10 Toxic Traditions That Are Killing the Church

Viewing missions as a location and not a lifestyle.

I love missions. I was a missionary for two years. I’ve done missions about every bad way you can do it. I did tourist missions, where I went to an exotic place, took some pictures with some malnourished kids to feel better about myself, and then came back home loaded down with souvenirs. That’s not missions. But here’s the specific tradition about missions that we’ve turned into something toxic: we’ve turned missions into a location, not a lifestyle. We feel like we’ve got to go 1000 miles and spend $1000 to go do missions. How is it that we’ll train for months, give up our vacation and spend our hard-earned money to go tell strangers we’ve never met about Jesus, and yet we won’t go across the street to help our neighbor? We’ll go to Africa but we won’t go to the inner city? Come on now! Missions is not a location, it’s a lifestyle. If we started doing missions right where we lived, if we began to see our schools, our workplaces, our ball fields as a mission field, people would be getting saved left and right. Missions is not a location, it’s a lifestyle.