Jesus Jargon: Mission

Hey, friends.
Welcome back to our podcast,
Jesus Jargon, a look at some of the words
that Christians have used and what they mean,
and maybe sometimes what they don’t mean.
And today, we look at a word that I think is probably pretty familiar to anyone who’s been in the church very long.
That word is mission,
the idea that the church exists for a specific purpose.
And as we live out that purpose in the world,
we speak of that as our mission,
our calling, our reason for being.
And this is a great word.
I would say that historically,
in the American church at least,
we have kind of narrowed it.
And one of the things that’s
happening currently is that we’re having conversation about how do we rediscover
the full breadth of this word.
And so typically, this word has been used in the church in a way that is specific.
And we’re now examining whether that’s the best way to talk about what it means
to do our mission.
Yeah, it will follow in the conversation a little bit where we talk about some
of that reclaiming.
But it is worth noting that when we talk about mission at its best,
we are talking about something that we see at the very birth of the church.
We’re not talking about
a program or an idea that came up later as we grew as an institution over thousands of years.
This isn’t something that at some point we discovered.
This is innate to the DNA of what the church was.
We have Jesus saying at the very end of Matthew and the Great Commission to go.
You know, there’s this idea that the church is by its nature moving out from the place where it’s
at.
In fact, the Gospel writer Luke talks about how the Gospel spread from Jerusalem in these
concentric circles out from that center into the whole world.
And it is really historically
remarkable that in less than 200 years,
the church had the kind of influence and footprint that it did
coming from where it came from.
And quite frankly, the people who believed it and who preached it,
we’re not talking the power players,
the best orders of the ancient world.
And yet the church
grew out and that movement of the church continues to be something that we draw from
in this very time.
And what that means historically is that the church has at different points
understood that sort of outward look differently.
We have responded in different ways and a very
classic example of that would be maybe what the church has done in the 20th century,
where we were very formalized in our understanding of mission,
their entire organizations with mission
in the name of them.
And so I do think we have in our own collective consciousness today,
sort of some of that remnant,
some of that memory of putting people on a boat,
sending them to China,
sending them to South Korea,
sending them to Africa in the hope that these missionaries
would do mission work.
And so we do have this history that we’ve inherited in the last few
generations that I think makes an interesting touch point as we engage this question.
What is the mission of the church?
Yeah, we’ve coupled the word very strongly with that idea of going out.
In fact,
we use the term missionary.
Paul calls himself missionary.
We talk about his missionary journey.
So historically,
we have set a foundation in which mission meant sending someone or taking
someone and going somewhere else.
And that’s certainly an appropriate way to talk about the
term.
What that has sort of left us with though,
is the idea that that’s all of what mission means.
And so when churches put together a mission budget,
it almost always means money that is sent
to other people doing Christian service,
to missionaries,
to teachers,
to camp
administrators,
to foreign countries, to the denomination.
But the idea is that it’s the
stuff that happens out there somewhere.
And that is certainly an important part of mission.
But lately we’ve been having a conversation,
is that enough?
Because if we go back and we look at that
idea of mission in the New Testament,
if you asked what is the mission of the church,
it certainly is evangelism.
It certainly is expanding the gospel,
but it’s also we saw in
the book of Acts,
caring for one another.
It’s meeting physical needs.
It’s praying for one
another.
It’s fellowship with one another.
It’s leadership and administration.
The church was called to this multitude of tasks,
this very rich tapestry of things they did because they
believed in Jesus Christ.
And evangelism outreach was one part of that,
but it becomes identified
as the primary arm of this term mission.
And in ways that’s really important and really helpful,
but in other ways it has perhaps kept us from thinking about some of those other things that
we do as mission.
Yeah, we’ve got to be very careful when we over-identify mission with
something that happens beyond our national borders because what ends up happening is we miss
the mission that literally lives in our backyard.
One thing that strikes me about being a vibrant
congregation is when you turn to Paul’s words about the body of Christ being like a body,
he talks about the hands,
the feet, the head, right?
That every person has a different role.
