The Mission of the Church
By Andrew Heard
Churches often make a choice between being a maturing church or being a mission church. We can’t be Bible people and make that choice. We need to be about both; the great commission is a call to do both. The language of ‘disciple’ can sometimes hide this because we often use the word as a descriptor for maturing a person; we ‘disciple’ believers. But Jesus clearly intends this command to refer to the establishment of people as new disciples. It is, in the first instance, a command to win people from death to life. Of course, it includes much more; it includes deepening them in their walk. We are to ‘teach them to obey everything Jesus commands’. The Bible concerns itself with two things – mission and maturity – pursuing the twin purposes of ‘wide’ and ‘deep’. We aim to win as many as we can and deepen every one of them in the things of Christ.
These twin aims sometimes compete in church life. We often have to make ministry resource decisions; we don’t have unlimited people, time or money. We have to determine priorities and invest the little we have wisely. Where do we put our efforts? What things do we prioritise? It is here where hidden agendas often emerge. The passions of a leader often subconsciously dictate priorities and resource decisions. In our theological context (reformed evangelical) it is often the mission priority that slips first. Our church structures tend us towards ‘insider’, ‘deep’ ministries. We were trained to know the Bible deeply and well. We, therefore, want to share this depth with our people. We were ‘ordained’ as pastors. The language of ‘pastor’ predisposes us to think in terms of the insider, deep ministries.
For us, in our context, we need to more actively work at countering this drift and set in place practical processes, structures and plans to keep the mission priority front and centre.
For us, this has meant that we embrace a very simple strategy of always thinking about any annual program of events from a mission perspective first. We look at the year and start with the question, ‘What things at what times will help us reach more people in this region?’ We start there and create an annual program that maximises mission impact. We then move to maturity issues and fill the calendar around the mission priorities. This led us to a profound but powerful shift in yearly thinking. We worked out that the best time to do mission in our area is during summer. This had traditionally been the time ministers and churches wound down for holidays. We reversed this, we wound up for mission right at the time when the community was most receptive to being missioned. This made a massive change to the way we as staff managed our own personal calendars. We lost our summer holidays! It was a cost but we aren’t doing church to make life easier for pastors.
We also always report on mission outcomes before any other outcome. We start all our weekly leadership meetings with the question, ‘Who was converted this week?’
Our preaching is brought back regularly to the drive, motive and concern for reaching the lost. Each of these things, amongst others, help keep us focused outward.
Let me offer eight further points which serve the purpose of getting and keeping church on mission.
Although my list starts with the importance of the gospel as the power of salvation, I plan to expand point eight at the outset. Point one needs to stand as the heading but point eight clears some ground.
Don’t be naïve and operate with foolish myths and idealistic dreams. We often live with a list of convictions that are, at best, idealistically naïve and, at worst, simply foolish. Some examples:
We sometimes run our churches as if this is really going to happen. Now I want to mobilise every person in our context for mission but I don’t expect that everyone will. I want to live with the dream that they will but I know it won’t happen. So I don’t structure church or our mission strategy around the hope and dream that it will happen. I call it ‘beads and sandals’ Christianity. It is the naivety that you sometimes find in the hippy movement – we want to get back to nature and never have to rely on technology or systems or organisation. It is a lovely dream. But reality never works like this.
Don’t build your mission strategy around this expectation. It won’t happen, which will mean your mission strategy will be far less effective than it otherwise might be.
We sometimes believe that if we just train people in Two Ways to Live, Bridge to Life or one to one Bible reading then we’ll unleash an army of evangelists who will be winning their friends to Christ. No! We’ve done lots of training as a church. These things simply don’t produce the fruit that you want to believe they will produce. They have a place but be realistic.
Just for Starters (The Seven Basic Bible Studies) are excellent. I think we must find a way to incorporate this material into church life. Unfortunately a seven-week course will not be sufficient in a suburban Australian setting. People are so far back and they need a wholesale transformation of life, worldview, instincts and values. We function with a ten month follow program. It is during this time that many people are actually converted. And new converts are given long enough to be properly established in a new community and a new life.
