Adapted from the talk as a book chapter, in the speaker's voice. It keeps the argument, stories and wording where possible, but it is an edited retelling, not a transcript. Tap a time in the margin to hear that moment.
I have had the privilege of travelling through many parts of the world, visiting missionaries and workers on the field and researching the history of missions and the legacies missionaries left behind. People often ask me which moments stand out. My favorite changes from day to day, but there is one I keep coming back to: landing in Seoul, South Korea. I was on a fact-finding trip, trying to learn how the gospel came to a land that is now saturated with churches, and I didn't really know what I was looking for. But I had heard of a place called the Yanghwajin Foreign Missionary Cemetery, so I started there.
Korean Christians regard it as something of a sacred place, because it is the final resting place of many of the first missionaries to that part of the world, most of whom arrived in the early 1900s. Korea is an advanced nation today, but in the early 1900s it was one of the poorest and least developed places on earth. The rise of South Korea has been phenomenal. Those who went then were making a real sacrifice.
I was there one fall morning, almost alone. The leaves had turned; it was beautiful. As I walked among the graves I read the names and where the people had come from, and I was surprised to find some from my own town, even my own neighborhood. That made it all the more special. I found it deeply moving to read the names, to see where they came from, and to see how many little children were buried there too.
I thought of the hundreds of thousands who worship the Lord in South Korea today, and I was overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of what God has done there, the connection between that cemetery and the work the Lord is doing week by week. I had no one to share the moment with, and perhaps that made it sweeter. But it was there that it struck me afresh how beautiful it is that the church has a missionary heritage.
I have been back since, and I've learned that it has become a place of pilgrimage. Many Christian schools make sure their students visit at least once, sometimes several times, to walk among the graves and learn about the people who sacrificed so much to bring the gospel to their nation. They go to learn the church's missionary heritage. And I wonder whether that helps explain why Korea has become such a phenomenal sending nation. Perhaps it has become part of their spiritual DNA because of what, and how, they teach their children.
That is my subject: teaching children the church's missionary heritage. There are so many Christians whose lives are worth knowing, and worth imitating. Children naturally look for examples. They want heroes, and the world will offer them plenty, some good and many bad. Wise Christian parents take it upon themselves to offer their children heroes who are truly exemplary because of the way they honored the Lord: people willing to make heroic sacrifices for God's cause, people convinced that God was calling them to leave their place and their people and go, and who accepted that call willingly and joyfully. What we want is for our heritage to become our children's heritage. And it falls to us to teach it to them.
I want to offer three principles, then three representative lives, and then a whole list of resources that can help you.
First principle: to help them value missions
We teach the church's missionary heritage to help our children understand and appreciate the value of missions. Every Christian parent is called to raise their children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. We raise them with the hope, really the expectation, that God by his grace will call them to follow him as he called their parents. So we raise them in an atmosphere soaked in Scripture, prayer and the gospel.
We also teach them a sad reality: that privilege is a great one, but not every child in the world enjoys it. So we teach them to have great pity for those who have no way to know the Lord because no missionary, no Christian, has yet gone to them with the gospel and the Scriptures. In short, we raise our children to have a deep concern for missions, and really a deep concern for the lack of missions, for the places where the gospel has not yet taken root. We do that by teaching them the Great Commission and the need for Christians to fulfil it, not only in their hometown or their country but in other nations too. We can and should lay a theological foundation so they know why missions matters and why it is essential to God's plans in the world.
But as parents we learn quickly that much is better caught than taught. The church has vast treasures to share with our children in the examples of those who actually went. Through story and example children learn what it is to be zealous for the Lord, to have a heart deeply burdened for a particular people, language or nation. (It endlessly fascinates me how the Lord burdens one person for this place and another for those people.) Through story they learn what it is to suffer joyfully, to pass through hardship toward the glory beyond, to see the fruit of long and persistent obedience. They see how a husband and wife can serve side by side, how children can play a part in missionary work, how Christians serve not only as individuals but as teams and churches, and how important it is to be willing to serve the Lord however he directs and enables.
So we must not neglect the theological basis for missions, of course. But we do well to emphasize story and example, and thankfully God has given us a great deal to draw from.
Second principle: modelled in our own lives
We teach the church's missionary heritage in conjunction with modelling it in our own lives. When my children were small, my mother warned me that children have an amazingly advanced hypocrisy detector. She was right. Children expect consistency between what they are taught and what they see lived out, especially in their parents. We can fool them for a while, but not for long. So it is right for parents to teach their children the church's missionary heritage, but those lessons will remain abstract if they are not modelled in their parents' lives.
