A couple of weeks ago I emailed some supporters reminding them that our goal is ‘the fulfilment of the Great Commission’. But after I had pushed the send button, I had second thoughts. Would they know what I’m talking about using such time-worn phraseology? Maybe it would have a soporific familiarity. And anyway, what did I mean by ‘fulfil’? If it’s not crystal clear to me, what hope is there for the Christian whom we want to recruit to our cause?!

My first instinct was, ‘Microsoft’s thesaurus will help me’. To my astonishment, they didn’t even have an alternative word for ‘evangelism’. Time for a deeper dive.

I took my trusty Penguin Pocket Thesaurus off the bookshelf and started to translate. The freshness of the results startled me, motivated me and even gave insight about how to go about our task. Since nobody was looking, and my notes would never be published, I had the luxury of playing around with all sorts of combinations. I’ll spare you the humorous ones and share a couple that really caught my fancy.

Take ‘evangelism’ for example. Of course, we all say that evangelism is a process – but a process of what? Here the thesaurus makes life simple with expressions like ‘winning people over’, ‘persuading them’, ‘converting them’ and (my favourite) ‘helping them to defect’.

Then, the ‘commission’ of the Lord. Penguin says it’s his ‘charge’ to us, his ‘instruction”, his ‘directive’ even (sounds a bit heavy), his ‘assignment’ (that’s better). When I first met Campus Crusade for Christ, I told my friends it sounded like ‘The Holy Spirit meets Madison Avenue’ by which I meant that these people were taking Christ seriously. They were in busy back offices with maps and charts and diagrams planning to actually do the assignment. Their leader in the UK at the time gave an interview to BBC radio in which he talked about ‘when the Great Commission is fulfilled’. Not ‘if’ but ‘when’.

Of course, it would be arrogance to infer that Agapé has the key role to play in this venture. It’s even arrogance to say that we who are Western can see the whole world picture. Only God knows and he has plenty of non-Western agents working on the assignment – like the Nigerians, Brazilians, Koreans and others I meet in my limited little experience. We all have our part in ‘bringing off the Lord’s instructions’! Including Gen Z stars who aren’t burdened with too much missions history baggage.

My greatest encouragement comes in translating what it means to ‘fulfil’ this assignment. The alternatives ranged from ‘carry out’ and ‘accomplish’ (which I had expected) to ‘make a go of’, ‘pull off’, ‘finish off’, ‘polish off’ (I thought that had style), ‘wrap up’ and ‘see through’ (which I would never have thought of).

I know I’m not the first to wrestle with these issues. John R Mott, the great leader of students in the original Student Christian Movement, coined the phrase ‘the evangelization of the world in this generation’ with which he inspired thousands of students in 1900. He was careful to point out that this didn’t mean that the world would become ‘Christianized’. This became painfully obvious after the missionary delegates to the hopeful ‘World Missionary Conference’ in Edinburgh in 1910 went home only to find that a World War was about to break out between their countries. They didn’t even call it the ‘first’ World War’. They had never seen another and didn’t expect a second.

Our missionary future is brighter. There are even people like the Joshua Project who have dedicated themselves to offering missions data to help guide our choices.

Whatever would people think if we announced that we were helping to pull off the Lord’s assignment to help people defect to his government? They might take us seriously! They might take the Lord seriously. Maybe ‘pull off’ sounds too much like a stunt – but I’d sure like to ‘see it through’.

They other day I received a document which is being circulated to Agapé colleagues, board and staff here asking us to reaffirm our commitment to our statement of faith (I think they like to keep us on our toes theologically!). It included ‘The command of our Lord Jesus Christ to all believers to proclaim the gospel throughout the world and to make disciples in every nation. The fulfilment of that Great Commission requires that all worldly and personal ambitions be subordinated to a total commitment to “Him who loved us and gave Himself for us”’. The document didn’t have any of my fancy new translations.

I signed it anyway.