For many students Missions Conference week is really a great opportunity to spend the better part of a week as a kind of extra Spring break. After all, if you don’t feel called to missions and really don’t want to have to face the pressure or guilt associated with all those pleading eyes staring at you from an army of missions recruiters on campus, why stick around?

Well, I’m not going to be another pious voice trying to badger you into sticking around to “hear the voice of God” and all that stuff. But, I would like to share why this is an important week for some of us by telling a personal story.

I grew up in a non-Christian home. We lived in one of poorest sections of a densely populated inner-city community in a large mid-Western city. Skid-row was just a block from my house where alcoholism and violence were all around including its own devastating affect on my own family. Fortunately, in God’s own timing, my family moved to California where I started attending a small church in Hermosa Beach. In this church I discovered a new family –- the family of God. A community of believers who demonstrated that life could be far richer than anything I had known before. I was hooked. The church became my new family, and I spent as much time as I could in church services, youth meetings, whatever they had to offer.

One Sunday evening as I was walking home from church, having spent at least six hours in meetings I found myself reveling in the joy of having found Christ. My heart was overflowing with joy. It was wonderful knowing Jesus as my Savior. It was great being with people who loved Him as well, but then came the fear. Would I lose this joy some day? Would this joy be just an illusion? That was when I heard again God’s promise “I will never leave you or forsake you.” What sweet comfort to be able to embrace that promise and to rest in that assurance.

Then the reality hit me. If what I have discovered in Jesus is so great, it was not a secret I could keep. It was a message the whole world needed to hear. As Billy Graham used to say, “Evangelism is like one beggar telling another where to find food.” So that night when I got home, I knew I had a major decision to make. I needed to dedicate my whole life to sharing the Gospel with others. I wasn’t sure what that would mean, it certainly wasn’t some mystical missionary call. It was simply the realization that sharing the Gospel is something Christians should be doing. So, in the course of my life I have shared the Gospel as a believer, first as a missionary and now as a professor.

This realization that the world needs to hear the Good News has become increasingly popular among American Evangelicals who are now talking about forming “missional churches.” That is, churches that give priority to sharing the Good News of the Gospel. Perhaps we also need to think about becoming “missional believers.” That is believers who accept that God expects us to share our joy in Him with others. This, it seems to me, is what Missions Conference is all about.