There is a tradition of Missions Month in the New Zealand church. Different mission organisations celebrate it during different months. The New Zealand Church Missionary Society promotes Missions Month for September 2026. At St Paul’s we have long cooperated with global missions through NZCMS. We are currently a Link Church for the Dunbar family in Cambodia. So, what is missions like in the early 21st century? Rosie Fyfe, the past director of NZCMS, outlined that well in an article she wrote in 2020.
A part of that is reproduced here:
NZCMS is founded on the passionate call of CMS in 1799 to ‘evangelise the unreached world,’ a mission movement which brought the Gospel to Aotearoa in the first place. It’s built on the global vision of NZCMS, founded in 1892 to send missionaries from New Zealand to the rest of the world. But since then, our world has changed. When CMS first sent out missionaries, over 90% of the Church lived in the West: now 75%
of Christians live outside of the West. New Zealand itself is also a mission field. NZCMS’ initiatives around Reverse Mission (bringing missionaries from overseas to New Zealand) and Intercultural Communities (reaching out to different cultures within New Zealand) have challenged the Church here to see these mission opportunities in our backyard. In the light of changes in the global Church, we must ask: what is the role of missionaries sent out from New Zealand now? Michael Goheen, in Introducing Christian Mission Today, makes a distinction between mission and missions that I find helpful, “Mission is the whole life of the church witnessing to the whole world”. Mission is what we are all called to do, wherever we are.
It is showing God’s love in our words and in our actions; bringing our world closer to the reality of God’s Kingdom and proclaiming Jesus Christ as King. Goheen applies “missions” (plural) more specifically; “Missions is one part of mission, establishing a gospel witness where there is none or where it is weak”.