NPAC’s mission stories over the years and the pioneer church planting history of the forerunners of the Christian & Missionary Alliance (C&MA) tell us seven things:

1. The path of mission is pitted with challenges and hardships, many of them beyond our imagination. Going on mission is not an honorable option to escape predicament in real life. It is a life choice for total offering, voluntary surrender, and absolute obedience to the LORD’s will. Such courage, faith and commitment are something today’s believers need to learn.
2. Even if the worst possible situation happens, mission is still a path of grace. Missionaries shed blood and tears on the hard soil for the gospel, offer prayers, toil and sweat. Their work may not bear instant fruit but in hindsight, the fruit the LORD brings forth is always evident. C&MA mission work is one of such struggles and persistence. Looking back at the missionaries to China, who would have thought that more than a hundred years later, Hong Kong would become a base for mission among Chinese?
3. Mission is the LORD’s plan, not the church’s achievement. What the church needs to do is to actively tie in with God’s plan and do its best to arrange the work. No single church or mission agency can do all the mission work. The church cannot confine itself to its member churches, region or denomination. Collaborating with others and forming alliances for the gospel is still the most effective strategy.
4. Mission calls for a great deal of human and financial resources, but ultimately it is the LORD who provides. When the church is willing to do it, the LORD will use the church to accomplish His work. If brothers and sisters are willing to make a faith offering pledge, the church will be able to continue, by faith, to support mission work. The church has to shoulder the responsibility of furnishing supply according to its own scale. For well-attended churches with plentiful financial offering, they should, just like the Egyptian storehouses managed by Joseph, stock up during the good years and distribute when famine strikes. This way, mission work near and far can continue to be provided for.
5. Mission work will be difficult to progress without some in the church to mobilize. Teaching believers to care for mission should be an ongoing effort of the church. In fact, a lot of passion for mission ignited within the church could grow cold once the believer steps outside the worship hall. Over the years, the church has been mobilizing through mission conference, short-term mission trips, missionary care groups, short-term missionaries and mission ambassadors. Hereafter, the church will need to find a new model suitable for this era.
6. The home front for mission cannot really “stay behind.” The warfare does not just take place on the frontline. Everybody must be assigned tasks. We can win the war only when everybody recognizes he has a part in mission, that he is not just a bystander waiting for others to help. It is the same with the Great Commission. Paul first liaised with believers in different churches. Whether they are rich or poor, everybody could serve as missionaries, helpers, financial supporters, or prayer warriors.
7. The networked world and the world in post-pandemic times is still one that our Heavenly Father deeply loves. Mission has been the church’s mission since the early church. If the church stops having mission, there can only be two reasons: first, Christ the Lord has returned; and second, the church is no longer the church. That is why the church should continue to send people, to take the gospel to unreached peoples and lands where the name of Jesus has not been heard before.

       (Excerpt from the epilogue of The Path of Grace – A Quest for Mission Corners)