“Missions exists because worship doesn't. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man. When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever.” - John Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad

I think we tend to rigidly separate our ideas about worship from our ideas about mission. We think of worship as a deeply personal, emotional experience (and it can be) while missions feels practical, external, maybe even impersonal. We know of course that the peoples of the world need to be evangelized and we understand one of the ways we can contribute to this is to financially support missionaries. But why? Why do people need to be evangelized? So our religious demographic can get bigger? So we can feel successful? So we can pat ourselves on the backs that a few more have been spared from hell? The ultimate motivation is the one Piper so helpfully points out as noted above. We were created to worship God: all peoples were created to worship God. Billions of years after missions giving, missions trips, and missions conference have been forgotten, worship will remain. There is no greater privilege for a child of God than to encounter the Creator of the Universe as Father and worship him: to awaken to the truths of his word by focusing on, and responding to, him. Don’t you want that to be shared? Doesn’t it excite you that through the spread of the gospel there could be the miraculous creation of new worshippers of God? Then get behind missions.