What we can miss is that even in the early church,
not everyone was an apostle Paul,
right?
Not everyone made these missionary journeys that Paul made.
Now he had people that came along with him that he mentored.
So there was an active sort of apparatus of leaders who did travel throughout
the church.
They moved, but we miss all of the hundreds of Christians,
if not thousands of
Christians who stayed right where they were at.
They were in what we would call local congregations
and they were doing mission.
They were being equipped by these missionaries,
by these apostles to do the mission in their backyard.
And so in a local congregation like our own,
we sometimes, if we’re not careful,
we miss the mission to those who are in nursing care facilities.
When we have church members who go in in the name of Christ to love on,
to spend time with,
to hear the stories,
to remember, “Oh yeah, it’s their anniversary.” And then they come back,
they share that with our
church family.
That is mission in its deepest and most pure sense.
It is the church loving and
serving in Jesus Christ’s name.
And we would miss those opportunities if we over identify this word
mission with the stuff that happens beyond our national borders for the stuff that we’re called
to do and be as Christians.
I think the language helps us.
We think of missionaries as the ones who are sent,
but the Greek word for church literally means the called out ones,
the sent out ones.
So every Christian in that sense,
and I think we see this in the early church,
is a missionary.
The early Christians understood that whether they were sailing with Paul to Ephesus or to Philippi or to wherever,
or whether they were staying in their church trying to sort out controversies and
love one another in Christ’s name,
they were a missionary.
They were sent.
They were sent into
the world.
They were sent to their jobs.
They were sent to their families.
They were sent to love people,
even those who are difficult to love.
And it helps us,
I think, to recapture this idea of
mission as bigger and broader than simply sponsoring people who do good things in other places.
That’s really important, but it’s not everything that it means to practice mission in the church.
And in the last,
I don’t know,
30 years or so,
I think some really important conversations
have developed along those lines.
It used to be that when churches talked about their mission,
they would look at almost exclusively that budget,
the money that was spent
sending people to do other things.
And I think we’ve started to ask some important questions.
Isn’t vacation Bible school mission?
Isn’t worship mission?
Isn’t Christian education mission?
Isn’t taking care of our facility and facilitating good relationships between members?
Isn’t that also mission?
And so, I like that we’re in the process of trying to expand the word
mission, not to in any way subtract from what we’ve done,
but to add this richness to the idea
that everything the church does is supposed to be in keeping with our mission.
Everything we do is to be about Jesus Christ and his work,
and that makes it our mission.
Yeah, I think that this is an important juncture in the conversation because if you’ve done any
reading in some of the business leadership kind of section of the bookstore,
you know, there’s a lot of talk in corporate America about mission.
What’s your mission statement?
How you create and generate a culture around your mission?
I mean, you could spend a lifetime
reading some of the thoughts that have been put together on the idea of mission.
And it’s important to remember that as Christians,
we don’t come to the idea of mission from that
same sort of lens.
In other words, we don’t start from this presupposition that for an organization,
there’s a right mission or best mission that we need to create,
foster, put in front of people.
And then we need to sort of try to create and cultivate as leaders this idea that,
you know, a corporation, if it’s doing really well,
everybody knows its mission statement,
and they get behind the mission statement,
and you got to sort of push that forward.
There’s some churches that do function that way,
churches that sort of create a simple sort of
statement and idea.
And their idea is that the more and more we can get people to understand
and internalize this mission,
then we’re being faithful.
And I don’t want to criticize that per se,
other than to say,
I think if churches ever fall into that as being our primary understanding
of being a people of mission,
I think we fundamentally misunderstood what we mean
theologically as being people of mission.
Because ultimately,
everything that we do
flows as a witness to what we’ve seen and heard revealed as true in Jesus Christ.
So we become missionaries not because of a skill set or not because a mission statement is particularly
applicable to a segment of the population or a part of our community,
but because ultimately, we’ve seen something.
And because we’ve seen it,
we’re now eyewitnesses to share it to those who
surround us.