We have had very little fruit from big event evangelism such as the rally or the high profile evangelist speaking to crowds. They might form one piece in a total mission strategy but only if they are deliberately built in to be a part of a total mission strategy. Otherwise, they are almost always a waste of massive resources for very little long-term gain. This is, of course, outside the miraculous movement of God around a Billy Graham like figure. If God raises one of them up again, we’ll jump right on board!
Churches often hunt around for the killer program. They have heard that Alpha is attracting thousands, let’s give that a go. They hear that EV runs a thing call LIFE, let’s give that a go. The fact is that these things only work when they are part of a comprehensive mission plan that is also incorporated into a total overall healthy church program. If you just add a good program onto a dud church life, very little will happen.
No! He is too busy. If your mission program depends on the minister running it, it will run out of steam fairly quickly.
No! Some things certainly do change with shifts in society and culture but the deep structures of humankind remain the same. We are still modern; we believe in right and wrong, truth and error. We are still spiritual; we have a spirit that is in rebellion to the Lord God. We ultimately need the same thing – a call to repentance and faith.
Which would you rather have happening? Event evangelism or personal evangelism? Every pastor I know wants mission to be an activity of individual Christians personally engaged with their friends, family and workmates. Despite the earlier critique of large event evangelism, some kinds of events do have an important place. Don’t trade personal evangelism off against event evangelism. In a properly constructed mission program, they work well together.
So with these myths addressed and cleared away, back to point 1!
Prayer becomes a priority; pray a lot. Make mission and conversion part of your private and public prayer life. Let it be a constant ache of your heart and let that ache emerge in all your prayers both private and public. Get your people to pray.
Consciously look to the fields, not the barns. Look outside your church and its people to gain a proper vision for ministry. It’s the 40,000 people around you that set your vision, not the 100 people inside your building. Your task is to make disciples of all nations, beginning with the nation and region that God has placed you in. Look out and set a preliminary goal. We use 10% vision as a starting point. Our aim is to see 10% of our region in Bible teaching churches, saved and maturing. This means we have a target of 30,000 people in church. So although we have a large church, relative to many, we are tiny in comparison to the task in front of us. We constantly keep this larger vision in view. We won’t be satisfied until every person within a 30 minutes drive is converted.
We use this language regularly with our people. Give thanks for any evidence of conversion growth and use it to set the vision to go for much more. We must think bigger and find ways to communicate a larger vision to our people. It is too easy to drift back to be insider focused.
A mission as large as this won’t happen through the minister door knocking. It becomes crucial to build teams, structures and systems to mobilise and multiply the efforts of a larger group.
Set about capturing everyone with the vision of the lost. Don’t be content when only a few from among the church community understand this concern or feel the weight and burden of it. Preach to it. Pray to it. Let this burden pepper every conversation with every person in every context. For some ministers, this means reviewing every sermon before you preach it. Will this sermon help or hinder people’s heart for mission? And it means reviewing every day of ministry and asking yourself whether or not your conversations helped foster and build mission heat.
Set a high bar for penetration into people’s hearts and minds. I don’t expect that everyone will be doing personal evangelism, that is unattainable and a waste of energy and resources trying to achieve (although some university contexts can pull it off).
Lower your expectations as to each person’s personal mission efforts and raise your expectations of each person’s grasp of the importance of the kingdom growing and of mission. Set a high bar on the expectation that every person will be captured by a vision of the lost and a desire to see this church ongoingly grow with newly converted people.