That doesn't mean parents must be foreign missionaries or go to an unreached people group. It means parents should be engaged in mission in some way. We can't expect our children to believe we love overseas missions if we have no commitment to local mission. We can't expect them to care deeply about the unreached if we seem apathetic about the souls of our neighbors. If we ourselves are not on mission, everything we teach them will be abstract facts, and they will see that we don't really believe it, because we don't live it.
So mom and dad need to be on mission wherever they are: sharing the gospel with family and neighbors, refusing to live in a safe little Christian bubble, living in the world but not of it, faithfully serving the people around them and telling them about Jesus Christ. They pray for the work near and far. They let their children get to know the missionaries their church supports. Perhaps they help their children set aside part of their allowance for God's work in the world. They pray around the dinner table.
One of the most formative memories of my childhood is a big poster we had at home, covered with people we didn't know but were praying for, people serving the Lord in other places. I don't remember much about them, but I remember that poster, and I remember feeling a deep burden for them. In ways like these, parents show that missions is not only for other people or for people far away. It is for every Christian. We are all on mission; we differ only in our vocation and in the particular shape of our commitment.
Third principle: in the hope that they will be willing
We teach the church's missionary heritage in the hope that our children will be willing to join it, so inspired by what is taught and modelled that they see the need and are willing to help. I want to dwell on that word, willing.
It sounds obvious, but consider it. As a parent, have you prayed that your children will be willing to accept a call to move far away from you? That is what it may mean for them to serve the Lord. Have you prayed that the Lord would help you hold them with such an open hand that, if he directs them to a far-off or dangerous place, you will be supportive rather than discouraging?
I was recently talking with someone considering the mission field: a country not exactly closed, but certainly difficult and unstable, a place most of us would find unattractive to live in. The need there is desperate. As far as I know, virtually the entire population is religious, and far less than one percent is Christian. As this person has prayed about going, they have received a good deal of negative feedback.
Let me be clear: there are times to give prospective missionaries negative feedback. Some people are underqualified; some are plainly disqualified. We have all seen that zeal and good intentions can never make up for proper qualifications, and sometimes love must say, “No, you should not go,” or “You must not go.” (I believe there is a session on qualifications after this one.) But that is not the case here. This is a person of mature faith and godly character, exactly the kind of person any church should joyfully consider sending. When I expressed joy and enthusiasm, this person was so grateful. The negative feedback had gone something like this: “We love you so much, and you have such a place in our church and in our lives. We just can't bear to lose you.” They were not saying, “You can't go because you're unqualified.” They were saying, “You shouldn't go because we'll miss you.” And this person is naturally wondering whether that is the Lord's voice. We all believe in sending people to the field, until it comes to the people we love most.
I am probably not the only parent who raised my children to honor missionary work while feeling torn between two desires: that they would serve the Lord anywhere, and that they would live just down the street and raise my grandchildren close by in a safe place. It would break my heart to watch them board a plane for the other side of the world. But what if the very thing that would break my heart is what God has in mind?
So we need to be honest with ourselves and make sure we really are willing to let our children join that heritage, and that we won't stand in their way. We can't teach it to them in the abstract and then bias them against it. We can't make it a calling everyone should consider except the people dearest to us. Before we ask the Lord to do a work in them, we need to ask him to do a work in us, and then we can truly expect him to work in them.
Not all of us should go. All of us should be willing.
The wording is chosen carefully. The principle is not that our children will necessarily become part of the church's missionary heritage, but that they will be willing. Willingness counts for a great deal with the Lord. God calls all of us to some kind of mission or ministry, but not all of us to full-time or overseas missions. He needs people to serve him here as well as there. He needs people who earn so they can fund, and people who send so others can be sent. Not everyone is suited to overseas missions, disposed to it, or qualified for it. Some are too weak, too ill or too immature; some have made decisions that rule it out for now; some are held back by responsibilities the Lord has given them. Not all of us should go. All of us should be willing, living before the Lord with a deep sense of surrender, so that if he lays that burden on us, we go. That is what we should want for ourselves and for our children. And if that is not God's call on their lives, they will, like their parents, be involved in other forms of mission: sending, helping, praying.
Our goal is not necessarily to form little missionaries but to form people who are willing to be missionaries should God call them, and, if he does, to let them go and entrust them to him.
Three lives worth imitating
So where and how do we teach it? We teach doctrine, so they understand how and why God calls people to serve him in missions. But we also teach through the power of positive examples. Who are the figures most worthy of imitation, most likely to grip a child's mind, stir their zeal, and fire their imagination for those who have never heard of Jesus Christ? Let me offer three, simply because they matter to me. My own children could probably sketch their lives, because I've told them about them so often.