And so therefore,
our witness flows directly from our mission statement,
flows directly from who Jesus Christ is,
which by the way,
I think as people of the faith,
means that we can never land on a mission statement.
Our mission is always being transformed and
renewed as our understanding and discernment of Jesus Christ also grows in community.
So I think our mission is actually a very colorful,
robust, nuanced sort of connection between our
theology and our practice that the church at its best is always growing and shaping and being
reformed into the image of those who are called to do the mission of Christ as witnesses to what
we’ve seen and what we will continue to see.
So I just want to make it very clear when we talk about
mission in the church,
this term is not a direct analog to some of those other instances of where
we see mission in other places.
Yeah, so mission statement tends to be about us.
Mission in the church is about what Christ wants of us,
what Christ asks of us and offers us to be and do.
And that matters because while there is a constancy to our call in Christ,
there’s also a fluidity to it that it may change in our seasons and circumstances.
What Christ calls us to may be different a year from now than it is now.
And the reason that matters is because
there has been within this idea of mission a tendency,
a temptation to compartmentalize
and to say things like,
well, mission is what we do beyond our community.
So mission is helping
people who don’t live here.
Or perhaps mission is evangelism,
but not social justice.
Or others would say our mission is social justice,
but not evangelism.
And when we do that,
when we cut those slices and we say this is what mission is,
mission is doing this or mission is sending money to this,
we detract from that bigger picture.
And it keeps us from experiencing
that full range of everything we are called to do.
Mission, the mission of the church includes
both evangelism, sharing the good news,
and working for justice and social righteousness
amidst causes and issues.
It includes both loving people who are far away and people who are near.
You know, sometimes you’d hear people say,
well, why do we send money to Africa?
We have hungry people here.
That should never be the choice.
It should never pit one thing over the other.
We should be talking about how can we make a difference in the lives of people who live
in our community and how can we help in some of the horrific situations we will never see with our
eyes, but we’re aware of through media and news and other agencies.
How can we help there as well?
And we shouldn’t allow ourselves to get drawn into this idea that we can put mission in whatever box
might be most appealing or most interesting to us.
And those boxes are very tempting to fall into.
And some of it is by nature of how it has to work.
Mission often gets funneled through programs,
through ministries, through organizations and institutions.
The reality is in order to be
faithful with funds and time and energy,
you have to have some leadership and you have to,
you know, so the growth of missionary organizations is only natural because you have people who have
experience in those places.
They can help measure,
you know, how effective is this missionary being
in their goal to help provide clean water to these people?
Or how effective are they being in
Italy while they’re serving refugees?
You know, there’s this very sort of specific sense in which
it is easy for us to identify mission with the people who are doing that mission.
But the danger in doing that is we begin to think that mission only exists in these programmatic forms.
In other words,
you know, our congregation every year has a history of going down to the banquet in Sioux
Falls where we go serve by providing meals for those who are in need.
The temptation would be
to think that that program that we do,
which is really just a sort of annual thing that we participate in,
that somehow that is a culmination of the mission of this place.
That’s a misordering in my view.
That is a channel that the missionary call of this congregation is seen in,
but it’s not our mission.
It’s not really us.
That’s not,
if you ask me to define what is the mission of First Press,
that’s an effect of our call as missionaries in the name of Christ Jesus.
It isn’t the thing,
but our temptation, I think, is to say, well,
you know, we’re the Gideon Bible people or we’re the
Operation Christmas Child people.
I mean,
to think that those programs, those institutions,
those channels of doing good things,
that those are the mission itself.
And I don’t think that’s
helpful understanding of what it means to be a people called by mission because ultimately
those are just small instantiations of something we’re all called to.
And whether we participate
in it in December when the shoebox is supposed to go out or not,
it does not determine whether we
are people of mission.
That’s just an effect of that call that we have.
And that reordering is, I think, essential to be people who are people of mission.
Absolutely. And so the mission of the
church is to be the best,
most faithful church we are capable of being.
The mission of each
Christian is to be as engaged and energized a follower of Jesus Christ as you can be.
And what that means is that everything Christ calls us to,
all of it, is within our mission.
