Jesus clearly taught in Mark 8:35 that whoever loses his or her life for Him and the gospel will save it. Mark uniquely recounts this moment by noting Jesus’ call for believers to lay down their lives for His sake and for the sake of others. The gospel brings salvation to anyone who believes but—how can they believe in the One of whom they have not heard?
This is what drives us. This is why we do what we do.
It’s not secret that the calling to serve Christ is costly. At his conversion, Paul was told he would suffer for the name of Jesus, and he later proclaimed—from prison—that compared to knowing Christ, everything else was garbage.
Thousands of years later, our mission is the same as Paul’s: to plant the Church. In Europe, we are taking this moment to embrace the clarity of Jesus’ words and lose ourselves as we plant churches that are gospel-driven, culturally savvy, and prophetically engaged.
Gospel-Driven
The gospel of Jesus is the foundation of all we do. It is the power of God, bringing salvation to all who believe. This must remain our focus. With the Bible as our driving force, we are called to make disciples of all nations, and we take this apostolic calling seriously. We strive to employ solid church-planting methodology, but as soon as we put methods over the mission, the gospel is no longer what drives us. In order for us to love ourselves, we must stop connecting our identity to how we minister and cling to our identity in Church instead.
Culturally Savvy
Missionaries can’t casually adopt a host culture. Learning a culture takes more than cracking a set of coded societal norms. It involves years of sharing experiences with new friends, discovering what is important to other people, and slowing down to listen and learn. Many missionaries earn trust through the process of becoming an insider as they lose their outsider identities and even sacrifice their vision of what the Church can and should look like. To be culturally savvy, we must lose our way of seeing the world and embrace others’ radically different perspectives.
Prophetically Engaged
When we contextualize the power of the gospel for a specific culture, we can customize it for a particular place with a particular people. We strongly believe the Holy Spirit is leading us to engage with peoples throughout Europe where we can strategically embed personnel and see God do what only He can do. Only through the power of the Holy Spirit can we build something that will endure beyond any individual missionary or missionary team.
We continue the costly journey of planting the church among the secularized people of Europe. If the mission is to plant the church, and we’re planting it among people for whom self is the center, then we’re calling people to lose themselves—to die to themselves—for the sake of Christ and His church.