In the summer of 1727, a ragged community of religious refugees gathered on a Saxon nobleman’s estate called Herrnhut.
Lutherans, Reformed, separatists, and Moravian exiles had lived together on this crowded property for five years, and their bickering over doctrine and practice seemed ready to tear it apart. Then, during a communion service on August 13, the Spirit of God fell on them in power. Within weeks, the Moravians organized a round-the-clock prayer watch that would continue, hour by hour, for a hundred years.
Five years into that vigil, two of their number—a potter and a carpenter—boarded a ship for the Caribbean to bring the gospel to enslaved Africans, having declared themselves willing to become slaves if that was what the work required. We rightly honor William Carey as the father of modern missions, but the Moravians were planting mission stations around the world before Carey was born—and it all began in a prayer meeting.
Through the years, many have pondered John Piper’s famous line that missions exists because worship doesn’t. He is right. Worship is God’s goal for the world, and missions is a temporary necessity—the church’s labor to gather worshipers where there are none.
But there is another sense in which the opposite is also true: missions exists because worship does.
When God’s people faithfully and fearfully worship the triune God in spirit and in truth, walking in obedience out of gratitude for his all-sufficient grace, the natural overflow is joy carried to the nations.
This is true because it follows the order of love. When we are faithful in the small and near things first—loving our families, our churches, and our neighbors—those loves do not stay contained. They overflow outward in concentric rings, from household to congregation to community to the ends of the earth. When the fruit of Christian love is borne in this proper order, we may prayerfully expect that our charity will extend beyond our immediate circle.
Our capacity as created beings is limited, but God’s is not. The one who multiplied a few loaves and fishes to feed the multitudes is able to take the ordinary loves of people and places and deploy them to reap his harvest among the nations.
To speak of Christian living—or of Christianity itself—apart from love is a contradiction in terms. In a world of disordered affections, where what is vile is celebrated and what is good is bent inward on itself, recovering the order of love is essential to our mission. By this all nations will know that we belong to Christ (John 13:35).
Acts 13 shows us how this works. Before Paul and Barnabas ever set sail, the church at Antioch was simply doing what churches do. Its prophets and teachers attended to the ordinary means of grace: “While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them’” (Acts 13:2 ESV).
Notice the order. God moved first among the gathered church, and only secondarily among the men he called out of it. The Great Commission did not interrupt Antioch’s worship. It grew out of it.
And notice that Paul and Barnabas were already being faithful with what they had been given. They had carried the churches’ relief gift to the famine-stricken saints in Jerusalem (Acts 11:29-30, 12:25). They had spent a year teaching a great many people in Antioch (Acts 11:26). Barnabas, true to his name, had been encouraging believers to remain faithful to the Lord (Acts 11:23) and developing leaders—including, it seems, Paul himself, whom he sought out in Tarsus and brought into the work (Acts 11:25).
The first missionaries were not restless visionaries waiting for a stage. They were faithful churchmen whom God promoted from one field of service to another.
Paul and Barnabas were the first missionaries formally sent out by a local church. Through their journey, the gospel crossed into Europe, and from Europe to the rest of the world—which means most of us reading this trace our own spiritual lineage back to an ordinary moment of worship in Antioch.
Worship begets worship. Missions is simply the process by which worship multiplies—the doxology of one congregation becoming the doxology of the nations. Which means the diagnosis for missionary apathy is not first a diagnosis of zeal but of worship.
Worship begets worship. Missions is simply the process by which worship multiplies—the doxology of one congregation becoming the doxology of the nations.
Do you feel little pull toward the nations? Does your unbelieving neighbor’s condition leave you unmoved? Do not manufacture guilt; instead, deepen in worship. Come to church on the Lord’s Day hungering for God himself, asking for fresh outpourings of his Spirit, renewing your covenant with him, delighting in his grace—rather than merely hoping to get something out of the service.
Then practice worshipful living before the watching world. My friend Ray does this well. He invites unbelievers to his family’s Saturday dinners, which include family worship. His guests watch as he and his household open Scripture, sing psalms and hymns, and come before the Lord in prayer. No pitch, no program. Worship itself, though not a replacement for evangelism, is itself a powerful witness—and its aroma often carries farther than we think.
Herrnhut’s prayer watch did not begin as a missions strategy but as a company of sinners beholding the grace of God together—and within a generation, their sons and daughters were scattered from Greenland to the West Indies.
The pattern has not changed. Let us give ourselves to the ordinary worship of the triune God, trusting him to multiply our loaves and fishes among the nations. And may we, like Antioch, be found worshiping when the Spirit says, “Set apart for me.”
