Becoming Mission Driven: How One Church Made the Shift

Note: This case study is included in the book The Sending Shepherd: Leading Churches to Disciple All Nations, by Denny Spitters and Matthew Ellison, published by Sixteen:Fifteen in 2025. Learn more about the book and how you can get a copy.

If you cut our church, it bleeds missions. However, we felt our church needed to shift from being missionary-driven to being mission-driven. We decided that our church needs to integrate the Great Commission into our entire discipleship process. Although we had a passionate small pocket of people who embraced this discipleship, our hope was that, in a glorious way, this new vision would infect the entire body.

Where we started

As part of this process, we had to rethink the way we were supporting the dozens and dozens of missionaries from the past. Some in our congregation felt the shift was a betrayal of the missionaries. It would have been an easier existence not to make this shift. But we were compelled by a greater vision to reach the unreached like the Bible teaches, and we had to accept there will be a cost. Still, our heart was about standing on the shoulders of the missionary spiritual giants who have paved the way.

Who led the way

The key to this shift to being a mission-driven church was to find the right person to be in the right seat to lead this effort. We found an outstanding person with direct experience to become our Director of Global Outreach. She spent fourteen years working to reach an unreached people group, and I know her heart breaks for those who still haven’t had a chance to hear the Good News.

In 2019, we began working with Matthew Ellison at Sixteen:Fifteen, and we established the objective of identifying two unreached people groups in the next five years that we could lock arms with—whether to raise up missionaries in our local congregation or develop strategic partnerships that aligned with this vision.

Where the journey has taken us

Through prayer and consideration, we discovered a heart for reaching a Hindu unreached group, and then also a Muslim unreached group. A real strategic group that God has brought to us has been Afghan refugees. While we continue to ask God to clarify how we can serve these two unreached people groups, we’ve also taken steps in this direction. For example, this fall, we’re having a Hindu-focused weekend where we will ask the church to focus their prayer and seek God for how we can reach this group.

We've also established a ministry that teaches English as a second language, which allows our church to reach those learning to speak English. It’s been beautiful to see how the nations are represented within our own local body.

Another way we are trying to cultivate God’s heart for the nations is by taking groups to visit a Hindu temple that is about 90 minutes away. I think it’s the second-largest temple in the world. Although we are not actively trying to evangelize, this gives our congregants a tangible experience of Hinduism, where they worship a god or many gods. This helps us understand the God of Scripture who incarnated Himself so that we can know Him. He can pay for our sins and change us from the inside out. Through that lens, we see how inclusive the gospel is. And yet the exclusive side is that we must put our belief in Him. So it’s both inclusive and exclusive. We know God desires the very best for them, which is to worship the one true God. That’s our heart.

There’s also an apartment complex, nicknamed Little India, about one mile away from our church that houses a number of people from India. We know God is moving within the Muslim world, drawing people to Himself. And we acknowledge that Hindus are an even harder population to reach. A huge percentage of the unreached people in the world are on the continent of India. Thus, we feel a nudge toward this population, and we believe that God in His providence has put a large number of Hindus nearby.

We’re also cultivating God’s heart within our congregation by asking every ministry to adopt a global outreach mindset within its discipleship plans. Even in our nursery, staff and volunteers pray over these little kids asking God to raise them up with hearts for God’s mission--whether they become bows or arrows with the Good News.

A couple of times we’ve ended our worship services by inviting people to shout praise in their native tongue, kind of a popcorn of verbal worship all over the congregation. The response I’ve heard from others in the pews is that they “had chills.” In a tangible way it gives a foretaste of what Revelation 7:9 will feel like—when we have the amazing opportunity to gather around the throne united as one to worship God.

A fresh chapter

In this fresh chapter for our church, I feel very blessed to get to work with a passionate team at our church, both staff and lay leaders who want to see Christ exalted. That’s the end game—God’s glory. We know there will be resistance, whether it comes externally or internally. Yet when we dust for fingerprints and see the tactics Satan is clearly using even today, the good news is that we see that our God is greater than any resistance and He will ultimately succeed. Caught up in God’s glory is where we want to remain. This is our long game: united in worship forever.

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