Jesus calls us to himself and then sends us on mission — The Great Commission as told in Matthew 28 — to “go make disciples of all nations.” But where does global missions stand today? And what does it look like to collaborate across organizations, denominations, ethnicities and countries to accelerate the advance of the gospel?
In this episode of Today’s Conversation, we’ve joined with The Mission Matters podcast to bring you special guest, Michael Oh, the global executive director and CEO of the Lausanne Movement. NAE President Walter Kim co-hosts the conversation with Ted Esler, president of MissioNexus, and Matthew Ellison, president of sixteen:fifteen.
Together they share how God is moving around the world, particularly through the global missions movement. You’ll hear them discuss:
- What the difference is between global missions and the globalization of missions;
- How the demonstration of the gospel interacts with the proclamation of the gospel;
- The unique aspects of the upcoming Lausanne Congress in Seoul; and
- What brings them hope for the next decade of the global Church.
Read a Portion of the Transcript
Matthew: You will be celebrating 50 years here very soon. What makes this [Lausanne] gathering unique? Again, a lot of history here. What makes this gathering so special?
Michael: Lausanne’s passion is to accelerate global mission together. We believe that together is better. So we basically started with a question of how do we help the Global Church do the Great Commission together. Then we decided that there are three critical things towards that end. First of all, what we need to do, how we need to do it and the way to get it done.
First, what do we need to do. Over the past years I have asked dozens of global missions CEOs about the Great Commission: How are we doing, how far have we come, how much is left? No one had an answer for me. They only knew about their own contribution, their own growth chart. We need a growth chart for the Great Commission for the Global Church. We need a baseline of what it looks like to make progress of the fulfillment for the Great Commission. That’s why as a part of Lausanne 4, we are producing the first ever global report on the state of the Great Commission.
In addition to knowing what we need to do, we need to know how we need to do it. We need to come together and share information. We need to figure out how to do global mission together. Together is better. September 2024 the Global Church will gather together for the fourth Lausanne Congress. Five thousand from every nation joining in Seoul, South Korea, and 5,000 joining for Seoul virtual will come together to figure out how to do global mission together.
Lastly, how do we get it done? We need Netflix for global mission. Global mission today is the equivalent of local video stores, like the old company Blockbuster. We have tens of thousands of local video stores trying to build up their own stores and convince people to come into their stores to watch great videos they have on their shelves. We can’t use a 20th century modal to engage with a 21st century world. We need to find a way to bring the best of the Global Church to all of the Global Church. We need a global mission platform that is on behalf of the Global Church to accelerate the global mission together.
Seoul 2024 will be launching a meta platform — a platform that can help us connect with each other, learn from each other, collaborate together and respond strategically to the global report on the state of the Great Commission. Lausanne will then do one of the things that we do best which is curate people and platforms and theologies and strategies, resources and opportunities and make connections that will help accelerate global missions together.
Not only will we be working to develop a Netflix for global mission, the Fourth Congress itself will be Netflix-like. Seoul 2024 will be thousands participating from all around the world both in person and virtually with an additional hundreds of thousands be able to join various parts globally as well.
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Michael Young-Suk Oh is global executive director and CEO of the Lausanne Movement. He served on the younger leaders planning team for the 2006 Lausanne Younger Leaders Gathering. In 2007 he joined the Lausanne Board of Directors as its youngest member. Prior to joining Lausanne, Oh and his family served as missionaries in Nagoya, Japan. In January 2004, he founded a ministry called Christ Bible Institute (CBI). He currently serves as chairman of the board of directors for CBI and chancellor of Christ Bible Seminary. Oh received his B.A., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Pennsylvania; an M.Div. at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and an M.A. in regional studies at Harvard University.
Matthew Ellison is president of sixteen:fifteen and serves as a church missions coach. He worked as the missions pastor at Calvary of Albuquerque, New Mexico, for nine years, where he developed and launched a strategic church-wide missions ministry. He also founded an international short-term mission ministry called LifeLine Missions that gave thousands across the country the opportunity to experience the mission field firsthand. Ellison holds degrees from The University of New Mexico and Calvary School of Ministry.
Ted Esler is the president of Missio Nexus, an association of agencies and churches representing about 30,000 Great Commission workers worldwide. He worked in the computer industry before becoming a church planter in Sarajevo, Bosnia, during the 1990s. Esler is the author of “Overwhelming Minority,” which tells the story of their family’s ministry in Bosnia. In 2000, Esler became the Canadian director of Pioneers, and three years later moved to Orlando to join Pioneers USA’s leadership team. He was appointed as president of Missio Nexus in 2015. Esler holds a Ph.D. in intercultural studies from Fuller Theological Seminary.
Walter Kim became the president of the National Association of Evangelicals in January 2020. He previously served as a pastor at Boston’s historic Park Street Church and at churches in Vancouver, Canada and Charlottesville, Virginia, as well as a campus chaplain at Yale University. He preaches, writes and engages in collaborative leadership to connect the Bible to the intellectual and cultural issues of the day. He regularly teaches in conferences and classrooms; addresses faith concerns with elected officials and public institutions; and provides theological and cultural commentary to leading news outlets. He serves on the boards of Christianity Today and World Relief and consults with a wide range of organizations. Kim received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, his M.Div. from Regent College in Vancouver, and his B.A. from Northwestern University.
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