You Are a Sent Person — Even If Nobody Has Officially Commissioned You

Based on John 20:21 — “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.”

I have never been formally commissioned as a missionary.

No sending ceremony. No official appointment by a mission agency. No title, no support letter template, no organizational structure with my name in a directory somewhere under “field workers.”

And yet — standing in a living room in the Philippines, or sitting around a table in Japan, or gathered with friends in Michigan, or meeting with our Lk10 community — I have never once felt unsent.

Because John 20:21 does not say, “As the Father sent me, I am sending the officially credentialed ones.” It says: I am sending you. All of you. Every believer who has received the breath of the Spirit that Jesus breathes in the very next verse. Every person who has been brought into the life of the One whom the Father sent — you are now included in that sending.

You are a sent person. The question is not whether you have been sent. The question is whether you know it.

The word Jesus uses in John 20:21 for “sending” is apostellō — the verb form of apostolos, apostle.

We have made “apostle” into a special title reserved for the Twelve and perhaps a handful of specially gifted individuals in subsequent church history. But at its root, apostellō simply means to send out with a specific purpose and with the full authority of the one who sends.

Jesus is saying: the same quality of sending that characterized My relationship with the Father — the same authority, the same purpose, the same Spirit-empowered mission — is now the defining reality of your relationship with Me. You are sent. By Me. With My authority. Into My mission.

That is not a statement for special missionaries. That is the baseline identity of every believer.

Frank Viola argues that the entire church — not just its recognized leaders, not just its formally appointed missionaries — is fundamentally a sent community.

“The church does not have a mission,” he writes in Reimagining Church. “The church is a mission — a community of sent people, living the life of the age to come in the middle of the present age, embodying in their shared life the reality of the kingdom they are announcing. Mission is not a department of the church. It is the nature of the church” (Reimagining Church, p. 154, Frank Viola).

Mission is not a department of the church. It is the nature of the church.

That single sentence reorganizes everything about how you understand your daily life. Your workplace is not where you go to earn money so you can fund real ministry somewhere else. It is your mission field. Your neighborhood is not where you live between church activities. It is the specific territory into which you have been sent. Your family, your friendships, your ordinary daily interactions — these are not the secular backdrop to your spiritual life. They are the primary arena of your sending.

The Lk10 community, which Lois and I are part of, has given me the most practical and grounding framework I have encountered for living as a sent person in ordinary daily life.

The name comes from Luke 10 — the sending of the seventy-two. Jesus sends them out in pairs, without extensive resources or elaborate preparation, into the towns and villages ahead of Him. He tells them to look for people of peace — those who are already open and receptive. He tells them to eat what is set before them, to heal the sick, to announce the kingdom.

The pattern is strikingly simple. Go where you already are. Look for who is already open. Be present. Be generous. Announce — not primarily through proclamation but through the quality of your presence and your relationships — that the kingdom of God has come near.

Kent Smith, Toni Daniels, and John White — the founders of Lk10 — have built an entire community of practice around that pattern. And what I have found in that community is a vision of mission that is simultaneously more ordinary and more radical than anything I encountered in my years of institutional church ministry.

More ordinary — because it happens in the normal flow of daily life, not in specially designated ministry moments. More radical — because it requires the kind of genuine, present, unhurried attentiveness to people that is far more demanding than running a program.

John Eldredge describes the sent life in terms of what he calls “a life of intentional presence.”

“Most people move through their days,” he writes, “interacting with dozens of people without ever truly seeing them. The sent person moves differently — with the eyes of someone who knows that every encounter is potentially significant, every person potentially a divine appointment, every conversation potentially the moment when God’s kingdom comes near to someone who has been waiting for it without knowing what they were waiting for” (Walking with God, p. 112, John Eldredge).

Every encounter potentially significant. Every person potentially a divine appointment.

That is not an exhausting way to live — not if your identity is secure and your heart is genuinely open. It is actually the most alive way to live. Because it means that your daily life is not a series of mundane transactions punctuated by occasional spiritual moments. It is a continuous, Spirit-attended, divinely purposeful adventure in which God is always already at work in the people around you, and you are invited to join what He is doing.

Graham Cooke connects the sent life directly to the nature of God Himself.

God, he argues, is fundamentally a sending God — a God whose essential nature is to go out, to reach toward, to pursue, to close the distance between Himself and those who are far from Him. The Father sends the Son. The Son sends the Spirit. The Spirit sends the church. The entire movement of redemptive history is the movement of a God who sends — who refuses to stay contained in heaven while His creation is lost and broken.

“To be sent,” Cooke writes, “is to participate in the most fundamental characteristic of God’s own nature. When you go — when you move toward the person who needs the kingdom, the one who is hungry without knowing what they hunger for — you are not doing something for God. You are being something with God. You are becoming, in your going, a small embodiment of the God who never stops coming toward His people” (Being with God, p. 112, Graham Cooke).

Becoming, in your going, a small embodiment of the God who never stops coming.

That is the most beautiful and the most motivating vision of mission I have ever encountered. Not duty-driven sending. Not guilt-motivated outreach. But the natural, overflow expression of a people who have been so thoroughly encountered by the coming God that they cannot help but go — because going is what God does, and they are becoming like Him.

Bob Hamp grounds this in identity — where, in the Lifechoicely framework, everything ultimately begins.

“A person who knows they are sent,” he writes, “moves through the world differently from a person who is simply trying to be a good Christian. The sent person has a purpose that is larger than their comfort, a mission that is more compelling than their security, a calling that gives meaning to every ordinary moment of every ordinary day. Identity as a sent person is not a pressure — it is a liberation. It means that nothing you do today is without significance, because you are moving through your life on assignment from the One who sent you” (Think Differently, Live Differently, p. 259, Bob Hamp).

On assignment from the One who sent you.

That is how I want to live every day. Not with the pressure of needing to produce visible missionary results. But with the quiet, confident, identity-rooted awareness that I have been sent — into this neighborhood, this community, these relationships, this particular corner of the world — by the same Jesus who breathed on His disciples in that upper room and said:

As the Father sent Me, I am sending you.

You are a sent person.

Not because a mission agency approved your application. Not because a church board commissioned you in a formal ceremony. Not because you have crossed a geographical or cultural boundary in the name of ministry.

Because Jesus said so. Because the Spirit has been breathed into you. Because the God who is always already ahead of you has been preparing the people around you for the encounter that only you — with your specific story, your specific wounds, your specific hunger for more — can offer them.

Go. Not somewhere dramatic. Right where you are.

The field is already white. The harvest is already ready. And you have already been sent.

TAKEAWAY LESSON:

You do not need an official title, a mission agency, or a formal commissioning to be a sent person. Jesus has already sent you — into your neighborhood, your workplace, your family, your daily life. Mission is not a department you join. It is the identity you already carry. Live from it.

Sent Person Practice: This week, walk through your daily life with one intentional question in mind: “God, who are You already at work in today, and how can I join what You’re doing?” At the end of each day, write down one person you noticed, one conversation that felt significant, one moment where the kingdom came near. Watch the pattern that emerges over seven days.

— Ed Baulete Lifechoicely.com