Eric Liddell. No surprise: I belong to the Chariots of Fire generation. It was the one movie every Christian parent said yes to every single time. I love that film, and I also spent a year living in Edinburgh, and when Liddell's family left China they settled in Toronto, near us. He has been a friend and an inspiration to me and many others, and today's generation can look up to him too.
He was the son of missionaries to China, sent back to Britain for his education. In those days missionary children usually went to boarding school and were raised largely apart from their parents, seeing them only on furlough every few years. At school he became a world-class athlete. He played rugby for Scotland and became a runner, and he became an intensely devoted man: devoted to the Lord, to prayer, to personal holiness. He was chosen for the Olympic team, but when he learned that the heats for his best race would be run on a Sunday, his Presbyterian conscience would not let him violate the Sabbath, and he withdrew. That brought great reproach. Many people, even good Christian people, begged him to reconsider, and much of the nation was furious. He held firm, switched to a different race, still won gold, and rightly became the toast of Scotland.
Then, at the height of his fame, he left it all to return to China. He had always known that was his calling, and he wanted to serve there alongside his parents and brother. When war broke out with Japan, he and other foreigners were interned in a camp. He served faithfully there, developed a brain tumor, and died.
His story has intrigue and excitement, and children are naturally drawn to it. As they learn about him they see a man whose greatest commitment was to personal holiness. I don't know that he was a hugely successful missionary in terms of great numbers coming to faith, but he was certainly successful in modelling a faithful life. He loved children and was a formative influence on many young people. I have read a great deal about him, and as far as I can tell there are no great moral blemishes in his life, no awkward episodes you have to explain away. His life shows children that a Christian can scale the very heights of fame and still count it all loss compared with the joy of serving and honoring the Lord.
There are several biographies of him for children. Two are mine: one for younger children coming next year in the Good Book Company's Do Great Things for God series, and a graphic novel for teens, Eric's Greatest Race. Crossway has one aimed at roughly twelve to sixteen, and there are good options for adults. He is a man worth getting to know.
Amy Carmichael. I came to know her better while working on a book and video project that took me around the world, including to southern India. I had read about her for years, but visiting the ministry she founded, meeting people still connected with it, even looking through her bookcase, deepened my respect for her enormously. She grew up in Northern Ireland and even as a young woman had a heart for the downtrodden and the lost. She was precocious; as a young woman she founded a ministry, a church, of her own.
After hearing Hudson Taylor speak, she became convinced the Lord was calling her to Asia. She went to Japan, but her health forced her home. She went to Sri Lanka, which did not work out, and finally to southern India, where she stayed for the rest of her life. She founded the Dohnavur Fellowship to give a home to children who needed one, above all children caught up in temple prostitution, a terrible blight on the country at the time. Out of her deep love for children she rescued many from that life. She served there faithfully, rescuing and giving a family to hundreds of children, and through her books and poems she remains an example of steady service and wholehearted commitment to the Lord.
Children are drawn to her because it is a story of rescuing children (you'll want to keep the details discreet for younger ones). She is an example of a woman who served alone, never marrying, because of her deep commitment to the work, who depended on God's provision rather than actively soliciting funds, and who built an institution that has lasted. It is striking, as you travel, how many institutions have collapsed, disappeared or become something entirely different. Dohnavur still exists and still serves the Lord's purposes. Not long ago I got a note inviting me to join their 125th-anniversary celebration by livestream, and it was wonderful to watch them singing, praying and still serving the Lord.
Children can also learn from her that you are never too young to serve the Lord, and that in some ways impetuous young people get a lot done. You get wiser as you get older, but also more risk-averse, and that is not always a good thing. What she accomplished as a very young woman is remarkable. There are many biographies of her, including one of mine just coming out with Missionary, one for younger children in the Do Great Things for God series, one in the Trailblazers series, and, for adults, an excellent short biography by Iain Murray.
The missionary your church supports. I'm cheating a little with the third. Introduce your children to the missionaries your church supports. When they are home on furlough, have them in your home. Let your children get to know them and ask questions; help your children come up with questions. If you have the chance to visit their field, take your children with you. Let them hear you pray for those missionaries, and teach them to pray too. Let missions be more than characters in books, historical or otherwise. Those books are truly good, but make sure your children meet people who are going and serving right now. When missionaries are in town and need a bed, offer yours. If they need somewhere to be on a Sunday afternoon, bring them home. A great deal of good can come from that.
