As I was teaching at a local college and seminary in New York, I felt an intense prophetic call to plant a church in the city that would reach urban professionals and university students who were far from God and cynical about Christianity and the church. 

The woman told me her story quietly as we huddled around the table in her cramped home in Serbia. She was younger than me, and yet her face bore the deeply worn evidence of hardship and struggle for survival. Like many other Romani people in Eastern Europe, she was impoverished and illiterate, and I found myself completely captured by her story. Married at 16, she had her first of seven children at 17. Both of the men who fathered her children were abusive alcoholics.

Church was a form of religion, but life transformation wasn’t taking place on a consistent basis. We questioned the purpose of the church, our call, and if church planting and missions was really working.

I long for the Church to fully embrace its identity as the missional powerhouse God has formed it to be—that Christ-centered, transformational catalyst that even the gates of hell cannot stand against.

Some of the things I’ve learned on my 10 year journey.

How is it that when it comes to the development of mission strategy, missions has become essentially syncretized to a secular world? How had they come to make plans which did not actually require faith in order to be carried out?

How do I determine what God’s purpose is for my generation? What is my generation’s relationship to the work of Christ? The clues to answer these questions may be found by looking at a group that missed God’s purpose.