This morning as I write, my family is still asleep. In a little while I will leave to pick up donuts for a breakfast celebration marking the beginning of another homeschool year.
Afterward, I will drive to the office and carry on the work of Upstream Collective. Next month I will fly to Kenya to do some of the same things there. Significant parts of my vocation will be public: preaching, equipping, writing, influencing. People will recognize it as ministry. They may even call it missions.
Meanwhile, almost everything my wife does today will remain hidden. Katie will feed our four daughters, pray with them, teach them, correct them, listen to them, and begin again when the day does not go according to plan. There will be no microphone, passport stamp, or published report. Her work will carry joys, frustrations, privileges, and sometimes questions about whether any of it is making a difference.
The missions language I inherited knows exactly how to describe my trip to Kenya. It is less equipped to show how Katie’s daily vocation belongs to the formation and witness of a sent people.
To me, that seems like a problem.
The Sending We Did Not Expect
Katie and I once expected that God would send our family to East Africa. Homeschooling was part of that imagined future: something we would likely need to do while living in a remote place. Instead, God kept us in the United States, serving local churches and helping them send their members. But Katie’s desire to invest deeply in our children remained.1
So she laid aside other vocational possibilities—not because she lacked education, giftedness, or desire, but because she believed this was what God was giving her to receive in this season. In turn, it has become a place where she gives herself in love.
I have elsewhere described parents as archers who prepare their children to be sent into the world.2 I still believe that. Katie is helping our daughters love learning, find Jesus in the pages, and (hopefully) follow the curiosities he stirs into lives shaped by his purposes.
But even that can miss something important. Katie’s work does not matter only because of what our children may someday become. She is not merely raising sent ones. She is herself sent.
Her labor would matter even if none of our daughters ever crossed an ocean. It is not significant because it frees me to do the “real ministry.” If (and when) seasons change and God gives her other things to attend to—working outside our home, pursuing another degree, caring for a parent, recovering from illness—it will not mean a higher or lesser calling. Her work matters because she is a beloved image-bearer receiving a particular gift from God and offering it back in love for the good of others.
This is what I mean by sent identity.
Loved Before Sent
In the previous essay, I traced the movement of sending and receiving across Scripture. The Father sends the Son. The Father and Son send the Spirit. The Triune God sends his sons and daughters. Those who receive God’s grace are caught up in its movement toward others.
But the order matters.
When the risen Jesus enters the locked room in John 20, the disciples are not presented as courageous witnesses ready for deployment. They are frightened people hiding behind a door. Before Jesus gives them a responsibility, he gives them his presence. He speaks peace. He shows them the wounds through which that peace was secured. He breathes the Holy Spirit upon them. Only within this abundance of giving and receiving do they hear, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you” (John 20:21).
Their sending is not a demand placed upon their own reserves. It is their participation in a life they have received from Jesus.
This corrects something in the way I learned to relate to missiology. The productivity-driven imagination of Western culture indeed helped fuel the modern missions movement. I am grateful for that. Yet I also recognize that it likely taught us to begin with activity: take this trip, join this project, meet this need, reach these people, finish the task.
The goals may be virtuous. The problem is not the activity, but the order. Without cultural awareness, the underlying logic can become instrumentalist—valuing things as means to an end rather than as having intrinsic worth. People are measured for what they accomplish and faithfulness is ascribed by numeric results. But this cultural driver already has people exhaustingly busy. Missions is just one more urgent demand honking for attention.
Sent identity begins elsewhere. It allows our identity—what God has done for us—to inform our activity, rather than allowing our activity—what we have done for God—to determine our identity. Christians do not become sent by making ourselves useful. Through the gospel we discover that, as Gentiles now grafted into Christ’s body, we already belong to the sending God. We are living testimonies of a global mission—long before we take an evangelism class or go on our first mission trip.
Sent into Ordinary Life
I don’t believe this means that every Christian should be called a missionary. The particular work of crossing languages and cultures to proclaim the gospel, make disciples, and establish churches among all nations remains essential. It often requires specialization, preparation, and sacrifice, and its uniqueness should be protected.3
But every Christian belongs to a sent people.
Some are sent across oceans. All are sent into the world God loves. The Father sent the Son not away from the world but into it. Jesus now sends his people in the same direction—not necessarily out of ordinary life, but into it.
This does not mean applying a religious label to everything we already do. Nor does it make every ordinary task an act of evangelism. The gospel still must be spoken. People must hear the name of Jesus, be warned of sin and judgment, understand his death and resurrection, and be invited to follow him. Recognizing who we already are—witnesses (Acts 1:8), ambassadors (2 Corinthians 5:20), shining lights (Matthew 5:14; Philippians 2:15)—does not replace proclamation.