Resources
A word of caution first. You've probably heard the term “AI slop”: material produced entirely or almost entirely by AI. I recently wrote that there are now more systematic theologies on Amazon written by AI than by theologians. As I prepared this talk I found the same in Christian biography. Someone types, “Write a 180-page biography of Amy Carmichael,” and there it is on Amazon. Within days of a well-known author releasing a book, you'll find look-alikes with similar titles, covers and names, all AI-generated. There are excellent resources for teaching children the church's missionary heritage, but don't be led astray by the junk. Look for authors you have heard of, publishers you know, or endorsements from people you trust. Do a little research and get the lay of the land.
Here are some resources that have been a blessing to many families, including mine:
- The Goers (Missionary): for roughly ages four to ten, stories of men and women sent by churches to take the gospel to the ends of the earth. I can vouch for them, because I wrote them. The first three, now out, cover William Tyndale (not quite a missionary, but he had to be included for giving his life to translating Scripture), Amy Carmichael, and David Livingstone, another favorite of mine; William Carey, John Paton and Hudson Taylor follow next year. If you like them, tell Missionary there should be more.
- Do Great Things for God (The Good Book Company): a similar age range, covering missionaries and other figures such as Corrie ten Boom, Joni Eareckson Tada and Queen Elizabeth II; about twenty-two volumes so far, including my coming Eric Liddell.
- Lives of Faith and Grace (Crossway): a new, lightly illustrated series of chapter books for ages eight to thirteen, about eight volumes so far.
- Trailblazers (Christian Focus): a massive series of some seventy biographies, plus bundles like Ten Boys Who…. My mother loves them, because she wants about fifty pages on someone, not five hundred. They are written well enough for adults, with no illustrations, so good for reading aloud or for tweens and teens.
- Eric's Greatest Race: my graphic novel on Eric Liddell. Grown-ups are allowed to read graphic novels too.
- Torchlighters: half-hour animated films on many missionaries, now free on YouTube and very well done. Our children watched a lot of them.
- Tim Keesee's Dispatches from the Front: films, recorded mostly ten to fifteen years ago, visiting workers in the field and hearing the Lord's hand on their lives; a fine way to give children contemporary stories tied to history. (Travelling with him for a year, I saw many children come up to him starstruck.)
- From the Rising of the Sun: the book from our year of travel, with a QR code for a twelve-part documentary visiting local churches in twelve countries (southern Chile, Brazil, Morocco and more) to see how they worship and how the gospel came to them; plus a children's version, God's Great Big Global Church.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. We are very well resourced, and I think the reason is that Christian parents are buying these books for their children. Publishers wouldn't produce them otherwise. So keep buying them, and more will keep coming.
A long and glorious heritage
So we are called to teach our children the church's missionary heritage: to help them understand and appreciate the value of missions, to model it in our own lives, and to teach it in the hope that they will be willing should God call them. We teach them the lives of those who model what obedience looks like, drawing on the wealth of resources our fellow Christians have provided. And we do it all trusting that, through our feeble efforts, the Lord will raise up a new generation of men and women who will go for the name of Christ, and who may one day inspire others to follow in their footsteps, as we now follow in the footsteps of those who went before.
Whatever you hear in the news, the Christian missionary heritage is a long and glorious one. There are shameful moments, of course, but on the whole it is a heritage we can rightly rejoice in. And it is not complete. It may only be getting started. The greatest and most inspiring stories may still be to come, and who is to say that one of the characters in them won't be your own child: a child who was taught the church's missionary heritage, was challenged and inspired by it, and by God's grace chose to take part.
Lord, thank you for these brothers and sisters who were called, who were willing, and who were able to go and serve you. We pray for the children in this room and at this conference, that they would be inspired by these examples and others, and that you would raise them up to serve you faithfully and well for the sake of your name. In Christ, amen.
Questions from the floor
Is there a distinction between being content with the gifts God has sovereignly given and earnestly seeking a greater measure of the Spirit's empowering and sanctifying work?
God gifts us all differently, and part of life's work is discovering where he has gifted us and where he hasn't. We serve him best by leaning into our gifts. But we are also called to make the most of what he has given, and largely we do that by serving, trusting that as we serve by his grace, according to Scripture, continually feeding on Scripture, he will increase our gifts and their impact.
I'm the dad of a two-year-old and a three-year-old, and I wasn't raised by believers, so I'm figuring this out. What weekly habits did you build as a young father, and what would you do differently?
