In Acts 13, the church at Antioch is gathered for worship — fasting and praying — when the Holy Spirit speaks: "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them." And with that, the first deliberate missionary sending in church history begins. It begins not in a strategy meeting, not in a denominational office, but in a gathered community of worship.
This is not coincidental. The pulpit and the mission field have always been connected. What happens in gathered worship shapes what a congregation does in the world. And pastors who want to form genuinely missionary congregations cannot outsource that formation to a missions committee — it has to happen in the preaching.
The Theological Link Between Proclamation and Mission
Before we talk about methodology, we need to establish the theological foundation. Preaching and missions are not two separate activities that happen to share a building — they are different expressions of the same impulse.
Mission is, at its core, the sending of the gospel across every boundary — geographic, cultural, linguistic, social — so that every people group on earth has the opportunity to hear and respond to the good news of Jesus Christ. Preaching is the declaration of that same gospel to gathered communities of believers and seekers.
When preaching is done well, it does not just inform the congregation about the gospel — it shapes them into people whose imaginations are captured by the mission of God. A congregation that has been formed by preaching that consistently situates their local experience within the global story of God's mission will naturally begin to ask missionary questions: Who does not have access to the gospel? What am I doing about it? What are we doing about it together?
The Mistake of Compartmentalizing Mission Preaching
Many churches have a "missions Sunday" — one or two Sundays per year when a missionary is invited to speak, or when the pastor preaches specifically about global mission. The rest of the year, missions is someone else's topic.
This compartmentalization communicates something unintended: that mission is a program, a project, a special interest — not the beating heart of God's agenda in the world. And it produces congregations that are supportive of missions in a general sense but are not shaped by a missionary imagination.
The alternative is integrated mission preaching — not necessarily preaching about missions every week, but preaching in a way that consistently tells the story of the congregation within the story of God's global mission. This is a posture and a lens, not an agenda item.
Five Practical Ways to Preach With a Missionary Posture
1. Preach the biblical narrative as a missionary narrative. The entire Bible is the story of a missionary God — a God who creates, who sends, who pursues, who redeems, who commissions, who will one day gather worshippers "from every nation, tribe, people and language" (Revelation 7:9). When you preach Genesis, show how the calling of Abraham is the beginning of God's plan to bless all nations. When you preach the Psalms, notice how frequently they anticipate the praise of the nations. When you preach the Gospels, keep the Great Commission in view. The missionary thread is not a special topic — it runs through the entire canon.
2. Include global examples in your illustrations. Most sermons draw illustrations from the cultural world of the preacher and congregation. This is natural, but it produces a congregation whose imagination is limited to their own context. When you include stories, examples, and images from the global church — from persecuted believers in the Middle East, from first-generation Christians in Africa, from urban mission workers in Southeast Asia — you expand the congregation's sense of what the kingdom of God looks like and who it includes.
3. Pray for unreached peoples from the pulpit. The pastoral prayer is an underused tool for shaping missionary imagination. When the pastor names specific unreached people groups in prayer — when the congregation hears that there are hundreds of millions of people who have never once heard the name of Jesus — it creates an awareness that slowly, over years, reshapes priorities.
4. Preach the "why" of mission, not just the "what." Many mission sermons are motivational — they try to move people to action through compelling stories and urgent statistics. These sermons have their place, but they do not form long-term missionary commitment the way theological preaching does. When your congregation understands why God cares about all nations — rooted in his own character as a God who is for all people, rooted in the logic of the gospel itself — they are motivated by something more durable than emotional engagement.
5. Celebrate and integrate testimony from the congregation's own outreach. When a member of your congregation leads someone to Christ, when a short-term mission trip produces a real story of gospel transformation, when a member is considering a long-term missionary call — bring these stories into the gathered community. The sermon is one context; the broader gathered life of the church is another. Both shape missionary imagination.
Raising Up Missionaries Through Preaching
Some of the most significant work the pulpit can do for global mission is not organizational or programmatic — it is vocational. Some of the people sitting in your congregation right now have a calling to cross-cultural missions that they have not yet heard clearly.
Faithful, consistent preaching that presents the call to mission as a live option — not just for super-spiritual people or professional Christians, but for ordinary believers who are willing to go — will surface that calling in some hearts. The pastor who regularly says, from the pulpit, "Some of you are called to go — and I want to help you discern and respond to that call," is participating in the raising up of missionaries.
GoRhema can help you identify the missionary threads in your text as you prepare, so that this posture becomes natural and integrated rather than something you have to add artificially.
The Congregation That Prays for the World
The simplest and perhaps most powerful thing a pastor can do to cultivate a missionary congregation is to lead the congregation in consistent, specific, informed prayer for the world. Prayer for nations, for people groups, for missionaries by name, for unreached communities — this practice, sustained over years, produces people whose hearts are enlarged to the scope of God's love.
And enlarged hearts produce sending congregations. Congregations that give. Congregations that go. Congregations that partner with what God is doing at the ends of the earth.
It starts in the pulpit. It starts with you.