I feel like God has called me to love Him with passion & devotion, to love & shepherd my family, and to advance His Kingdom on earth through personal disciple-making and church planting. I believe that God is calling individuals into relationship with Himself and onto mission with Him. This calling is both individual and collective.
I believe the church was the NT strategy, the vehicle for the continuing mission of Jesus. Definition: The church is a community of Christ-followers who are continuing the mission of Jesus. However, new churches may not fit our institutional mental models of church.
The church is a lighthouse in a dark world. The church is an outpost or beachhead for the Kingdom in the midst of a cultural struggle. God's Kingdom is not a political or governmental or military kingdom. Instead it is a grassroots movement of the love and grace of Jesus Christ, fueled by the Holy Spirit, transforming its followers, their faith community, and the world.
However, the world/culture is always going to decay and deteriorate faster than transformation will come. But where sin abounds, grace does much more. As the culture deteriorates we will see greater and greater expressions of God's transforming grace.
We must be faithful to be the "salt" and "light" of the world even though we see more darkness, knowing that one day Jesus will return, sin will be ultimately defeated, and He will create a new heaven and new earth - He will make all things right. (Remember the power and promise of the resurrection!)
My responsibility is not to turn the world into a utopia - that will never happen. My responsibility is to faithfully express His love and grace in a darkening world, to be a faithful messenger of the good news of the Kingdom among people whose lives are being ravished by this increasing darkness, and (with other Christ-followers) be an agent of hope and transformation in a dark place. Every church we plant must become this kind of outpost for the Kingdom by making transforming, missional disciples.
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3 comments:
One of my good friends emailed this response to me:
I think your theology about the church is on point. However, I think I
would differ in your theology of darkness. When I read your statement, I
got the impression that we can expect darkness to be continually gaining
strength, gaining momentum, ever faster than the light can disperse it.
While that may be a current reality, I'm not sure that I think it is a
given. I think it is possible that if God's people could be salt and light
in a way that truly is transformational and that even before the return of
Christ that we would see not perfection or completion but a definite tilt in
the balance.
Another good friend said this:
Sounds fine to me. The only thing that I might disagree with is the latter half of your definition of the church. "Continuing the mission of Jesus" may fall more under a category of what the church does vs. how it is defined. That's splitting hairs a bit, but the point is (unfortunately) there are churches who are not continuing the mission of Jesus, but they are still the big C church regardless. I think the letters to the churches in Revelation illustrate this too. Some of them are not continuing the mission, but Jesus addresses them as the church regardless.
The same is true with disciples. I believe we are disciples at salvation, though we might be sucky disciples. There are a lot verses where Jesus is reprimanding the disciples for being knuckleheads, but they're still disciples regardless.
On the flip side, because definitions often include elements of function to provide clarity, I like that "continuing the mission of Jesus" is in there. We've lost sight of it so badly that the more places it can show up, the better.
It's great that you're opening this discussion up - I appreciate being able to ponder this and to share some thoughts of the cuff.
First, I like your one-sentence definition of the Church. It's important to never loose sight of the fact that the Church is, ultimately, about what God's doing. This definition falls in well with the Nicene marks of the Church ("one, holy, catholic (i.e. whole world), and apostolic (i.e. sent)") and with the predominant Biblical images (people of God, adopted sons of the Father, communion of the Holy Spirit, etc.)
The Church/Israel is not just a New Testament strategy, though, but it goes back to the very Creation as the strategy of our covenant-making God, the same yesterday, today, and forever.
I'm in agreement with the other commenter who questions the assumption, "the world/culture is always going to decay and deteriorate faster than transformation will come". I can't see how we could make that kind of historical statement, especially in light of Jesus' role as Redeemer. We can't say that decay and deterioration have been steadily on the march from the Fall straight to today. The Fall certainly threw the cosmos into sin/disorder, but the Incarnation interrupted and thwarted that (not to say that things have been steadily getting better since then, but that there are ups and down, and we know who wins in the end). I just think that we've got to acknowledge all that Jesus accomplished for the salvation and redemption of the cosmos on the Cross (some historical/social examples: the near-abolition of slavery, the improvement of the lot of women and the dispossessed, the spread of the Gospel to so many parts of the world).
Now, I'll also reject any Social Gospel proposal that utopias await us or that it's our job to "bring in the Kingdom", but I do know and trust that Jesus came to redeem and reconcile the world. Granted, his coming again will certainly bring in a New Heaven and New Earth, but we have to be careful to affirm that his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension were about redeeming the cosmos, and he's done it/is doing it.
I'll stop there. Thanks Glenn.
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