Now, it may not be all equal at any given time.
Churches are of limited resources as are people.
It is always part
of the process to prayerfully consider what is the thing God might be calling us specifically in our
mission to do right now in this moment.
And we’ll never be able to do all of it,
but all of it
exists as part of the mission to which we’re called in Christ.
And I think it’s just a better
way to understand the term.
It’s a more helpful way to talk about what it means to be the church
and what it means to be Christian.
And I think it’s both more holistic and more inclusive.
And I think it has helped us.
I think those conversations over the last several decades
have benefited the church a great deal to expand what we mean when we use this word “mission.”
Right.
And when we talk about the idea of the church’s mission,
we’re connecting to a theological
strain that has existed in the church since the very beginning.
And I just want to make that very
clear.
The church has always been a group of men and women who were convicted by the idea
that because we are called sons and daughters of Jesus Christ,
we now have work to do in the world.
And every Christian who has lived that out with what they’ve said and what they’ve done,
they have preserved and passed on the mission of the church.
This is essential.
This is not us in
any way innovating on something that didn’t exist before.
This is us being faithful stewards of what
has been handed to us.
What has happened,
though,
in the last few decades has been a more sustained
conversation about reclaiming some aspects of that original understanding of mission.
And there has been a new term that has been used to help describe it.
And that has been called
“missional,” instead of just mission,
being a missional church.
And Pastor Clint and I both
had the privilege of studying with one of the,
if not the, major proponents of and thinkers of missional theology,
which if you’re going to be honest,
remains a very early level
kinds of conversation.
It is very deep and there’s not one textbook definition of what missional means.
But if you look at some of the conversations that have come from that time,
which have essentially centered around what does it mean for the church to reclaim every person’s
call as missionary in their own time and place,
I think some interesting reflections have come
about.
And one of those I want to share is there has been a kind of skepticism of professional Christianity.
The idea that Christianity is best sort of led and best understood as being lived out
by professional clergy or academics or missionaries in the traditional sense that we fundraise and send them overseas,
because the temptation in that is that we might believe as people who
live in Christian community together,
the people who sit in the pews and worship every Sunday,
that we somehow equip and send out these people to do that job for us,
that they represent us in
the mission doing of the church.
And that’s not a particularly historically helpful way of
understanding the mission of the church,
because we can never condense mission in such a way that
it can be put in a job description of one and then not shared by the others.
The church has always
been by its DNA,
equipping every member to do the witnessing to what we’ve seen in Jesus Christ,
that we’re doing mission when we invite our neighbors over to barbecue,
we sit down over
Jesus Christ.
That is in some part, not in whole,
but in some part that is us being people of the mission,
sharing the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ by what we do and by what we say.
What I appreciate about this this question of being a missional church is that it insists that
we must recognize every member is called to it,
that we all share in this mission,
though there are some who equip us to do that work,
that we all have some part in doing the mission of the
church.
And I think that makes this an incredibly applicable and to congregations a task that we
must set ourselves to because it won’t happen by itself.
I think what I’ve appreciated about the
conversation is that historically,
or at least for a while now when we’ve used the term mission,
we’ve talked about it programmatically.
In other words,
mission is something we do.
And I think the helpful correction to missional is that it’s about identity.
Missional is a characteristic of who we are.
The people of Jesus Christ are to be missional.
We all inherit the work of Jesus.
Now we inherit it in different ways with different talents,
different abilities, different opportunities,
but each of us share in the same goal,
which is to work out the kingdom
of God to the best we can in our current moment.
And that can be done by volunteering in the
nursery.
That can be done by going to China.
That can be done by teaching Sunday school, by preaching,
by singing,
by working at a nonprofit or volunteering at a soup kitchen.
That is all missional.
It all speaks to the influence of Christ in our own life
and the call of Christ to take that message,
that news into the world.
And Presbyterians, we have done really well on one side of that equation.
We’ve been fantastic about giving money,
pretty good about volunteering time.
Most Presbyterian churches historically have been
engaged in causes and fundraising and financial support.
