Integral Mission is the understanding that the mission of God is bigger than simply the salvation of souls.  While this aspect of the gospel is immensely important, it fails to understand the full scope of God’s mission.   In reality, through Christ, God is reconciling all things to Himself (Col 1:20).  Rene Padilla says “The salvation that the gospel proclaims is not limited to man’s reconciliation to God.  It involves the remaking of man in all the dimensions of his existence.  It has to do with the recovery of the whole man according to God’s original purpose for his creation.”[i]  In reference to the holistic nature of God’s mission Esteban Voth says, “God’s mission is not limited to establishing a spiritual relationship with people, though this is extremely important.  God’s mission also concerns itself with concrete aspects of human existence.”[ii]

These descriptions communicate the desire of my heart in founding LBM.  I wanted to reconcile a heart concerned for all of the needs of the poor with an understanding that apart from repentance of sin and faith in Christ everyone will parish.  This is accomplished with an understanding of the wholeness of the mission of God and was demonstrated clearly in the early church (Acts 2:41-47 and 4:32-37).  As Padilla states:

Acts 2:41-47 clearly shows that the result of the Pentecost experience is no ghetto-church, devoted to cultivating individualistic religion and an exclusive, separatist church.  On the contrary, it is a community of the Spirit, a community that becomes a center of attraction, ‘having the good will of all the people’ (v. 47), because it incarnates the values of the Kingdom of God and affirms, by what it is, by what it does and by what it says, that Jesus Christ has been exalted as Lord over every aspect of life.  It is a missionary community that preaches reconciliation with God and the restoration of all creation by the power of the Spirit.[iii] 

This is the type of church that we have committed to planting among the desperately poor in the majority word.