Missionary Churches

Is it possible to revitalize a church that has forsaken its “first love” (Revelation 2:4)? Such a church needs to be revived through a living relationship with Christ, reformed according to God’s Word, and transformed into a missionary training school for all its members. According to Ellen White, “Every church should be a training school for Christian workers. Its members should be taught how to give Bible readings, how to conduct and teach Sabbath-school classes, how best to help the poor and to care for the sick, how to work for the unconverted.” No other early Adventist missionary strategy was so effective in transforming local congregations into missionary agencies as the Tract and Missionary Societies. On November 6, 1870, the first of those societies was organized by Stephen N. Haskell for the newly formed New England Conference.

Its threefold purpose was to visit people, circulate books and tracts, and obtain subscribers for Adventist periodicals.

Any Adventist could join the society by contributing a dollar.

Each member kept a record of his or her labor and gave a report at the quarterly meetings. In 1873, the General Conference asked Haskell to travel to each of the other conferences to promote tract and missionary work.

And in 1874, the International Tract and Missionary Society was formed. Our world today is very different. Many of the good outreach methods of the past might not work as successfully today. They may need to be either updated or replaced. But imagine your local church becoming an effective “training school for Christian workers.” Remember, “the church must be a working church if it would be a living church.” As important as it might be to ask what the church should be doing, it is far more effective to ask and then act upon the more crucial question, What am I doing to revitalize my local church? Allow God to use your talents and skills to help transform your local church into a powerful missionary agency.