Missionary quotes

Do you need a reason for missions? Do you need inspiration or ideas for a sermon or message on missions? Are you involved in teaching or learning about missions? Quotations from missionary leaders like William Carey and Hudson Taylor have served as battle cries for the Christian missions movement.

Why missions? World evangelism has advanced with inspiring missionary slogans like these:

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

God's work done in God's way will never lack God's supply.
~ Hudson Taylor

God isn't looking for people of great faith, but for individuals ready to follow Him.
~ Hudson Taylor

The Great Commission is not an option to be considered; it is a command to be obeyed.
~ Hudson Taylor

If I had 1,000 lives, I'd give them all for China.
~ Hudson Taylor

God uses men who are weak and feeble enough to lean on him.
~ Hudson Taylor

Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.
~ William Carey

The spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to Him, the more intensely missionary we become.
~ Henry Martyn

He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.
~ Jim Elliot

We are debtors to every man to give him the gospel in the same measure in which we have received it.
~ P.F. Bresee

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

Sympathy is no substitute for action.
~David Livingstone

If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.
~C.T. Studd

No one has the right to hear the gospel twice, while there remains someone who has not heard it once.
~ Oswald J. Smith

Any church that is not seriously involved in helping fulfill the Great Commission has forfeited its biblical right to exist.
~ Oswald J. Smith

The mission of the church is missions.
~ Oswald J. Smith

We talk of the Second Coming; half the world has never heard of the first.
~ Oswald J. Smith

Let my heart be broken with the things that break God's heart.
~ Bob Pierce

No reserves. No retreats. No regrets.
~ William Borden

When James Calvert went out as a missionary to the cannibals of the Fiji Islands, the ship captain tried to turn him back, saying, "You will lose your life and the lives of those with you if you go among such savages." To that, Calvert replied, "We died before we came here."

The gospel is only good news if it gets there in time.
~ Carl F. H. Henry

You can give without loving. But you cannot love without giving.
~ Amy Carmichael

The command has been to 'go', but we have stayed -- in body, gifts, prayer and influence. He has asked us to be witnesses unto the uttermost parts of the earth..but 99% of Christians have kept puttering around in the homeland.
~Robert Savage

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

We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God.
~ John Stott

Believers who have the gospel keep mumbling it over and over to themselves. Meanwhile, millions who have never heard it once fall into the flames of eternal hell without ever hearing the salvation story.
~ K.P. Yohannan

Tell the students to give up their small ambitions and come eastward to preach the gospel of Christ.
~ Francis Xavier

The mark of a great church is not its seating capacity, but its sending capacity.
~ Mike Stachura

'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

It is not in our choice to spread the gospel or not. It is our death if we do not.
~ Peter Taylor Forsyth

If God's love is for anybody anywhere, it's for everybody everywhere.
~ Edward Lawlor

Never pity missionaries; envy them. They are where the real action is -- where life and death, sin and grace, Heaven and Hell converge.
~ Robert C. Shannon

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

Love is the root of missions; sacrifice is the fruit of missions.
~ Roderick Davis

Missionary zeal does not grow out of intellectual beliefs, nor out of theological arguments, but out of love.
~ Roland Allen

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

If you take missions out of the Bible, you won't have anything left but the covers.
~ Nina Gunter

The concern for world evangelization is not something tacked on to a man's personal Christianity, which he may take or leave as he chooses. It is rooted in the character of the God who has come to us in Christ Jesus. Thus, it can never be the province of a few enthusiasts, a sideline or a specialty of those who happen to have a bent that way. It is the distinctive mark of being a Christian.
~ James S. Stewart

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

The history of missions is the history of answered prayer. From Pentecost to the Haystack meeting in New England and from the days when Robert Morrison landed in China to the martyrdom of John and Betty Stam, prayer has been the source of power and the secret of spiritual triumph.
~ 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