This involves a serious review of all your word ministries. Mission doesn’t happen because you have a mission program. Most often mission happens where there is a broad and deep passion among a great number of church people for the lost to be reached. This will only happen as all the word ministries are aligned towards fueling a heart for mission among your people. The preaching, small group work, one to one conversations, books promoted, informal and formal all need to address the dozen different biblical themes that empower mission. Then the church will begin to own the mission for themselves. Make your word ministries fire! Develop what we call ‘worldview’ preaching; don’t just explain the text, but expound its meaning. What is the meaning of the Bible? God is on mission! Every part of the word adds fuel to the fire of seeing God’s glory fill the earth.
Build a fire in the hearts of your people. Build their confidence and competency. People often don’t engage with their friends, because of a problem with the three ‘c’s’ – conviction, confidence, competency. Work on each of these. Take responsibility to build each of these in people.
Confidence grows through making much of people who have tried with their friends. It grows when they see ordinary people can do it. It grows when they see there are answers to difficult questions.
Build opportunities in your calendar to help people see this. We always set aside January as mission preaching month. Every week has a mission edge since we always call people to repentance and faith but during January we focus on those who are outside our church, while also equipping our people with apologetic material. They begin to see how they can speak with their friends. Without diminishing the focus on exegetical preaching, add in apologetic material, for the outside present and for the insiders. We also feature interviews with people who have been converted or who have had a great experience sharing the gospel with friends.
Get people on mission in groups: mission works best when people aren’t alone. By this, I don’t mean gospel community efforts. I mean encouraging people to share their friends with each other. Do things as a group and join clubs together, and invite unbelievers.
This is different to people doing mission in groups. It is an organised activity of the group that is the church. It trades on systems thinking. Church is described in the Bible through a number of metaphors: a family, a body, a building, a field.
The family metaphor leads us to make much of the organic relationships and care that we have for one another. The body metaphor adds something extra. It portrays church as a system where different parts do different things in a coordinated whole so that the pieces together achieve far more than they might on their own.
We would love to have everyone doing personal evangelism. We work towards everyone having a fire in their hearts for mission, doing what they can among their friends and family but we don’t expect a high participation rate in one to one evangelistic activity.
However, the more everyone appreciates the need to be on mission, the more they have a passion to see the gospel bear much fruit, the more you are in a position to mobilise them and their gifts to do what they can do, together. In this way, we can make it easier for a group of people to achieve effective mission outcomes without demanding that they each operate as personal evangelists. It is ‘lowering the bar’ of entry into mission activity.
Most evangelistic courses function along these lines. These programs bring together gifts: preaching, catering, vibe, welcoming and hospitality. People only need to exercise their invitational gift and come with their friend. It does something bigger and better than you can do alone; it gives a sense of team. It mobilises people for mission who can’t yet do personal evangelism. It gives the growing heat for mission an outlet and, done well, it adds further heat to people’s heart for mission.
There are various other ‘together’ activities that all serve this same purpose. It might be a social event, a bridge building event, a festival for kids, etc. These get people working together for a cause and create some easy wins for people who often lack confidence.
In everything you do, ensure you have a place where there is a regular and predictable quality gospel presentation event. In some churches this has been the service itself. This has a great strength to it. It positions church as a place for outsiders to directly connect with God’s people around his word. However, it also has a great danger. Not only does it shift the theological shape of church, which could be properly described as ‘for the believer, with an eye to the outsider’, it tends towards a ‘seeker service’ shape. This works for a while but soon causes a dumbing down of Christian maturity. The church service sets the tone for all of church. If it is a seeker service, then it doesn’t matter how many other alternate maturing structures you put in place, the tone is set by your flagship event and all of church will tone down towards its level.
We have worked hard at keeping the church service an event pitched for the believing family, with an eye to the outsider. The only exception to this is our Summer Series which is intentionally pitched towards outsiders as part of a larger pathway.
