In the closing words of the Gospel of
Matthew, Jesus leaves us with what has become known as “The Great Commission.”
In it, Jesus charges His disciples with a set of tasks until He returns. Here’s
what Jesus commands us to do: 1) Go out into the world and make disciples.
2) Baptize these disciples in the name
of the Trinity.
3) Teach them to obey everything Jesus
commanded us.If we take a moment to evaluate how we, the Church, have done in
accomplishing these tasks, I think we might see where we’ve missed the mark,
and hopefully discover a few clues about how to get back on track.
First, we’re called to go. It seems
simple enough, but what frustrates me is how often I see us in the Church
flipping things around the other way. For the most part, the organized Church
has built a model of evangelism and discipleship that says, “Come to us.”
We build large buildings, we buy
plasma television screens to announce our upcoming events, we host large-scale
musicals and plays to dramatize the Gospel, and we instruct our members to
invite their friends to Church so that the professional clergy can do the
evangelizing.I’m not trying to say that these methods are wrong or evil, but
just that we’ve taken a very simple and clear command to go and made it into a call
for the world to come to us- to our house, with our rules, on our terms. This
just isn’t what Jesus commanded us to do.
Jesus very easily could have commanded
us to create appealing environments where the world felt welcome. He could have
commanded us to make space for unbelievers to show up and meet us on our terms,
but He didn’t. What He commanded us to do was to go out and, in the course of
our everyday, regular life, communicate and live out the message of the Gospel
to those we encounter along the way.
MAKE DISCIPLES
Secondly, Jesus commands us to make
disciples. A disciple is someone who is daily, intentionally following Jesus
with their whole life. A disciple is not a convert. If you take a look at how
our local churches practice evangelism you’ll probably see a lot of emphasis
placed on winning people to Christ, getting them to come forward in the meeting
to make a public profession of faith, and not as much emphasis on taking them
from this first step into all the other steps that follow.
As one example, I recently came across
a very helpful tool called “The Engel’s Scale” which charts the slow
progression by degrees of those who are far from God and how they slowly come
to faith in Christ over time and with the assistance of loving friends and the
Holy Spirit.
What I found troubling about the scale
was that it stopped at conversion. As if, after the conversion experience, we
no longer had any need to chart their ongoing development and discipleship to
Jesus. Again, the entire emphasis was on conversion,not on discipleship. I
understand that there are exceptions to this over-emphasis on conversion within
the Body of Christ, and for that I am very grateful. I’m simply pointing out
that, at least as far as I have seen, most modern American churches seem to
focus entirely too much on conversion and not enough on discipleship, which is
expressly what Jesus commanded us to focus on.
Conversion is essential, for obvious
reasons, but discipleship is central to our calling. We need to return to the
basic instructions of Our Lord and begin to make disciples.
