It was the Master’s plan that His Church should speak all the languages of the earth then and now and always, as well as the language of heaven, the language of love.  So every man would learn of Jesus in his native speech.  The language of the cradle and of love-making and of the fireside, the language that most quickly kindles the fires in a man’s heart, that was the language to be used in carrying Jesus to every man.  That was Jesus’ plan.  The Church was rarely equipped with winning power for a world-service on its birthday in the gift of tongues.

Of course, this is not the only mission of the Church.  That is to say, there are other purposes necessarily included in this.  Taking the Gospel of Jesus to all men means more than merely taking it and telling it.  The teaching and training and developing of those won to Jesus is an inseparable part of the Church mission.  The great service of worship has always been recognized as a vital part of the Church life.  Sometimes indeed these have been thought of, and still are thought of, as its only mission.  But they grow distinctly out of the chief mission and are distinctly contributory and secondary to it.  Indeed, they come into being only through the faithful doing of the chief task.  Men were won.  Then they met for worship and for training.

Reaching Out For a World.

The Church of those first years thoroughly understood what its great mission was to be.  The first chapters of the Book of Acts vividly describe the ideal Church as planned by the Master, and as understood by those who felt His own personal touch upon themselves.  Everybody went.  They went to everybody.  They went everywhere.  There is pretty clear evidence that they actually went everywhere that men could go.  They held their lives, and even their property, subject to the one great gripping purpose.

The greatest leader of the first century of the Church, Paul, who contributed most to its literature and exerted the greatest influence upon its life, was above all else a missionary leader.  He went practically everywhere.  He didn’t go hastily, but by carefully thought-out plans.  He won men to Christ, organized them into church societies, taught them, and sent them out to win others.

He worked in and out of the world’s great city centres of his time.  Ephesus, the Asiatic centre, Corinth, the centre of Greek influence, and, Rome, the centre of the world’s governing power, were the scenes of his longest and most thorough campaigns.  His choice of the centres was a master’s strategic choice.  For these centres sent their influence out to the ends of the earth.  Paul’s body might be in Ephesus or Corinth or Rome, but his thought and heart were on the world these cities reached by constant streams of influence.

And to these churches which he had won out of the raw stuff of heathenism he taught the same world-wide message.  They became filled with this same world-wide spirit.  The Thessalonian and Corinth Churches made their winning power felt throughout Greece and wherever Greek culture had gone, that is to say, everywhere.[22] The Church in Rome sent out the message of Jesus from its golden centre of all Roman roads, out to the farthest reaches of those far-reaching roads.[23]