Pointing to Christ by humbly serving others worldwide

God is a missionary God. The Lord declares throughout Scripture that his passion is for all the nations to praise him. The great goal of God is his glory. To achieve that goal he must disciple the nations. The Father must call his chosen ones from throughout all the nations (1 Peter 1:1-2). Christ must purchase men from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation (Revelation 5.9). That is why he is a missionary God. Mission is the means to bring many to glorify God. In the words of John Piper: Missions exist because Worship doesn't.

In our culture it is easy to have a fragmented view of missions: individual people sharing the gospel with other individual people so that they may become worshipers of God. As we think about Christ and his bride, the universal church, we get a much more complete view of missions. The universal church-all believers in union with Christ, from all nations, throughout all time-is both the end and the means of missions! Missions is the church extending its breadth and depth through the gospel of Jesus Christ. As a local church, RMCC is engaged in missions locally, regionally, and globally as an integral part of the larger, universal church.

What Kind of Missions?

Several years ago, RMCC started on a path to be a church that is fully engaged in the work of missions. An RMCC Missions Committee was formed and given the task of developing and implementing missions strategies. RMCC's missions strategies can be summarized as follows:

• We partner with church plants locally and regionally and church planting movements internationally to establish viable, reproducing, indigenous, Reformed churches.
  
  
• We focus our missions efforts first where the church does not exist to any significant extent, or secondly where there is no Reformed witness.
  
  
• We develop long-term, two-way relationships with church planters, missionaries, and indigenous church leaders to help each other grow in Christ and promote the gospel.
  
  
• We promote with our mission partners biblical peacemaking as a key part of the gospel of reconciliation we have in Christ.
  
  
• We use strategic short-term mission opportunities to grow our passion for bringing the gospel to others and to strengthen our mission partnerships.
  
  
• We identify and help develop individuals who have a passion to bring the gospel to others and are gifted to serve as church planters or missionaries.

RMCC is a resource church. These strategies define where we as a local church want to focus our missions' resources of people, time, and money. They keep us focused, purposeful, and effective in our missions work.

Focus Areas

Over the years as we have sought to faithfully pursue these strategies, God has directed our paths to be engaged with missions in particular geographic areas and with particular partners. These focus areas are summarized as follows:

• Karamoja, Uganda-church planting, partnering since 2000
• Northern Mexico-church planting movement, partnering since 2002
• Bangladesh-church planting movement, partnering since 2004
• Montana-church planting in Helena and Missoula, partnering since 2006
• Asia Crescent-church planting movement, partnering since 2007

One of the ways RMCC hopes to inflame our hearts for missions is by encouraging every member to go on a short-term mission. Such mission ventures expose us to peoples, languages, cultures, and circumstances that are unfamiliar to us. By doing that, it can help us to reorient our perspective of our own culture and cultural practices, and it can enlarge our hearts for a greater passion to see God's Word proclaimed at home and abroad.