Sent identity simply refuses to divide life into the parts God can use and the parts that do not matter. It means receiving our whole lives—our relationships, neighborhoods, work, limitations, gifts, tables, and daily responsibilities—as places where we may bear witness to the beauty, goodness, and truth of God.
Our lives can embody and commend the gospel through hospitality, reconciliation, thoughtful work, patient presence, and making something good. But these practices cannot name Jesus by themselves. Christian witness reaches its proper clarity when embodied love and spoken testimony belong together. In many cases, sentness is less about adding a new category of activity than learning to inhabit the life we have received with Christlike love and purpose.
Missiology may uproot some of us. But first, it grounds all of us.
Cultivating Beauty
Sent identity rests upon a human vocation older than the church’s missionary efforts. Before humanity was called to carry good news through a broken world, image-bearers received a good world to inhabit and fill to God’s glory. The creation mandate is not the Great Commission. But redemption does not discard our created vocation; in Christ, it begins to renew and redirect it.
I sometimes refer to this as cultivating beauty. Curt Thompson connects it to our identity as image-bearers. To exercise dominion is to steward the world in ways that allow creation and its inhabitants to flourish. That beauty may take the form of a garden, friendship, meal, business plan, marriage, or work of art. Human beings were made to create beauty “in the presence of and for others.”4
Beauty, then, is not merely prettiness. It is not polish, ease, or public admiration. Beauty is something like the goodness and truth of God taking form in and through his creation and image-bearers.
Sometimes that cultivation happens amid ruins. Thompson tells the story of Vedran Smailović playing his cello in the wreckage of Sarajevo after a mortar attack. His music did not end the siege. It did, however, turn people’s attention away from the inevitability of violence and toward another way of being human. Beauty did not deny the brokenness. It answered it with a sign of life.5
The gospel itself is the supreme picture of this. The Son of God on a cross is the ugliest form our world has ever known. And yet from it flows God’s highest good. It is that very juxtaposition that heightens the beauty of Jesus’ self-giving love.
Much of the beauty cultivated in the ordinary lives we have received is similar. It does not arrive after frustration and exhaustion have been removed. It grows among them. It may look like remaining present when leaving would be easier, or leaving when remaining present would disrupt flourishing beyond repair. It may look like creating order that will soon become chaos again—the toys, dishes, and crayons in my own household are a daily testimony of this.
Yet this is not how Western culture usually measures significance. We notice what is visible, scalable, efficient, and profitable. The Christian faith is not immune from those values. Sermons can be downloaded. Mission trips can be photographed. Books can be counted among copies sold. Beauty becomes a commodity.6
The irony is, measuring our work only by profitability often just ends up cheapening it.
The Hiddenness God Sees
Thankfully, God does not measure significance the way we do.
Scripture is filled with the quiet assurance that what escapes human attention does not escape his. In Psalm 139, David marvels that God saw him fully while he was being “fearfully and wonderfully made…in the secret place” (vv. 14–15). Even the darkness is not dark to God. He knows the depths within us that we cannot perceive ourselves.
Jesus describes his Father as the one “who sees in secret” (Matthew 6:4). Our giving and praying do not require an audience to acquire significance. Their worth does not depend upon being noticed, admired, measured, or reported.
The Father already sees. And he does not seem to find this hidden life a bore.
The Son of God himself spent most of his earthly life in the obscurity of Nazareth. Scripture records almost none of those years. We know only that Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, lived in submission to his parents, and labored as a carpenter. Yet long before Jesus preached a sermon or performed a miracle, the Father called him his beloved Son (Matthew 3:17).
The Father’s delight did not wait for visibility.
This gives me a better way to understand Katie’s work. Almost nothing she does can be scaled. Its fruit will emerge slowly, often beyond our ability to measure. But none of it escapes the attention of her Father.
Her faithfulness does not need to become public before it becomes precious. “God is not unjust,” Hebrews says, “so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name” (Hebrews 6:10).
One day, the stories we tell about significance will be corrected. Some achievements that appeared impressive will be exposed as empty. Some acts that gained almost no attention will receive God’s hearty approval. The Lord “will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart,” Paul writes. “Then each one will receive his commendation from God” (1 Corinthians 4:5).7
Surely the proclamation of the gospel, new believers, baptisms, and churches established where Christ was not known will magnify his glory. But the story of his glory will not be told only through the moments we know how to count.
Even much of a missionary’s labor is ordinary and unseen: language studied, luggage packed, sickness endured, prayers offered, relationships slowly tended, and conversations that appear to lead nowhere.
The same is true around Katie’s table. Jesus’ resurrection means that “in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58). Ordinary work received with gratitude and offered in faith and love can bear fitting witness to the world God has promised.