Maybe where we have been challenged in
this new arena is to be more personally engaged in mission.
What does it mean to invite others to church?
In many parts of Asia,
they operate under a very simple outreach model.
Each one brings one, and they don’t just mean to church,
they mean to Christ.
Each one brings one,
that one ought to be working in their life to draw other people to Jesus.
And that can happen in
formal and informal ways.
And Presbyterians have perhaps been a little more uncomfortable on the
evangelism side of the fence.
We’ve been pretty comfortable on the outreach side.
Evangelism is a new challenge for us in the world we live, a new struggle.
The idea of relational outreach is a
growing edge for most Presbyterians.
And I think one that’s exciting,
that we are,
that we’re being challenged to do that,
that we are being kind of,
our hand is being forced on our reluctance
to think of ourselves as missionaries as we learn that that really is probably the best way forward
and the best way to recapture the sense of what our earliest fathers and mothers in the faith thought
of as endemic built into being church.
I think that sometimes Presbyterians have really
felt uncomfortable with the idea of being missional people,
that each one of us has a role
and a voice to share the good news with others.
And part of that,
I do think, is an unfortunate sort of borrowing from the professional evangelist who we see on TV,
or we’ve seen portrayed in film,
or maybe we just have an imagination of they’re the extrovert who always has the best thing to say
and they’re good with people and they can draw them in and they can explain the faith with
conviction and clarity and we compare ourselves to this imaginary person and we always find ourselves wanting.
I don’t think that’s a helpful image at all.
And I think I can give a very
concrete example.
This has happened in my time here at First Prez.
We had a guest visitor come
to worship with us and one of our longtime members was just literally sitting next to this individual
and we passed the friendship pad that that person’s name came across and after service that person
came and greeted this visitor and said,
“Hey, we’re glad that you’re here,
not seeing you here before.
Is this your first time?
Yeah, it is.
Well, we’re glad that you were here.” They called the church
office and we were actually able to connect them with that person.
That member took this
visitor out to lunch and on one hand there’s nothing magical or mysterious about that.
That is pure hospitality,
a gracious sort of welcome.
There’s no expectation in getting to go have
lunch with someone and share time and conversation for an hour and yet that is the living definition
of being missional people.
That is living out our faith in a meaningful way and quite frankly,
some of us would be uncomfortable with making that offer but that’s a reasonable thing that
anyone could do.
We could make that request,
we could meet someone that’s subway,
we could sit down and enjoy a conversation with one another.
It might not be a thing that we would want to do
every day but that is within reach of every Presbyterian.
And friends, I just want to
encourage you that mission and being missional people doesn’t need to require some rocket science
level of faith or public speaking or whatever you think that that might entail.
It can look like
simple, strong relational invitation.
Just someone who you see who’s in need that you go out of the
way and being compelled by your faith,
you seek to serve in whatever way possible.
Friends,
that is good news and sometimes we do that programmatically when we get to supply meals for people
post-surgery or after they’ve had a baby.
We just have an overwhelming response to that.
We’re proud to be of a congregation that serves people well through our deacons,
through our outreach ministries, through our supportive families who are in need.
There are so many ways that we seek
to serve but it isn’t any one of those particular ways that matter.
It’s the people behind them
compelled by that desire to do mission.
And if you haven’t found a place yet that you hook up
spiritually, that you feel connected to being a missional person,
really want to encourage and
challenge you to do so, to look,
to seek, to call.
We can help connect you but also don’t think that
there’s some magic key,
some silver bullet you need to find.
Sometimes just being missional people
is going out making ourselves uncomfortable to make someone else comfortable and that can be the
very spirit and definition of being a missional people.
There was a Christian who once said that
the church exists for mission like a fire exists for burning.
In other words,
that being the church
and being missional are inseparable.
You really can’t have one without the other.
I have occasionally had people say through the years,
“The church I go to doesn’t do mission.” And
the very jaded part of me wants to say that it’s not a church.
It’s something else.
You cannot be a non-missional church.
Such a thing doesn’t exist.