The most foundational thing is to lead your children to the word: in some form of family devotions, which I think is a core discipline of the home and which the father should take on himself; in the local church; and, as they are able, into their own private devotions. As you read Scripture and tell them the gospel, the application will come naturally: not everyone has heard this good news, so it falls to those who trust in Jesus to take it to those who don't. In church they will hear the prayers of the saints and the pastoral prayer for missionaries, and meet missionaries who come to speak. There is no great trick, just the ordinary Christian disciplines.
Looking back, the thing I'm most glad we did was family devotions. That doesn't mean long sessions of systematic theology; it means leading them to the Lord day by day and showing them that God is central in your life. Almost no single family devotion feels significant. Ten minutes on a Tuesday morning doesn't seem like much. But compound it over the years your children are in your home, and it bears fruit. The other thing was reading to the children (fiction, non-fiction, biographies). That supplements Scripture well. Scripture is the main thing, and these good examples come alongside it.
I'm preparing to be a missionary, but that is several years off. Meanwhile I'd like to create a resource for parents in my church: an overview of countries and how to pray for them, customizable for the countries where our missionaries serve. What advice would you give?
Children's ministry isn't my forte, but children are very tactile and visual learners. My church, Grace Fellowship, recently made a world map available for parents to print, so they can show their children, “Here is the world, and here is what we're talking about,” with other resources to go with it, and that has been quite effective. Use the resources I mentioned and read these stories to children. And learn to read well to children. I've noticed that the people who read Scripture best in public are often those who learned to read well to children. Two people can read the same story, and in one person's mouth it comes alive while in the other's it falls flat. Many parents are unconfident about this, so if you can model it, that alone is a great gift.
Like your mother, I'd like the fifty-page version: from your journey around the world for From the Rising of the Sun, what was most encouraging, and was there a glaring problem?
It was an amazing journey. I spoke with Christians in twenty-two to twenty-four countries and spent real time in twelve of them. The question behind the project was: if I had been born there instead of here, what would Sunday morning worship be like? The big takeaway was how similar we all are. Everywhere, Christians sing, pray, read Scripture, preach, take the Lord's Supper, fellowship and go home. Musical and preaching styles vary, but it is essentially the same thing, and I found that very encouraging. The other takeaway was how quirky human beings are. Something utterly offensive in one culture is dignified and proper a couple of countries over. God made us that way, and it's a wonderful thing to see how different we are even as we are alike. If there was a negative, it was how often Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, prosperity preachers and other false gospels outnumbered the true churches. But what a blessing to go to Zambia, to Cambodia, well off the beaten path, and find Christians worshiping the Lord.
Many missionary heroes had messy family lives (think of William Carey, or what happened to Adoniram Judson's wife and children), and the very things that make them heroic to children are things most churches wouldn't want to promote. How did you handle that with your kids?
Many of our missionaries are exemplary in some ways and not in others, which makes them relatable and human. We are the same: parts of us honor the Lord and parts don't. With children, you introduce these people in proportion to their understanding; you don't give them the full rounded portrait until they are older. But all our heroes are flawed. That is the only kind of person there is. We don't need to explain the flaws away. We simply praise what is praiseworthy and don't praise what isn't. I want to be honest and say it as it is. Some missionaries have been very unwise, and some of our heroes have deep flaws. William Carey is a good example: a sending organization today would probably, and rightly, pull him off the field. And yet the Lord used him. That's one of the big lessons: God uses flawed people.
I read The Goers to my daughters, and paired with the Torchlighters videos they've generated so many rich conversations. Will you keep making resources like these?
I'm all for it, though I'm not the decision-maker. We are so blessed with the ability to create these things and with so many people creating them. Almost every level of reader is now covered for nearly all the major figures, with more to come.
Are there translated resources, or publishers producing these in other languages?
I'm not very familiar with the world of translation. I don't even know which of my own books have been translated. Publishers are supposed to send the author a copy, but I usually find out only when I stumble on one in a bookstore abroad. I know there is a lot of English-to-Spanish translation, since I've travelled extensively in Latin America. But much of this doesn't need translating at all. It isn't hard to write a short biography of a major figure whose life is well documented, so it can be written fresh in any language. For illustrated books, the text needs translating but the artwork stays the same.
I don't know where to start talking about the gospel with my friends in my town.
People talk about concentric circles. God wants us to reach out first to those closest to us: brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, close friends who don't know Jesus. Then move a little further out, to friends of friends. As you do, God gives more opportunities, and you grow in skill at telling people about Jesus. Start close to home, keep praying, and be faithful in the little things, and God will give you opportunities.
Should we take our children on mission trips?
If it's a good place to go, why not? I took my son on a trip when he was seven or eight. He was being raised in privilege and safety among affluent people, and I wanted him to know from a young age that not everyone in the world lives like that. It was very helpful for him.