By Brian Wachter
Last year I wrote about everyday discipleship moving from our neighbourhoods to the nations. I wanted to remind people that the Great Commission belongs to every follower of Jesus and that local faithfulness can have global implications. But another word in our Navigator Calling deserves our attention. We long to see the gospel of Jesus and His Kingdom advance not merely to the nations, but into the nations.
There is a difference.
We can visit a nation without truly entering its life. We can run an event, distribute resources, support a project, or gather a crowd. God may use all of these. But our Calling invites us to look for something deeper: the gospel taking root among a people until local followers of Jesus are living and discipling among the lost, and the good news continues moving through their own relationships.
The gospel ordinarily advances this way—not as an idea floating above everyday life, but through people. Someone follows Jesus and begins helping another person follow Him. The Scriptures are opened around a table. Prayer becomes natural. Obedience becomes visible. Faith is shared with family, friends, classmates, and colleagues. Over time, those who were reached become labourers themselves.
This is why spiritual generations matter. Paul did not simply tell Timothy to preserve what he had received. He told him to entrust it to faithful people who could also teach others. Paul could see beyond Timothy to people he might never meet. The gospel had entered Timothy’s life, but it was already on its way to someone else.
When this happens among the nations, the gospel gains local voices and local feet.
Over the last three years, our student work has sent teams of students and staff to Fiji to serve alongside National Director Isei Tudreu and his wife, Daphne, and to help strengthen the work of seeing the gospel take root there. As these relationships have deepened, we have begun to see encouraging signs of generational fruit.
Their son Norton was impacted by last year’s team and began an initiative among his twenty-something peers to see the gospel advance among their generation in Fiji. That group then partnered with this year’s team to share their faith and help others take steps toward Jesus. The work was no longer simply something a team from New Zealand had come to do. Fijian young adults were taking ownership of the mission among their own friends and within their own relational networks.
At the same time, our students were being changed. Some have been gripped so deeply by what they experienced that they are now taking the initiative to return to Fiji in November to continue serving alongside their friends there. This is a wonderful picture of partnership between Navigator ministries across the Pacific. We are not bringing Jesus to a place where He is absent or arriving as the heroes of the story. We are joining what God is already doing, serving alongside local labourers, and discovering that we also have much to receive and learn.
That is part of what it means for the gospel to advance into the nations. We are not trying to make people more like us or to reproduce a New Zealand form of ministry somewhere else. We long to see people become wholehearted followers of Jesus who can help others follow Him within their own people and place. The outsider may continue to encourage, equip, pray, and walk alongside, but increasingly the gospel is carried by local people in ways an outsider never could.
Some of us may go. Others will send, pray, welcome, give, train, or walk alongside labourers in another nation. Many of us will do several of these things over a lifetime. But all of us can share the same longing: that the gospel of Jesus and His Kingdom would take root within the nations, carried through ordinary people who live and disciple among the lost, until one spiritual generation becomes two, and two become many.
As we ask God to use us to advance the gospel into the nations, it is good for us to reflect:
- Is my heart being enlarged by what God is doing beyond New Zealand?
- Am I praying regularly for particular people and places?
- Am I willing to cross cultural, relational, or geographic boundaries?
- Am I willing to support and strengthen local labourers without needing to be the visible worker?
- Am I discipling people with a vision that reaches beyond themselves?
- Could God use my vocation, hospitality, resources, friendships, or availability to help the gospel take deeper root somewhere else?
This month, we have a particular opportunity to participate through giving. We are seeking to strengthen the Peter Burch Missions Fund so that we can continue building upon the momentum God has given us—raising up and sending labourers, strengthening partnerships, and helping the gospel advance into the harvest fields of the nations.
The fund is not simply about financing another trip. It helps create opportunities for relationships to deepen, local labourers to be strengthened, emerging generations to serve together, and people to respond when God moves them to go. Through our praying, giving, sending, and going, each of us can help see the gospel take root in the nations and continue on its way to someone else.