What Heaven Has to Do with the Great Commission: It May Not Be What You Think
On Thursday we sat around a simple table over lunch with Mary, her father who is a pastor, and five other pastors who plant churches among their tribal people north of Ho Chi Minh City. Their people are predominantly farmers, about 100,000 of them scattered across rural villages where the rhythms of planting and harvest still govern life in Vietnam and Cambodia. Two years ago, when we first began equipping and encouraging them, there were four or five house churches, each with a handful of believers.
With traffic noise percolating through the restaurant, I leaned in to hear them through Mary’s interpretation. Quiet joy broke through their weathered faces as they shared the news: there are now over 180 churches. They’re praying for 500 by year’s end, the way God is spreading the good news through these communities. I believe this goal is well within reach.
That evening, my friends and I followed Google Maps to a recommended Indian restaurant for dinner. The app took us on an unexpected journey down Bui Vien Walking Street in District 1—the chaotic, neon-drenched artery of Ho Chi Minh’s nightlife that we immediately wished we’d bypassed. Young women stood on storefront runway stages of clubs and bars, dancing, objectified for the pleasure of older Western men. Solicitors grabbed at our arms, trying to pull us into their establishments. We kept our eyes straight ahead, moving quickly while the weight of it settled on our chests.
Walking through the artificial lights and real darkness of Bui Vien, I couldn’t stop my mind from making the connection. Many of these young women likely came from villages like the ones where those 180 house churches now gather. They came to the city to make money, to help their families rise from poverty, and ended up here—commodified, far from home, caught in systems that devour the vulnerable.
The juxtaposition of that one day—lunch with pastors seeing resurrection life spread like wildfire, dinner preceded by a walk through a place that felt like death—pressed a question into my heart: What exactly are we doing when we make disciples in lands like this one? What are we offering? And how does that sustain us and our partners when the darkness feels overwhelming?
That day reminded me to confront a deeper question: Is the Great Commission about escaping this world—or participating in God’s renewal of it?
The Heaven We’ve Been Selling
If you’ve been engaged in ministry long enough, whether as a volunteer or staff, you’ve probably felt the weariness. Another year, another outreach, another promising young leader who burned out. And underneath it all, a nagging question: Is this actually working? Are we making any real difference?
Part of our weariness, I think, comes from a truncated vision of what we’re actually about. We’ve been taught—perhaps not explicitly, but through a thousand songs and sermons and altar calls—that the Great Commission is primarily about getting souls into heaven. Earth is a sinking ship, and our job is to pull as many people into the lifeboats as possible before it goes down. Heaven is “up there,” a spiritual realm we go to when we die, and the goal of evangelism and disciple-making is to increase the population of the celestial city where we’ll someday walk streets of gold.
This vision can motivate for a season. But it’s exhausting over the long haul because it makes mission feel like an evacuation plan. It turns the earth into something disposable, a mere testing ground or waiting room. And it subtly suggests that all the beauty, all the work of justice and healing and cultivation we pour ourselves into—it’s all just going to burn anyway.
Just last week I sat down with a young man as he shared his faith journey with me. He grew up in the church with strong Christian parents. He remembers making a decision to follow Jesus as a child, but only understood his decision as essentially his card into heaven. It wasn’t until recently that he considered the impact the Gospel should have on his life in the present, this side of heaven. Up until the last three years, he had no sense of purpose and was deeply depressed, even to the point of suicidal thoughts. In his theology the Gospel was a sort of fire insurance policy. He didn’t understand that it transforms both the here and now, and the not yet. His understanding changed when he began to get involved with Christian community through a peer group and a couple of studies at our church. In these groups he learned more about the opportunity we have to join God in His redemptive work, where His kingdom is both now and not yet.
He told me that he now understood the gospel in an entirely new light and was wrestling with excitement at the thought that God was inviting him into his work to make all things new in and around him. He was living with a new sense of hope and purpose for the now.
The biblical vision of heaven isn’t about escape. It’s about invasion—the joyful, subversive, renewing invasion of God’s rule into the broken places of this world.
What the New Testament Actually Says
When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he didn’t say, “Get me out of here and into heaven.” He said, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). The direction of traffic matters. Heaven isn’t only where we’re going; it’s where God’s perfect reality already exists. And the prayer is that this reality would break into our world, transforming it from the inside out.
Eugene Peterson caught this in his paraphrase of Revelation 21:2-3: “I saw Holy Jerusalem, new-created, descending resplendent out of heaven… I heard a voice thunder from the Throne: ‘Look! Look! God has moved into the neighborhood, making his home with men and women!'”