The church is by definition.
The church fact of being established in Jesus Christ inherits the mission of Jesus Christ.
Whether it sends money to China or doesn’t,
whether it is missional,
the church is only missional.
There is no such
thing as a non-missional church.
It cannot be a reality.
And so I think where this conversation
and where this word is helpful is to remind us of that very thing.
To challenge us and ask us to
survey the entire breadth of what God calls us to be as his people and ask how do we jump in?
Where does the effort need me?
Where do my skills and my talents and my individual calling
meet the mission of God?
Where is the intersection of the service of church and faith and world?
And how can I find myself engaged in that?
And I think it doesn’t need to be intimidating.
That can be as simple as being mindful of others of going to nursing homes.
Sometimes mission is elaborate and complicated.
When we talk about the church being involved in the ills of the world,
fighting famine and racial injustice,
yes, those are enormous,
challenging,
multi-level conversations.
But how to be kind to your neighbor?
How to be gracious to somebody
who maybe has rubbed you the wrong way?
This is a part of mission as well.
This is something we’re
called to be in Jesus Christ.
And I think the broader definition,
Michael, serves us well by reminding us how many various ways there are to serve and how many things need done,
need the attention of the church through the lens of the gospel.
Yeah, I think you’re exactly right,
Clint.
And I think it is the double-edged sword that’s the other side of that blade that actually also
makes that a challenge because some people are overwhelmed by the breadth of the need and the opportunities,
especially in this modern connected world that we live in.
We can know about
intimate details of civil wars happening around the world of refugees and kids who are hungry.
Just the sheer amount of the world’s ills that is available to us today is unbelievable.
And so
sometimes I have watched as folks have responded to this call to be missional people,
and they felt overwhelmed by all the need.
Well, I couldn’t possibly move the needle in all the ills of the world,
and nor is that any one particular believer’s calling.
But do not underestimate the power of the
practice of opening your hands and serving in the mission of God in the world.
Small tasks to you
can be life-shaping for your own journey of faith.
Things like, you know, I know I come back to it as
an example over and over again,
but the simple act of the offering in worship has a way of shaping
a person’s life in ways that we often underestimate.
The reminder that as a Christian,
it’s not just about your spiritual nourishment.
It’s not just about your fellowship with other believers.
It’s not just about how comfortable you are in your seat in your place of worship with your family of faith.
It is about how you are called to serve this day.
And so one small gift given every month
to a particular ministry or one amount of time set aside that you will do this form of service
every month makes a substantial difference in not just the world,
but our understanding about who
we are as people of faith.
When we invite a family over to a barbecue,
not just because we
want to have a nice evening with them,
but because we want to show them the love of Christ in true hospitality,
that motivation shapes and changes that encounter.
You don’t need to have a conversation
about faith a single time in that meal,
but you can still be motivated by your Christian faith
to show love and care in Jesus’s name.
And that comes through in ways that I really cannot put
into words.
The way that those interactions are formed and shaped is different when we do it from this core motivation.
And then that action itself comes back in this beautiful cycle to shape and
form our understanding of who we are.
It’s this beautiful cycle of serving,
of relearning who we
are as people called admission and going back to service over and over and over again.
Yeah, we should never let the fact that we can’t do everything keep us from doing something.
And that may be praying.
You may identify a person.
Maybe you feel a leaning.
Maybe God is leading you toward calling someone to mind and commit yourself,
“I’m going to pray for them for
this season, whatever it is.
I’m going to daily commend that person to God and ask God to be at
this point in a million ways.” And that’s really the heart of this conversation,
is to make sure
we understand this word mission,
not simply as dollars that go to someone else who is doing God’s work,
but rather as all of us hearing the call to each of us to do God’s work together in various ways.
Not all of us can do the same things.
Not all of us can go the same places.
Not all of us
have access to the same people for a lot of reasons,
but all of us can do something.
And as we all do something in the name of Jesus Christ,
we live into this idea of our mission and being
missional as his church.
You know, we made it this far into this conversation trying to lay out some
framework with what we mean by missional at its best.
