5. CHURCH - People who live to fulfill the Great Commission Vision

CHURCH, the ESSENTIALS (5 OF 7)

“But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and in Samaria and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8)

 On at least six occasions, Jesus explained to the disciples what they were to do after he had ascended, and the Holy Spirit had brought supernatural power. With one exception, all of them were recorded as the last or final thing Jesus said. The six statements (Matthew 24:14; 28:16-20; Mark 16:9-20; Luke 24:45-49; John 20:19-23; Acts 1:3-8) are specific and clear. It is an imperative for the church and includes every follower of Jesus, not just a few. And it is profoundly challenging.

If I was to survey the two hundred plus Christian congregations in my home city, Canberra, and try and work out what commission they were fulfilling by what is most obvious about them I would come up with something quite different to the words quoted by Jesus. It might sound something like this:

Go and rent, build or buy a building so you can have meetings every Sunday. Make sure every meeting follows the pattern of the last one and spend most of your time and most of your income planning for and conducting those meetings. Try and get as many people as you can to make a commitment to come regularly to the meeting. And then try and get them to give generously to the offering.

We have been very good at inventing variations on this theme. In fact, we can justify separating from every other church because “God-approves-of-what-we-do-more-than-others,” or some similarly ludicrous presumption. Some of our churches assume that the great commission means to offer deep and meaningful teaching sermons. Others reduce the gospel to various forms of social justice. Before I am bagged and tagged, I want to say that none of these things are bad. They become bad when they substitute for and exclude the primary task given to the church by Jesus, namely the fulfilling of the Great Commission.

When you take all the things that Jesus said on these occasions, they meld into five clear imperatives. As you no doubt aware, an imperative is a command, not an option. It is essential not discretional. Neither individual believers nor groups (church congregations) have any basis for opting out. We are either going to be obedient or disobedient and that is the same as saying we trust Jesus, or we don’t. We either have faith or unbelief. There is no middle ground.

I have been committed to reaching lost people all my Christian life, even though I have done it badly. Sometimes people have presumed that I have a “gift” of evangelism. It is far from the truth. I am just trying to represent God’s heart for lost people as reflected everywhere in Scripture and stated by the Bible’s most famous verse: “For God so loved the world….” (John 3:16). I am believing that Jesus’ final command to the gathered disciples was to all of them and therefore all the disciples who would come after them. Here are the five imperatives of the Great Commission statements.

1.         We must exercise the authority of Jesus, depend on the presence of Jesus, and operate in the power of the Spirit for the work involved in completing the Great Commission to be fulfilled.

2.        We must take full responsibility for going to where people are and not expect to open the doors to a room and expect them to come.

3.        We must take full responsibility to go to every person in every people group:  neighbourhood, workplace, extended family, city, region, nation, and nations. Any vision that does not have a strategy for reaching every person is not a Biblical strategy.

4.        We must proclaim the gospel (of the kingdom). We must be sure that we do not presume that living among lost people constitutes a gospel proclamation. Doing good works is not a gospel proclamation. Establishing just and free social structures is not gospel proclamation. Calling people to respond to the invitation of their king and to accept his rule is the gospel.

5.        We must make disciples by baptising those who believe and by enabling them to obey every command Jesus has given. That includes the command to make multiplying disciples.

If we take the ministry of Jesus as a model, we see that Jesus personally visited every town and village in Judea and Galilee, lived, proclaimed, and established kingdom of God rule. He raised up twelve apostles and a hundred-plus followers who were prepared to wait in Jerusalem for the Spirit to come and empower them. Except for Judas, all those disciples died serving the cause of the gospel. Apart from James, they all died as missionary martyrs in places as far east as India and as far west as Spain. By the time Paul died in the mid 60s AD, he had seen churches planted to the point where the gospel was being fully proclaimed all the way from Jerusalem to Illyricum (Romans 15). Historians tell us that the number of people living in those regions accounted for more than a third of the total population of the Roman empire.

There was a period during the last decades of the twentieth century where churches spent a lot of time developing their vision and mission statements. It seemed that if we did this work, the very fact of having a vision would inspire people and shape their lives. It also seemed, at the time, that we needed clever people to produce clever wording so it would look nice and sound powerful. The reality is that, as members of the kingdom of God the King is the one who gets to declare the vision and we get to implement it. I always wondered why we had to do that, when all we needed to do was to repeat or apply what Jesus said to our own city or region. The more important issue was getting the faith to believe what Jesus has already said. Then all we need to do is to start obeying what he told us. We could start with the five imperatives drawn from the Great Commission statements. Here they are expressed as questions for any individual believer or local church congregation. These statements refer to the immediate region. Obviously, the great commission gives us a responsibility for other regions. So, as we begin to make this our primary purpose we can ask the same question, especially for the unreached peoples of the world.

1.        How can we depend on Jesus’ authority, presence and Holy Spirit power so that the gospel will be proclaimed to all the people - starting with those in our immediate city/region?

2.         How should we make a plan to have believers go to the people in our region for the purpose of making the gospel known to them?

3.         How can we ensure that we will see the gospel proclaimed to every last person in our region?

4.         How will we make sure that the connection with every person has involved the gospel being authentically proclaimed?

5.         How will me make multiplying disciples among all of the people groups in our region?

NEXT:  When Jesus ascended and the disciples returned to Jerusalem their next decision was a telling and powerful example of the culture Jesus had built into them – one that must be replicated in every generation of disciples.