Given these theological and pragmatic constraints, it is important to have a place or a person to whom gospel enquirers can go. It would be wonderful if every member could explain the fundamentals of the gospel in a winsome and compelling way, but it is important to own the reality that this is not likely to be the case. So establish something that creates a quality gospel delivery system that people can be invited to. Initially, it might simply be a few trained people gifted in evangelism. Later, it will likely form into a course. We have established an evangelistic gospel delivery structure called LIFE. It is a six-week series that takes people through the foundational truths of the gospel. We want everyone who comes to our church to go through this course. It is a form of catechising alongside the evangelistic aims.
For us, one of the powerful things about this course is its predictability. We run it at the same times each year (we did it twice a year in the early stages of church, now it happens nine times a year) and we built many other activities around it to give it greater visibility and pulling power. Everyone knows this event is there to be used and it now occupies a well-established place in all of church life.
Pay attention to the need for personal follow up, or relational engagement, as well as quality content over a long period of time.
A convert in the Australian scene takes a long time to process the implications of the life of Christ. We expect a new convert to spend many months being carefully followed up. We do this in small groups and individually. We have a stated desire that every person who responds to a gospel invitation or is newly converted has someone committed to walking alongside them through the journey of being established in the faith.
Further to this, we pay attention to a long-term follow up process. We look to see a new convert personally followed up over a long period of time. We now have a ten month process. Early on, we did this more organically. But the same principle applied, don’t just get a tick on a box and leave the person to fend for themselves.
Any group is difficult for new people to join. For example, sporting clubs. I’ve joined a few in my time, they’re always tricky. Everyone has their place and their safety depends on it not being disturbed, so they are passively resistant to new people and things. Churches are exactly the same.
Pay attention to each step of the conversion process. Briefly, it is – contact, gospelled, wanting more, connected to church, maturing in the faith, equipped to serve, partnering the gospel cause.
Filling that out a little, a person travels from being a non-Christian, totally distant from anything ‘church’, to coming within the circle of church relationships. This is the contact stage. It might be a friend or a visitor to church through signage. They come into a setting where they hear the gospel and have an opportunity to respond. If they want more, they move to becoming a person connected to church. From there they need to mature in the faith and learn to serve, in turn becoming a partner in the work.
Become intentional about each of these steps; pay attention to making each step as easy for a person to journey through as possible. We intentionally create ‘connect’ events. Things like Carols nights, or parenting seminars, or kids concerts. Then we create a next step – somewhere we could invite contacts to come and share more in our life and hear of the things of Christ in an easy environment.
This is alongside church as a key piece in this process. So close to these major contact events, we construct a set of church services that are also easy invites. For us, this is during the summer season. Everything works together to enable new people to move from outsider to insider as easily as possible.
We pay attention to welcoming new people. We give a lot of focus to developing welcoming processes to help people connect as quickly as possible.
This is a spiritual exercise. So we bathe the whole thing in prayer, calling on God to work his miracle and grow his church.
Be proactive about helping people move into church to hear and respond to the gospel. Make it your job to understand the steps and clear away any unnecessary hurdles. Provide scaffolding to the personal work. The structures and systems don’t replace personal work. They provide a support to enable it to flourish.
That last comment takes me back to the beginning. If people are mature and deeply convicted disciples of Christ, capable and competent, they will find a way to mission their friends and help them make the connections into a new life in Christ. The reality is that we don’t have many of these kinds of people.
We could run church aiming to create these people and not doing anything until they are as fully mature as they need to be. Or we could set up church so that even the less than fully mature person can participate readily, expressing their growing concerns about the lost.
When you run church facing realities, you get far more traction!
This also raises the earlier myth that the minister can do all the evangelism. The work of mission is far larger than the minister can do on his own. He needs to build teams.
Where do you want your church to be in five years time? Stuck with only you doing the mission? And the maturing, and the recruiting, and the …? Or do you want to be released to have many others joining in the work, setting up parts of the ministries so that they achieve far more than you are able to achieve on your own?
The task of the leader is therefore far larger than just preaching and praying. He needs to have a vision for what might be and set about taking responsibility to create it, under God.
