Understanding our Mission

There is a worn out cliché whose message really illumines the problem of the modern mainstream church:  “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything”.   If we do not prayerfully focus on hearing what it is God is calling us to do and to be, we will invest our resources in efforts that may have little lasting significance.  The “falling for anything” part I name as the self-preserving and self-promoting gene that dominates our individual and corporate sprits.  Without intentional focus on an alternative (i.e. holy) mission, this will be our default mission – to survive and thrive.  I worry that this is happening in the mainstream church by both clergy and lay leadership. Almost by default, people who are concerned with their churches adopt a mission to "preserve and/or expand" the ministry and reach of the church. In my own church the underlying concern and priority is "how can we continue to grow while preserving the good that we've enjoyed up to this point?" 

This sentiment isn’t in and of itself bad.  It’s when it takes center stage and becomes the defining assumption and paradigm for the church’s activity and attitude that we have a problem.   My argument is that this mission, this purpose should not be taken for granted as it is. This self-preserving and self-promoting spirit is neither directly biblical or Christ-like and should not be the core motivation of life or ministry.   Why?  Because, the preservation of the church and the promotion of the church are prerogatives of the Holy Spirit, not the people of God. The prerogative of the people of God is to follow their leader, Jesus Christ.   When we take on the wrong yoke, we may very well head in a different direction from our Lord.  

The basis for the church's mission is obedience to Christ and faith in the power of God. This may mean that we are called to things that seem to threaten our preservation or seem counter to promotion. It may mean that our numbers dwindle rather than swell.  Following Jesus may mean we become less popular in the eyes of mainstream society rather than regaining a top spot in the status of our culture.  Following our mission may mean we die before we live.  It may mean we have the cross before Easter.  The promise is that if we are obedient and we follow Christ as the church, the preservation and promotion of the Church will result according to God's timing and manner.   So why don’t we leave God to God’s work and focus on our work?  Put simply, we don’t have enough faith.

Conversion and Discipleship

For the last 200 years or so, the evangelical church has been primarily concerned with converting souls. When Europe was a Christian civilization, this was expressed through missionaries sent to parts of the world where the western version of the gospel had not been adopted. In the American colonies and then in the United States this took place through first and second great awakenings that produced a slew of denominational churches across the nation. The primary idea that demands this priority of conversion has been that thousands of people live in perilous danger of eternal damnation and it is the church’s task to offer them the good news of salvation from such a terrible end. The goal is mostly achieved once a person puts their faith in Jesus because they are now "saved" from hell. Conversion can be roughly described as the moment when an individual comes to believe in Jesus Christ as Savior and puts his or her trust in Him as Lord.

While this primary thrust of evangelism created a nation full of people who call themselves Christians, it has not maintained a church or a society that is Christ centered and Kingdom building. Rather, what we observe is a great quantity of people who have converted to Christianity (or been born to people who converted) that still function in ways in their daily lives that are completely inconsistent with a Christ-like life.

Furthermore, conversion is not the task of the church biblically speaking. The great commission is to “Go and make disciples” not to “convert and save souls”. I challange someone to make a biblical case that our mission as the church is to save the world from eternal damnation. And while “making disciples” certainly includes a conversion of heart and life, such an experience is at best the very beginning of the Christian life.

To elaborate further, let me use the analogy of baseball. For centuries our goal and aim has been to recruit people to be on the right baseball team. We've done all we can to get them in the right dugout and put the right uniform on their backs. But this is not what God commands us to do. God commands us to train and develop persons into hardworking and effective baseball players. In fact, God is more concerned that we play the game well and play it right than that we have the right uniform and are in the right dugout. To put things another way, we have prioritized orthodoxy (right belief) over orthopraxy (right practice). As the church we are charged not only to rescue souls from eternal death but to utterly recast their worldview, behavior, and attitudes so that they may become world-changing agents for the Kingdom of God.

If the modern church is to shift its mission from converting souls to making disciples, we will have to make some major changes in the way we approach worship, Christian formation, youth and children's ministries, and even our outreach to the greater community.

The Church Transforming: Attractional and Missional

Can you believe that only a couple hundred years ago (equivalent of 5-6 generations) if you were born in Western Europe you were automatically considered a member of some institutional/national church?  For example, during the American Revolution, if you were born in England, you were Anglican. Today, only a tiny number of those people’s great, great grandchildren consider themselves Christian. That’s because the church in Europe really didn’t change after the enlightenment.  Unfortunately the church we know today in the US was also largely built upon the premise of Christendom (Christian Civilization). The primary place to do any evangelical mission work was to those civilizations that had not yet been Christianized. Even the great growth of the church going westward during the 1800s was due in large part to a Christian culture that was imbedded into the imagination of the pioneers. 

This kind of church is the one that the mainstream institution still basically follows today. We stand on the assumption that if we put up a sign and build a structure, people will naturally come. In some sub-cultures, people will. If you are more traditional and carry on the practices of your grandparents, church may inherently be a part of your life. But if you're the majority of the people in our western context, you won't. We've responded to a culture that is post-Christian by ramping up our attractional efforts (better programs, more publicity, free coffee and donuts) rather than adapting our whole paradigm. In fact, the mainstream church in America is several decades behind the culture in this awareness of Christianity’s diminishing role in society. Folks in church lament the fact that society is no longer centered on "Christian values" and the obligation/duty of church attendance. But rather than adapt we complain and pray that things would return to the way they were. Even worse, we cling to a way of doing church that is comfortable to us but is no longer relevant or applicable to the majority of people (who by the way are disproportionately young).

The primary shift that must be made in our local churches is our strategies for growth. Most churches are almost entirely attractional in the way they gain new people. In other words, the non-churched have the burden of coming to us. We must move to a greatly increased focus on missional outreach, where we have the burden of going to them. This burden is not simply going outside the walls of the church to invite people back into the walls where we are comfortable. It is learning to do church in a new way that speaks the language of the people who otherwise will never come to Sunday morning worship.