Discussion Jumpstarter
Study leader reference - not a definitive answer
Question 1
Clyde asks, “Are you a missionary? And if not, why?”—what specific assumptions about the word *missionary* (airplane, overseas, formal programs) keep Anabaptists from applying Matthew 28’s “go” to the places we “live, work, play, worship, go to school,” and what would have to change to make “go” mean *our daily geography*?
Another way to ask: What ideas (like flying overseas or joining a program) keep Anabaptists from thinking of themselves as “missionaries”? What would need to change for Jesus’ command to “go” to mean the places we go every day—home, work, school, and church?
Discussion Jumpstarter
Direct Answer
Based on the speaker’s teaching, many Anabaptists hear “go” and instinctively picture overseas work—“board an airplane”—instead of seeing neighbors and daily routines as the primary mission field. For “go” to mean our daily geography, we would need a mindset shift to intentional, relational, local engagement as a way of life, not a special program.
- He challenges the default definition: “we typically think of a people in some distant land… Our neighbors right where we live, work, play, worship, go to school.”
- He asks pointedly: “Has the Anabaptist community… believed we need to board an airplane to be a missionary?”
- He presses Matthew 28: “It says go, but what does that mean?… go out my front door?… go down the street? Definitely means to go on an airplane, but what about where we are most of the time?”
- He warns against event-based outreach: “We can’t just put on an evangelism face… It has to be who we are… a way of life, not an event we do.”
- He reframes the “unreached” idea locally: “Are our neighbors in North America a new unreached people group?”