And what may have stuck out to you at this
point is some of the things that we have not talked about with mission.
And you know, I think it’s important to name them.
Some Christians do have in mind when they talk about this term
mission, they often think about the idea of personal salvation,
the idea that the ultimate
mission of the church is to get people saved.
And we could talk about differing people,
even within those families of the faith,
do have particular understandings of what they mean by saved.
But I want to make it very clear that as Presbyterians have generally come to the conversation of mission,
we have believed it’s important to have individual encounters with the gospel,
that we recognize the
call of Jesus for us as a disciple is meant for us,
that there’s a part that we are called to play in
it.
But Presbyterians have also been very comfortable,
and I think the Reformed tradition
has led us there,
to say that Jesus as the incarnate God calls us to a robust understanding
of doing God’s mission,
that Jesus fed the hungry,
he healed the sick,
it is not by accident
Presbyterians have our name on hospitals,
we have our name on schools,
we Presbyterians have gone
into cities and have made food distribution centers,
because Presbyterians believe firmly
that God cares for those not only in their souls,
but God cares for their bodies.
And so therefore we seek to join our hands to that work.
So when we talk about mission,
we don’t mean that to the
exclusion of one or the other.
We do believe that God cares for the body,
God also cares for the
soul.
I think it’s essential that we are reminded of that, that ultimately,
Presbyterians don’t narrow our sense of mission to one particular task over another,
we believe that they should
all be on the table at any one time.
Yeah, and as we’ve said earlier,
we think that’s the benefit
of having this kind of conversation is that it builds for us a protection against compartmentalizing
and saying, well mission is only to get people saved.
No, it’s only to help the poor and the
needy.
No, mission is both of those things.
Mission is all of those things that we’re called to in Jesus Christ.
And we are better as the people of Jesus Christ when we remember the breadth of those
many tasks to which we are called,
and called to do in the name of Jesus.
There’s another little nuance here that I just want to tease out really quickly,
and I’ll be brief,
but I do think there
has been a temptation with the rise of the missional conversation.
There have been some,
I think, who maybe misunderstand that to be a version of church marketing.
Essentially,
an awareness that the mainline church has by numbers been diminishing.
In fact, we did an entire series in which we talked
about the state of Presbyterianism and a sense in which the church,
if we’re going to be honest,
has struggled to connect with people.
We’ve struggled to be witnesses in our own culture
and time and place,
and we have less Presbyterians today than we did four years ago,
and that’s a reality of the church.
And some churches have thought of missional living as a kind of lifeboat,
a kind of opportunity for us to jump onto another program so that we can maybe market ourselves to
our communities to get people in.
And I want to be very clear and very careful in this,
but the church is never called to portray an image to the world.
We’re not like a corporation where we have
product, where we don’t have Jesus who we’re trying to sell to the world.
We have the truth,
the creator,
the redeemer, sustainer, redeemer.
We have all of who God is in Jesus Christ, revealed
and embodied in the living bodies of the church,
and we seek to allow and open others to see the
same thing that we have seen.
And that is critical.
We should never think of the mission of the church
as some form of vehicle to sort of convince other people to become part of the church.
We shouldn’t look in an empty sanctuary and say,
“Well, the solution is we need to make these people look
more missional.” No, no, that’s the exact opposite.
If we have failed to connect with the world that
surrounds us, we don’t change that by hiring marketing gurus to come in and try to portray a different image.
We start within us.
We start with our own understanding of what it means to
be Christian.
Have we missed this call,
each one of us,
to be missional people?
Because if we are
transformed into the image of Christ who goes into the world to love,
to serve, to teach,
if we are formed in that image,
then the mission of the church will affect that kind of invitation and
hospitality and welcome, but it will be done so authentically.
And I think it’s so important to
say we never in the church try to fake caring for other people.
We never try to portray an image of
hip or cool so that we can get people to come to our places.
It’s not about us.
It’s about the one
who we point to with every fiber of our beings as best as we can,
broken as we are.
We try to point
other people to the hope and grace we’ve received in this one Jesus Christ.
