My mission?

I don’t know when I heard the term Great Commission for the first time, but I’m sure it was early on in my Christian experience. What I do know is that it seemed to always be expressed as a directive to some individuals and that's what I assumed. It was normally a challenge to missions. Does God want you to be a missionary, or not? Does God want you to fulfill the great commission, or not? Should you go or should you stay?

I realize that I’m exaggerating a little, and making it a little more black and white than it usually is. Still, the  impression was, and often is, that this great commission is something that is given to individuals to carry out; and it’s a challenge for some of them to go, but of course not everyone. It's expanded sometimes to say that if you're not called to go, then you're called to give.

However, the more I have looked at it, the more I have come to realize that it is not individualistic at all. Those last few days before Christ ascended were spent not just with the 12 apostles, but with all of the key disciples who were committed to Him. This was the climax just as Jesus was about to ascend to heaven. The emphasis was not on the individual, but on this new body that was being called out. Jesus' focus was corporate.


My experience as a missionary has only emphasized this even more. I believe that we need to look at the great commission less in terms of the individual. It shouldn't be passive, waiting on whether God might be leading someone to become a missionary. Rather, we need to look at the Great Commission in terms of the church. In a sense, this is the founding purpose of the church. If the apostles were writing a constitution for the church as an organization, this probably would have been in the preamble as its purpose clause. The church exists to carry all this out. The church should see this as their number one responsibility–making disciples of all peoples.

Instead, the Missions program has been something that is extra, peripheral to the main ministry of the church. In many churches, the Missions budget is separate. It is set through extra pledges (faith promises) and extra giving. You can give to the missions budget as long as that comes after your tithe to the church. It's not a part of the church budget.

Some of that is changing. There already is less emphasis on waiting to see who God may call into missions, and then leaving that person to run around getting support from churches and individuals. But, we haven't gone far enough at all.

I think that the church should put more effort into thinking about what their role could be in making disciples of all nations, and then coming up with a strategy for how to do so. Of course, that is not just the overseas component that we often call "missions." It’s an overall plan that includes our neighbors, the people on the other side of the town, other nations and cultures across the sea. It's comprehensive. The key point is that the responsibility belongs to the church, and not just individuals. Missions and evangelism are certainly individual in that it is individuals who are the ones who are on the contact edge between the church and the unbelieving world. However, the individuals are part of a strategy, a vision and a mission of the church. We need to be less inward thinking and more outward thinking.

Missionaries can fall into a similar rut. One problem (issue) in missions is that missionaries are often independent and individualistic in spirit. It's easy for us to just drop into the mold of thinking about  "my mission" or "but, God called me here to..." Sometimes we can forget that we are all part of a team with our sending churches and our coworkers in the plan to make disciples of all nations starting in the part of the world where we have been sent.

But, the mission is far greater than any individual and it is far greater than any mission organization. Missionaries are sent and are part of the "mission" of the church.

Why am I Doing This?

Last Sunday morning, I was a guest speaker at the Syi-le Church near us. I know most of that congregation, but there's always a few that I don't know. As I was getting to the climax a man in the back raised his hand. It's not very often that you get someone wanting to make a comment during a sermon on Sunday morning worship. It happened when I was speaking at a retreat in central China, but in that case it was a young girl who had never been to any kind of religious service before and didn't know what was "proper."

I paused and acknowledged him and he made a comment that supported what I was saying, so that was pretty cool. I went on from there. A couple of minutes later, during a short pause, this man stood up again to make a comment, and this time he didn't bother with raising his hand. This one caught me a little off guard, but again it wasn't anything that was a problem, and it did follow with what I was saying. Probably less than a minute later, it happened again, but it was more than just a sentence this time. This continued at least another 5 -7 times, each time getting longer, and closer together. And, none was against what I was saying, but each time it made it harder and harder to bring it back to the point that I was trying to make as I concluded, and made it harder to come to the conclusion.

As you might imagine, I was not completely enjoying this anymore. It was making it really hard to concentrate and hard to conclude. I wasn't sure if he was a church member, or just someone who happened to walk in, so I wasn't sure what to do, but I can tell you one thought that started running through my mind and coming back when I had already dismissed it. I wanted to say, "OK, do you want to preach this, or should I?"

At that point, I had lost focus, and by that I don't mean just that I could not focus on my sermon. I had lost focus on what I was supposed to be doing. What bothered me was that I had lost control and didn't know how to get it back. But, what made me think I should be in control? The man came up to talk with me afterward, and it was obvious that he knew a lot about Christianity (unusual here in Taiwan) but it was just as obvious that he was not a Christian.

What does this have to do with the topic of the Great Commission, Mission, and the Church? Well maybe it seems like a stretch, but it shows how easy it is to forget the goal in order to just keep on doing what you think you should be doing. Preaching is for the purpose of influencing people. So, I am invited to speak in a church. when I speak. How is that I can so quickly get distracted from the goal--of influencing people, moving people--to start focusing on the sermon itself, the tool.

And, I think that's the case with many churches in relation to their mission's program. We go through the motions, but forget the goal. And, the church is judged on how many people came through their program rather than what influence they are having on the world that doesn't know God and on their fellow believers who want to know Him better. And, when we forget the real goal and substitute a program or a plan, we betray our cause and find that we have often done more harm than good.

The church needs to evaluate itself in terms, not of what they are doing, but why they are doing it.  It's people, not a program or a plan.

A New Start

Well, so much for promises. I started this in January, intending to write something every few days, but then things got pretty wild in my schedule and it was easier to drop something that I hadn't really started than to drop all the things that were demanding my attention. And, some of those things were pretty important and too urgent to drop. So,...

Here I go again, and this time, I hope that I can really commit the time to do it. I'm the type who needs to write to really get my thoughts together, so I need this for my own thinking process.

Here's to the journey!