’ve talked about this whole year as part of God’s kingdom work in the world.

We call this business as mission or BAM, there’s another acronym for you, business as mission. And at the Stone Table, we define BAM this way and you can write it down. Business as mission is the intentional integration of business and ministry to create a sustainable missional presence of the kingdom of God and a particular community.

So we say that the marketplace as God designed it is already sacred space, right? It’s a legitimate and desired value add, both economically and relationally. It’s part of God’s design for his world. A gospel redeemed marketplace, it brings people together, it creates human flourishing, right? And so BAM, Business as Mission is actually becoming a highly utilized missions approach in what we call these inconveniently lost places around the world.

We’ve got BAM missionaries, we’ve got friends around the world that are engaging in strategic missions initiatives through, know, CrossFit gyms in North Africa, coffee shops, restaurants in East Asia, preschools and daycares, and communist strongholds, manufacturing and technology companies, large scale manufacturing and technology companies across Southeast Asia. We’ve got coworking spaces in the Arab world. We’ve got travel and tourism companies along the Silk Road. We’ve got business English schools throughout Muslim communities, businesses of all kinds, just to name a few. And my friend and colleague here, John Byrd, he coaches tons of these people all over the world as part of our work at the Stone Table here.

And this isn’t just about visa access, right? This is about creating a value add platform that fosters relationships, that helps people. We believe business helps people when we function and engage through the marketplace as God designs. And it’s helping them make impacts on the local community and proclaim the gospel to the ends of the earth. Write this down. We are making disciples and planting the church amongst unreached people groups through business, through business.

Charlie’s Story

And I want to close with one such story. This is one of my favorite stories of anything I’ve ever encountered in our time working here at the Stone Table. There’s an island in the Indian Ocean. It’s a 99.99 percent Muslim nation. There are no indigenous churches there. And on that island, there’s a for-profit business English school that’s operated by a group of BAM missionary friends of mine.

And this island, actually, it’s a tourist destination. It’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful area off the coast of Africa. And it’s a tourist destination for people from Europe, from the Arab world, even some people from the United States will travel all that way. And so the locals there have found that if they can learn just basic business English, it will give them a lot of job opportunities and an opportunity to kind of move up the socioeconomic ladder.

And until recently, until just the last few years, we knew of no known indigenous believers on this island. They knew of none. But during a recent visit, just a few years back, I was lucky enough to meet one of these new local believers that we’ll call Charlie. Charlie was hired by the school as a translator and through his ongoing connection and relationship with the school and the people there, Charlie left Islam and he gave his life to Jesus.

When we met Charlie, Charlie had just literally lost everything for his newfound faith. Literally. His wife’s family dissolved their marriage because even though she was pregnant with their first child, dissolved their marriage because they had given her to Charlie as a Muslim man and now he was a follower of Jesus. Charlie’s brothers, they actually abducted him. They physically beat him. They confiscated all his possessions. They barred him from his home.

And we sat with Charlie and we heard his story and we wept with him because he said, where else would I go? Jesus is everything. Where else would I go?

And then that day I had the honor of getting up from the missionary’s home and walking with a small group of BAM missionaries down this little dirt path to a little inlet of the Indian Ocean to watch Charlie be baptized. And this was at the time the first known believer of this unreached people group. And he came to Jesus through a business. Through a business, right?

And get this, this is what’s so exciting. As of today, there are multiple generations of new believers that have come to faith through Charlie’s witness, even amongst horrific persecution. Some of the stories, guys, that I could tell you today, they’re book of Acts kind of stories, right? But a disciple-making movement has been planted on this island amongst this ethnos, amongst this unreached people group, all because a group of missionary entrepreneurs believed what Jesus said, to go and make disciples of all the nations. And they did it through the marketplace, through a business.

So this picture here, actually hangs, if you went across the hall to my office, this hangs behind my desk on the wall because I want to see it every day when I come in here, because this is what we are about here ultimately at the Stone Table.

The Biblical Foundation

So listen guys, the marketplace, the business world has always been a part of God’s plan for the Great Commission. I’ll just throw a couple of verses at you, just a handful of verses that we pulled out. I share these verses, if you’ve been at our CBBs, I share these a lot, right?

