There are many legitimate expressions of what traditional missions can look like today. As such, we hold to a broad definition of what missions look like, acknowledging that believers can be involved in all different types of work that advances the Kingdom of God - organising gospel crusades or evangelism campaigns, translating bibles, providing disaster relief and humanitarian aid, pioneering microfinance initiatives, planting churches, managing missional businesses, hosting creation care expeditions, strengthening local churches through theological education, carrying out ethnographic missional research and the like. They can also take on varying lengths - long-term, short-term, itinerant etc. They may also take on different postures - an outwardly Christian front, or, may be secular-in-position and Christian-in-posture (typically the case in sensitive and closed-access nations).
To that end, we have found the concept of “integral missions'' to be most relevant to us. Founded by Billy Graham and John Stott, the Lausanne Movement defines integral missions as:
“…as ‘the task of bringing the whole of life under the lordship of Jesus Christ’ and includes the affirmation that there is no biblical dichotomy between evangelistic and social responsibility in bringing Christ’s peace to the poor and oppressed. This was further clarified at the 2001 meeting of the Micah Network in Oxford as ‘the proclamation and demonstration of the gospel,’ emphasising that it is not simply the issue of evangelism and social involvement being done alongside each other but rather that ‘our proclamation has social consequences as we call people to love and repentance in all areas of life’ and that ‘our social involvement has evangelistic consequences as we bear witness to the transforming grace of Jesus Christ.’”
Thus, MissionDAO is willing to back anyone engaged in part, or in whole, with integral missions work. This means that their work should either contain evangelistic aims, contain elements of social involvement (eg. providing jobs, improving educational levels etc.), or both.
The next generation are now known to be digital natives, individuals that are increasingly spending more time online connecting, working, socialising, and the like. These changing norms thus call for new methods of outreach. Described as the “new frontier of missions”, digital missions relate to the idea of using the available digital means that we have to bring the Gospel to where it hasn’t been before. Disruptions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic only fuels the need for new wineskins further. Missionaries have been chased out of nations and unable to enter as freely as before, prompting the need for new means to evangelise and disciple people.
Just as technology have been used in the past to accelerate Kingdom work - from the printing press that democratised one’s access to the Bible, to Gospel preaching over radio podcast, and most recently young TikTok preachers reaching millions through their platforms - we believe that investing in digital missions would be crucial for the advancement of the Gospel.
MissionDAO exists to extend the Kingdom of God on earth and in the Metaverse. Some things we could do include:
Jesus’ charge to us to make disciples of all nations still stands, how will we respond?