Obedient Nations

What’s So Great about the Great Commission?

Stephen Spaulding sees a clear line of thinking and action running from the Bible’s patriarchs and prophets through the life and teachings of the Anointed One, Christ. He continues to trace this line through the apostle Paul’s calling and career as well as his visionary writings and on to the future reality which the apostle John portrays at the end of his book of Revelation. He calls it his own, new baseline—primary sum up—of the great commission. It is quite simple and stark. He summarizes it as “obedient nations.” That simple phrase, according to Spaulding, encompasses most of what we as Christ’s followers have been involved within mission for the past century, but also much more.

In this comprehensive evaluation of the great commission in light of both biblical history and the modern age in which we are living now, as well as the potential future to come, missiologist Stephen Spaulding presents the WHAT, the WHY, and the HOW of fulfilling the great commission toward the ultimate scriptural goal of “obedient nations.”

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Author Bio:

Stephen Spaulding was raised as a missionary kid in Japan, Canada, and Brazil, and then stepped rather innocently into the global mission enterprise himself. After responding to the likes of John Perkins (at Urbana ’76) to the call to inner-city missions, and going to California in preparation for a career working with orphans in Brazil, Steve ended up at Fuller Seminary and fell in love with the DAWN (‘discipling a whole nation’) strategy, which eventually led him to move with his wife, Marna, and their three children to the mission field in Asia in 1996. They were in Manila for 10 years, during which Stephen traveled extensively in the region on behalf of the DAWN movement as well as for SEANET, a network he founded on behalf of the Buddhist world. When DAWN folded in 2007, Steve logically joined O.C. International—the ministry which had first given birth to DAWN in the mid-1980’s—as their “resident missiologist.” Stephen and his wife now reside as empty nesters in Colorado Springs, CO.