We live that out missionally.
We can’t help it.
It pours from who we are as people.
And if we are doing that well,
then I’m convinced that the church has in its DNA the will to grow.
If we live in this
missional form of being Christian,
then we will be a compelling witness to the world that surrounds
us.
We don’t need to hire people to teach us the right words or the right apps to use.
That’s not the purpose of being a missional church.
And sometimes I think some have made that mistake in the conversations.
I think it would be a mistake for us to think of missional as a strategy.
Missional is our identity.
To be missional is who we are called to be in Jesus Christ.
The things that we are called to do are inherent within our call to be faithful.
And as we pursue them,
we offer the world around us a glimpse of what it looks like
to be in Jesus,
to follow Jesus, to be community,
to be body, to be one in His name.
And as we do that,
it is a compelling vision.
When the church lives its life as the church,
when Christians live their
life faithfully as Christians,
that is attractive.
Not to everybody,
but to many.
And as we seek to do that,
we fulfill
the mission.
But it’s to no other end than to be faithful to what God has
called us to do and called us to be.
It is not for our gain,
it’s for God’s glory.
And as long as we keep that clear,
I think we have our best chance of living that mission out in everything that we
say and do as the church and as individual believers.
And that’s the key.
Everything that we do there, Clint, I think is what makes this conversation so interesting and so compelling,
is that the identity of the church as being a missional people touches everything that we do.
It really does.
And there are some places that we could stand to spend some more time reflecting
upon how we’re called to be missionaries in that area.
There are some places, I think,
that Presbyterians really,
for good, have this built into our DNA.
And I think finance is largely,
definitely at first press here,
and I think many,
many Presbyterian congregations.
We think of how
we can be good stewards of our financial resources,
how those resources can be used
to influence and further the mission of God.
And that is, that is borne on a gift that we need to
celebrate and continue to seek to be stewards of.
But, friends, this does apply to how our deacons
serve those underprivileged in our community.
It applies as we seek to have a backpack program we
can bless with some space in our church for kids that we welcome to our youth group that we
encourage to invite their friends to participate.
Some things that on their surface don’t seem very
missional, like taking a busload of kids to Valley Fair,
which we’ve done, has a way of showing kids
love and grace and a kind of care from a congregation that says,
“Hey, we want you to know that there
are people who love and care for you,
and we want you to go have this experience surrounded by loving
Christian adults.” You know,
there’s just this beautiful animation that happens in our entire
lives when we recognize the breadth of this thing.
And so, I think coming to a conclusion from my
part, the encouragement in that,
friends, is you are not called as an individual to do all of the mission.
You never were.
But you are called to be a person whose life is missional.
And I would encourage you to evaluate where are your gifts,
your talents,
the things that you’ve been made
steward of.
Where are those being employed in the service of the Good News?
And if there are places
where your gifts are not yet used,
please be challenged to do so.
We as a church body need
every member engaged in the mission of the church because ultimately that is how we will continue
to invite others to see this Good News that we have received.
I think it’s very likely that most of us will not hear the call of God
to go witness to Jesus Christ in China.
Now, somebody listening to this may, in fact,
hear that call upon their life.
But what does that mean for the rest of us?
It means the question is,
how will I witness to Jesus Christ in my office,
in my community,
in my family?
Those are the we all share, and that is mission.
It is perhaps less extravagant.
It is perhaps less celebrated.
It is no less important.
And it is no less inherent in the call to follow Jesus Christ.
And as we seek to live that out together,
we not only are strengthened and blessed in our own faith,
but more importantly,
we are that witness to the world of the risen Christ.
Thanks, friends, for joining us for this conversation.
It is a privilege to get to
share a little bit about what it means as a Christian to think about this word mission.
We hope it’s not only been educational,
hopefully maybe you’ve learned something,
but maybe even more so that it equips you,
it encourages you, it challenges you to live into
that mission.
For friends,
everyone who has seen the gospel of Jesus Christ is a witness who is
called to go and share that mission that we’ve been given.
Thanks for listening.