Acts 17:17, this is great. It says, while Paul was waiting for them in Athens, his spirit was provoked within him because he saw that the city was full of idols. And so he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there, right? Paul always saw the marketplace as a place where the gospel needed to be proclaimed.

I love this as well. Just came across this recently as I was reading through the book of Acts again, Acts 18:26. Apollos, if you’ve heard of Apollos, was one of the early church planters and missionaries that we see in the New Testament. Says he began to speak boldly in the synagogue when Priscilla and Aquila heard him. They invited him to their home and explained to him the way of God more accurately.

If you know anything about Aquila and Priscilla, these weren’t apostles in the traditional sense, they were business people. Aquila and Priscilla were business people. They were marketplace people. They were tent makers who worked with Paul and traveled with Paul and they took their business with them as they went. And these marketplace people actually discipled one of the most powerful voices in the New Testament spread of the church.

And then I love this as well. I’ve shared this with you before here. You can write this down. One of the key ways the gospel spread, this is according to historian, Justo Gonzalez. One of the key ways the gospel spread in the early days after Jesus’ resurrection was through merchants who traveled with their businesses from city to city, town to town, nation to nation, and they took the name of Jesus with them and the proclamation of the gospel with them as they went.

We know Paul and Silas and Barnabas. We know these guys who were sent out from the church in Antioch to proclaim the gospel and plant the church. But history also shows that just everyday marketplace people and merchants, marketplace workers, they were always key to the spread of the good news. And this is true of you here in your own community. And it’s true of our missionaries around the world. And this is C-suite or blue collar, this is highly compensated or volunteer work, right? You can make Jesus known at work and around the world through your role in the marketplace.

Write this down. Marketplace skills are missionary skills.

Your Role in the Great Commission

See, we want to help all of you who work in the marketplace reimagine your role through a great commission lens. We want to give you some gospel imagination that who you are and how God made you is actually part of God’s redemptive story for the world. We love to tell you here at these breakfasts, you are not God’s B-team leftovers. God did not pass out all of his callings, his sacred callings and run out and was like, ah, you guys, we’re just going to ship you off to the marketplace. Have fun, right?

No, you’re not the B-Team leftovers. Go into all the world from our neighborhoods to our workplaces to the mission field and make disciples of all nations, of all ethnos. And friends, we can do it through business, through the marketplace. Your jobs, your work is sacred work and you are called even as marketplace people to make much of Jesus wherever you go to the ends of the earth, right?

So what does this mean for you? What does this mean for you? We’re going to talk about this a little bit around our tables. I don’t know, I don’t expect that all of you are going to quit your jobs and move overseas and go to a foreign country. That’s not what this is about today. But I mean, some of you might. And honestly, if you feel that urge, if the Lord’s pricking you and you’re saying, gosh, I’ve always wrestled with this, but you know, I got a business degree or I’m an entrepreneur or I just, you know I work in the trades. I mean, I never thought of myself as a missionary. Come talk to us. We can help you connect some dots.

Had a, Bill and I were just out in Fort Collins, Colorado talking about this stuff and had a 75 year old man who had just sold his business after 40 years of owning and running his own business. Came to me after the service, he had big tears running down his face and he said, if I would have just known this 50 years ago, I would have made some different decisions with my life.

But you know, maybe you run a business that can give a portion of its proceeds to see unreached people reached with the gospel, right? I told you earlier, less than 4 percent of all missions giving and dollars go to the unreached places. Maybe you run a business that can give a portion of its proceeds. We’re not taking up an offering here today, that’s not what this is about, but you know, or this we are going to talk about. Maybe you can take on a region of the world and pray for the people there who don’t have access to Jesus. That is not a throw off, friends. We need to be praying for these parts of the world who don’t have access to Jesus.

Or maybe you just need to learn more about the Great Commission and let the Lord speak to you about how he has best equipped you to engage the Great Commission in all the earth. The world is clamoring for our attention. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that. You go on social media. The world is saying, you know, look at this, right? Look at this, care about that, pay attention here. But we want to be concerned and we want to pay attention to the things that Jesus cares about, right?

And I promise you, Jesus has chosen for some reason, I don’t know why he chose us, but he has chosen to partner with us to see that the whole world hears the good news about him. So we’ve all been called, write this down and then I’m going to turn this over to Bill.

If you belong to Jesus, the Great Commission belongs to you.