Every Member a Missionary

written by Lawrence Yoo

If you’ve been at Waypoint for a while, you know the difference between a “doggie dog world” and a “dog eat dog” world. In case you haven’t heard the story, my sweet wife, Jina, sometimes has a hard time with American idioms and for years she thought people were saying doggie dog world--a world full of puppies, laughter, and joy. I hated to tell her that the people were really saying dog eat dog world--a place of competition, danger, and death.

The word mission comes from the Latin word missio that means “to send.” At Waypoint Church, we believe that God has sent each of us to our various neighborhoods, workplaces, and families to be God’s ambassadors to show the world who Christ is. We believe we are called to show our dog eat dog world what a doggie dog world could look like.

This is played out in different ways through the members of our congregation. We have teachers who trust that God has called them to their particular schools and live out their mission vocationally as they strive to do their work with excellence, loving those God has put in their classrooms and on their teams. Many have taken up the call to live missionally in their neighborhoods, creatively looking for opportunities to deepen relationships and share the gospel. We have families who have been called to foster and adopt, living out their mission through their family life. Whether it is through regular visits to a local coffee shop, at the gym, or in a lab, our prayer is that we will all live out our gospel identity through the rhythms of every day life.

This also means that some of us will be sent to unreached or unengaged people groups, and all of us are a part of that mission through prayer and giving. We take seriously the call to make disciples of all nations here and abroad, and we look forward to the day when people from every tongue, tribe, and nation will bow before our King. We saw that happen this past week as we rejoiced together as we commissioned two of our members to go to a global city with many unreached peoples.

I’m excited to be on mission with all of you, and I’m encouraged by the ways I see you live this mission out. Let us press on to share the gospel, make disciples, proclaim the word of God, pursue justice in the streets, and live mercifully in community.

A doggie dog world is coming.