The biblical story doesn’t end with us leaving earth for heaven. It ends with heaven coming to earth, with God making his home here, with the New Jerusalem descending, with the announcement that He is making all things new—not all new things, but renewing what already exists.
Jesus’ entire ministry was about demonstrating what it looks like when heaven invades earth. Healing the sick, casting out demons, forgiving sins, welcoming outsiders, flipping social hierarchies—these weren’t just nice things Jesus did while waiting to die for our sins. They were signposts of the Kingdom, previews of the world being made right.
The Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20 needs to be read in light of Jesus’ claim that “all authority in heaven and on earth” has been given to him. Not just authority in heaven—authority here, now, in this world.
We’re not making disciples to extract them from earth, but to embed them in earth as agents of heaven’s reality.
This doesn’t deny the hope of resurrection life beyond death; it insists that eternal life begins now and reshapes how we live here. We’re teaching them to obey everything Jesus commanded, which includes loving enemies, pursuing justice, caring for the vulnerable, and living as signs that God’s future has broken into the present.
Disciple-Making as New Creation
This isn’t just theological hair-splitting. This changes how we understand what we’re doing in ministry and why it matters.
Those 180 house churches in rural Vietnam aren’t merely preparations for the afterlife. They’re outposts of new creation, transforming a country from the rice fields to the villages to the city. When farmers gather to worship Jesus, to study his word, to care for one another and their neighbors, they’re forming communities that embody a different way of being human. They’re learning that women have dignity, that power is for service, that resources are for sharing, that the weak matter to God.
And here’s what gripped me walking through Bui Vien Street: those churches aren’t just preparing people for the afterlife. They’re creating the conditions that can mean the next generation of young women from those villages won’t end up commodified in the city. They’re planting seeds of economic empowerment, education, dignity, and hope. They’re demonstrating that there’s a different story available than poverty-to-exploitation.
The systems that trap people are complex—shaped by economics, migration patterns, and structural injustice. But communities formed by the gospel carry the power to interrupt these cycles in tangible ways.
In a country still shaped by the trauma of war, where economic pressure drives migration and exploitation, these 180 churches are becoming centers of resilience, dignity, and hope. This is why the work of my rural pastor friends matters so profoundly.
When we make disciples who make disciples, we’re not just changing people’s eternal destination. We’re forming communities that practice resurrection now. We’re creating beachheads of the Kingdom where heaven’s values start reshaping earth’s realities. We’re inviting people into the work of partnering with God in the renewal of all things.
A Kingdom Breaking In
The Great Commission isn’t a rescue operation to get people off a doomed planet. It’s a restoration project, and we’re the foremen, the artisans, the laborers who get to participate in God’s work of making all things new.
When we make disciples, we’re not just securing their afterlife. We’re forming them into people who bring life now, who carry heaven’s reality into the darkest places, who refuse to accept that exploitation and injustice and death get the last word.
This is the hope that keeps us going when ministry is hard: we’re planting seeds of a Kingdom that is breaking in, growing up, spreading out—until the day when, as Revelation promises, the dwelling place of God will be with humanity, and he will wipe every tear from every eye, and death will be no more.
Why This Vision Sustains Us
This is what sustains us in ministry when we’re weary. Not the grim arithmetic of souls saved versus souls lost, but the joyful reality that every act of disciple-making is a declaration that this world matters to God, that he’s not abandoning it, that we’re caught up in something as large as the renewal of creation itself.
I think about those six pastors and Mary (her father being one of them). They’re not planting churches because they’ve given up on this world. They’re planting churches because they believe God is making all things new and has invited them to be part of it. Every baptism is a sign. Every healed relationship is a foretaste. Every act of generosity is a glimpse of the economy of the Kingdom.
Yes, we long for the day when there will be no more Bui Vien Streets, when exploitation and trafficking and poverty are ended forever. But the New Testament vision is that we don’t just wait for that day—we work toward it. We live as if the future has already begun, because in Christ, it has.
Those 180 churches are signs that heaven is invading earth, one village at a time, one life at a time, one community at a time.
And that’s a vision worth giving your life to.
Our heart at Concentric is to ignite Jesus-centric disciple-making movements to every tribe, nation, and people—to every high-rise, city, and village—modeled after our Master and equipper, Jesus Christ.
If you’re weary in the work, remember this: you’re not just preparing people for heaven. You’re participating in God’s work of bringing heaven to earth.
That’s a vision worth spending your life on.