Diapers are changed. Papers are graded. Seeds are planted. Meals are prepared. Loads are hauled. Medicine is taken. Streets are swept. Toys and crayons are returned to their places, however briefly.
Much of this beauty will never be noticed by crowds. It does not need to be. The Father sees it. Christ receives it. And in the world he is making new, nothing cultivated in the Lord will finally be wasted.
Gathered and Sent
Sent identity is more than a private way of understanding our individual lives. When awakened, it is best expressed together.
Winfield Bevins describes the final movement of Christian worship as a sending. In the early church, after God’s people had gathered, heard his word, and come to the Lord’s table, they were dismissed back into the world with a benediction: Ite, missa est, meaning, “Go, you are sent.”8
That order matters too. The church does not gather merely to receive spiritual resources for private survival. Neither does it gather merely to be assigned more work. We are welcomed, nourished, reconciled, and formed in the communion of the Triune God. Then we are sent back into the places from which we came.
The church’s mission is not simply the sum of whatever its members do. But the church does not cease to be a sent people when its members scatter. Having received the gospel together, they carry its truth, goodness, and beauty into the particular lives they have been given.
Not everyone receives the same assignment or season. Some will be set apart to cross cultures with the gospel as a primary vocation. Others will remain and help recognize, prepare, release, sustain, and receive them back, all while living out their own sentness. The contributions are distinct, but they belong to one body and one shared identity.
Not long ago, someone from a church where I had taught sent me a picture of a shirt bearing the words, “We are loved. We are sent.” The congregation had begun speaking those words at the end of their service. Members had also written a song about becoming Christ’s witnesses. An idea had become a benediction, an image, and a melody. Missiology was entering their shared imagination.
For them, sent identity is becoming more than a personal insight. As its members are discipled to inhabit ordinary life with open eyes, they are also learning to discern their different places within the church’s witness. All are being formed to hold their lives open before Christ.
At the same time, this church’s commitment to sending missionaries to unreached peoples is actually increasing and improving. Their missionaries are less like detached specialists carrying a task that belongs only to them. They are members of a people who affirm their calling, share in some measure of their sacrifice, help sustain their obedience, and receive them as gifts when they come back.
Sent identity has not watered down the priority of going to where Christ is not named. It seems to have helped it make sense to everyone again.
Received and Offered
In a few minutes, I will leave for donuts. Later I will drive to the office. Katie will open books around a table and begin another year of work that very few people will see.
A flight to Kenya and a morning around the homeschool table are not the same canvas. Calling either “missions” may blur rather than honor them. Yet neither lies outside discipleship to the sending Christ. One may assist others in carrying the gospel across cultural boundaries. The other receives four particular lives as neighbors to be loved, beauty to be cultivated, and disciples to be formed and sent. Both belong within the movement of divine love and the life of God’s sent people.
Sent identity does not ask us to crowd more religious activity into lives already full. It invites us to receive the peace of Christ, offer our seasons of vocation to him, and remain available to whatever part he gives us within the shared witness of his church.
You are loved. You are sent.
Drawing from this example is not intended to make any statement about how Christians should educate. If Katie were a public school teacher, I could apply the same conclusion about her sent identity.
Bradley Bell, “Become a Sending Parent,” The Gospel Coalition, April 13, 2023, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/become-sending-parent/
Some readers will wonder whether emphasizing the sent identity of every believer inevitably diminishes the distinct role of missionaries or the priority of missionary work. I do not believe it must. The New Testament portrays the whole church as a witnessing people while also setting apart particular workers to cross cultures, proclaim Christ where he is not known, make disciples, and establish churches. Christian sentness and missionary vocation are therefore related but not identical: the former names a shared identity, while the latter names a particular role that the church must continue to recognize, prepare, send, sustain, and receive back. I recognize, however, that some consider this broader language of sentness too imprecise and fear that it will weaken the church’s unfinished missionary efforts.
Curt Thompson, “Beauty Will Save the World,” Curt Thompson MD, April 28, 2020, https://curtthompsonmd.com/beauty-will-save-the-world/. Thompson unpacks this more fully in his book, The Soul of Desire: Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community. Makoto Fujimura makes similar arguments in Art and Faith: A Theology of Making.
Ibid.
For more on this idea, see Lewis Hyde’s book, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.
C. S. Lewis describes this reversal in chapter 12 of The Great Divorce. The narrator encounters a magnificent heavenly procession honoring Sarah Smith, an obscure woman whose love helped the people and creatures around her become more fully themselves. His guide explains, “Fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.” The scene has remained with me as an imaginative picture of the hiddenness Christ may one day reveal.
Winfield Bevins, Liturgical Mission: The Work of the People for the Life of the World (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2022), 53