Missionary Quotes

*"I have but one candle of life to burn, and I would rather burn it out in a land filled with darkness than in a land flooded with light" — John Keith Falconer

*"He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose" — Jim Elliot, (missionary martyr who lost his life in the late 1950's trying to reach the Auca Indians of Ecuador)

*"In the vast plain to the north I have sometimes seen, in the morning sun, the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary has ever been" — Robert Moffat, who inspired David Livingstone

*"If a commission by an earthly king is considered a honor, how can a commission by a Heavenly King be considered a sacrifice?" — David Livingstone

*"Christ wants not nibblers of the possible, but grabbers of the impossible." — C.T. Studd

*"This generation of Christians is responsible for this generation of souls on the earth!" — Keith Green

*"If God calls you to be a missionary, don't stoop to be a king" — Jordan Grooms (variations of this also credited to G. K. Chesterson, Thomas Carlyle and Charles Haddon Spurgeon)

*"All the money needed to send and support an army of self-sacrificing, joy-spreading ambassadors is already in the church." — John Piper

*"As long as there are millions destitute of the Word of God and knowledge of Jesus Christ, it will be impossible for me to devote time and energy to those who have both." — J. L. Ewen

*"People who do not know the Lord ask why in the world we waste our lives as missionaries. They forget that they too are expending their lives ... and when the bubble has burst, they will have nothing of eternal significance to show for the years they have wasted." — Nate Saint, missionary martyr

*"Not called!' did you say?'Not heard the call,' I think you should say.Put your ear down to the Bible, and hear Him bid you go and pull sinners out of the fire of sin. Put your ear down to the burdened, agonized heart of humanity, and listen to its pitiful wail for help. Go stand by the gates of hell, and hear the damned entreat you to go to their father's house and bid their brothers and sisters and servants and masters not to come there. Then look Christ in the face — whose mercy you have professed to obey — and tell Him whether you will join heart and soul and body and circumstances in the march to publish His mercy to the world. — William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army

*"People who don't believe in missions have not read the New Testament. Right from the beginning Jesus said the field is the world. The early church took Him at His word and went East, West, North and South." — J. Howard Edington

*"It is possible for the most obscure person in a church, with a heart right toward God, to exercise as much power for the evangelization of the world, as it is for those who stand in the most prominent positions." — John R. Mott 

*"I have but one passion: It is He, it is He alone. The world is the field and the field is the world; and henceforth that country shall be my home where I can be most used in winning souls for Christ." — Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf

*"The average pastor views his church as a local church with a missions program; while he ought to realize that if he is in fact pastoring a church, it is to be a global church with a missions purpose." — Unknown

*"The Christian is not obedient unless he is doing all in his power to send the Gospel to the heathen world." — A.B. Simpson

*"The will of God — nothing less, nothing more, nothing else." — F. E. Marsh (also attributed to Bobby Richardson)

*"If missions languish, it is because the whole life of godliness is feeble. The command to go everywhere and preach to everybody is not obeyed until the will is lost by self-surrender in the will of God. Living, praying, giving and going will always be found together." — Arthur T. Pierson

*"Prayer is the mighty engine that is to move the missionary work." — A.B. Simpson

*"The history of missions is the history of answered prayer." — Samuel Zwemer

*'Go ye' is as much a part of Christ's Gospel as 'Come unto Me.' You are not even a Christian until you have honestly faced your responsibility in regard to the carrying of the Gospel to the ends of the earth." — J. Stuart Holden

*"A congregation that is not deeply and earnestly involved in the worldwide proclamation of the gospel does not understand the nature of salvation." — Ted Engstrom, World Vision

*"To stay here and disobey God — I can't afford to take the consequence. I would rather go and obey God than to stay here and know that I disobeyed." — Amanda Berry Smith

*"I believe that in each generation God has called enough men and women to evangelize all the yet unreached tribes of the earth. It is not God who does not call. It is man who will not respond!" — Isobel Kuhn, missionary to China and Thailand

*"I thought it reasonable that I should seek the work where the work was the most abundant and the workers fewest." — Scottish missionary James Gilmour on why he went to Mongolia