Communicating The Gospel Message
As I write this article on August 13, it is a memorable date for me. Sixty-one years ago, on August 13, 1965, my family began our journey of driving from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to San José, Costa Rica, in a 1961 Chevrolet station wagon. My parents started their missionary career by attending language school for one year in Costa Rica.
The world in which we live today has changed dramatically. One of the biggest changes in these sixty-one years is in communication.
Today we have a variety of methods, technology, and tools for communication.
In 1965, we drove from Tennessee through Mexico and several Central American countries until we arrived in Costa Rica. We didn’t have phones; we didn’t call home to let relatives know where we were or how we were doing.
We lived for a year in Costa Rica in a house without a telephone. At the end of that year, we drove all the way back to Mexico, where my parents started their ministry, still without owning a phone.
We received word from home via letters; if there was an emergency, we received telegrams. If a phone call was necessary, we went to a designated long-distance department of Teléfonos de México and gave the operator the number we wanted to connect with in the USA.
Communication certainly has changed. However, there is one aspect of missionary communication that remains the same today as it was in 1965, and that is communicating the Word of God.
In the book of Romans, Paul emphasized the fact that the Gospel is the power of God for salvation. That doctrinal belief was true in 1965 when my dad began preaching the Word of God throughout the Yucatán Peninsula, and it remains the foundational part of any missionary work that we do in the 21st century.
In our 21st-century world, we have tools and technology that we did not have when I was growing up in the 60s and experiencing firsthand what it was like to evangelize and start new churches.
However, the common denominator between the ministry of the first-century believers, missionaries in the mid-20th century, and today is the communication of the gospel.
As we traveled to Costa Rica in August 1965, we distributed gospel tracts in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and finally Costa Rica. I had the privilege of handing out some of those Spanish tracts that contained the gospel message.
The gospel remains the essential component of global mission work today. Whether we minister in remote villages or in cities of millions, the gospel is proclaimed in all settings.
The communication of the gospel is vital to all languages, cultures, and societies.
The gospel is essential for evangelism, discipleship, the establishment of churches, and training leadership for the continuity of ministry on any field.
First-century ministry was dependent on the power of the gospel. Twenty-first-century missionary work still relies on the power of the gospel for successful ministry. The gospel never outlives its power or its purpose. We are blessed with the privilege of communicating the gospel as we obey the Great Commission.
