Ordination Paper Six
Eric M. White
Other than creation, no event of human history has had so profound an effect on mankind as the death and resurrection of Jesus. Though Jesus was a good rabbi, he came to do far more than teach. Though he was a strong leader, he came to do more than lead. Though he was a humble servant, he came to do more than serve. The full mission of Jesus Christ is the mission of redemption, and he calls every believer to be a champion and servant for his cause.
The Lostness of Man
The mission of Jesus begins with the lostness of man. Luke offers a clear expression of Jesus’ purpose in coming: “For the Son of Man came to seek and save the lost” (Luke 19:10). Romans 3:23 says, “All have sinned and fall short of God’s Glory.” As King David explains in Psalm 51:5, we are sinful from conception, full of iniquity at birth. Sin entered the world through one man, Adam. As such, all are sinful and opposed to God by our very nature (Rom. 5:12). Because of our sin, we are separated from God, the recipients of God’s just wrath (Isaiah 59:1-2, Rom. 1:18).
The effects of sin transcend our experiences in life. Hebrews 9:27 says, “people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment.” Judgment lies ahead for all mankind. A righteous God will judge according to what each person has done. Jesus describes this in Matthew 25:31-46, prophesying that all people will be gathered before his judgment throne and separated into two groups, sheep and goats. The sheep are those who have been obedient to Christ, whereas the goats are those who have been disobedient. But since “no one is righteous, not even one,” the only way to be judged as a sheep by Jesus is to be redeemed and justified by his atoning work on the cross. Jesus concludes the passage by describing the fate of the goats: “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life” (Matt. 25:41). Jesus died to prevent this fate, but his gift of grace must be received through faith. Thus, Jesus has commissioned the church to proclaim the Gospel to all people, giving us mandates to ensure we work toward his mission.
Church Mandates
When asked which commandment is the greatest, Jesus gives an unexpected response to his audience, offering words that don’t appear in the Ten Commandments. In Matthew 22:37-40, Jesus says the greatest commandment is, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first great mandate for the church. All that we do must be rooted in our love for God. As Jesus says in John 14:21, “Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.” All the other commandments are rooted in this.
Similarly, Jesus says in the same passage that the second greatest commandment is that we love our neighbors as ourselves. If we love God, we long to see his mission fulfilled. If we love our neighbors as ourselves, we long for them to know the saving grace of Jesus. Thus the third great mandate is given in Matthew 28:19-20, where Jesus tells us to, “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always to the end of the age.” This is where we arrive at the heart of Jesus’ mission. His mission is to reach the world with his loving grace, redemption, and justification, paid for on the cross, validated by his resurrection, and sealed with the Holy Spirit. As disciples, he has commissioned you and me to carry this mission out.
Missional Living
I’ve often heard and read that Jesus’ word “go” in the Great Commission is a bit of a mistranslation. It would be more accurately translated, “as you are going.” If we take this second translation to be accurate, Jesus is acknowledging that we are already going. But where? We often think of the Great Commission as a call for missionaries, something we can only fulfill if we intentionally go to another region to proclaim the Gospel. Jesus’ understanding is that we are already going throughout the normal course of life. We are going to school, going to work, going to the grocery store, going for a run, and going to the gym. It’s like Jesus is saying, “you’ve already got the going part down, now here’s what I want you to do while you are going.” This is the basic premise that must be understood in order to grasp missional living: We are already going.
Missional living is an intentional rearrangement of life priorities such that the mission of Jesus is the focal point and purpose of our activities. I’m not suggesting that when we go to the grocery store for a gallon of milk we say we’re going for the Gospel and might get some milk while there. The point is that we go in consideration, and perhaps expectation, that God will give us the opportunity to be witnesses for his Kingdom. We live both seeking and taking these opportunities when they come. Several passages in Colossians 4 illustrate this well.
Paul and Timothy, perhaps the greatest missionary pair ever to live, ask the church at Colossae to pray for them. They ask, “that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ for which I am in chains.” Paul continues, “Pray that I may proclaim it clearly, as I should” (Col. 4:3-4). That this marvelous missionary duo asked for this kind of prayer indicates both how seriously they took the mission of Christ and how desperately the relied on the Holy Spirit to see it done. Note that Paul and Timothy seem to understand they’re already going for the Gospel; they just ask for God to open doors that they might proclaim it as they’re going.
In the next verses, Paul writes, “Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone” (Col. 4:5-6). This is a short but potent treatise on missional living. As we go about our lives, God gives innumerable opportunities to proclaim the Gospel. Paul and Timothy tell us to make full use of those opportunities, then they explain how. We are to speak with the grace of Jesus, not out of condemnation but with a message of hope. Salt in New Testament times was a valuable resource for both preserving and seasoning food. I see their statement on seasoning our words with salt as a command to proclaim the Gospel in a way that leaves a hunger for more. Bar food is typically and intentionally salty. This makes the eater thirsty so that they crave something to drink. We are to proclaim the Gospel in a graceful way that is well seasoned, attractive to the hearer leaving them thirsting for more of what Jesus offers.
Following Christ through my high school years, missional living was something that made a lot of sense to me. As I went about my normal high school experience I got involved in lots of extracurricular activities and spent ample time with friends all the while looking for ways to share the Gospel. I saw some fruit produced from this, but lacked spiritual maturity in ways that hindered my ability to disciple others. Ironically, as we grow older and into more life responsibilities, I’ve noticed that our priorities tend to shift. I got heavily involved with church leadership serving as a youth director, relatively young (21) elder, worship leader, and occasional pulpit supply. In many ways, this cloistered me into the church and out of the world where I was once making meaningful connections for Christ. I was also leading a busy schedule between college, work, and a budding relationship with the woman who is now my wife. It’s easy to lose the missional living outlook in sight of all our obligations, responsibilities, and life pursuits. I’m busier now than I’ve ever been, but God is doing a work to bring me back into missional living.
As I grew into this pastoral leadership role at Venture, I considered ways I might merge personal interests into fellowship with believers. At the same time, I was under the mentorship of our district leaders regularly receiving the missional living message. I was working on some of these fellowship plans when God beckoned me to consider how they might be better used as examples of missional living. So I’ve taken a few activities I like doing, invited a few brothers in Christ along, and begun welcoming people who need Jesus to participate. Through these activities, we’ve gotten to build relationships, and though we’ve not yet seen a harvest, God is definitely moving in the lives of the lost.
My wife and I bought a house and moved into a new neighborhood six days before our son was born. As a young marriage with a new child and new house, we were admittedly hermits for the first year or so there. We’ve recently taken some small steps to build better relationships with our neighbors in order that we might advance the Gospel. We’ve seen great reception to some of our small actions that fit in well with the natural rhythms of life as we reach our neighbors. As we grow and dive more deeply into missional living, we’re actively seeking ways to expand our reach throughout our neighborhood.
Church Planting
Church planting is the most effective means of Gospel advancement. Church planting does not refer to erecting a new building or establishing a new meeting place or time. It is building relationships within a geographic proximity, welcoming new believers into the faith, discipling them to walk with the Lord, and forming the group of believers into a church body to further reach the community. Paul and Barnabas were effective early church planters. Acts 14:1-28 records that they traveled to Iconium for this purpose. Facing immediate resistance from unbelieving Jews, Paul and Barnabas stayed for a long time preaching about Jesus. Some believed, others resisted violently and the pair eventually moved on. At the end of the chapter, we see them returning to several places where they’d previously preached and faced resistance. Verse 22 says that they “strengthened the souls of the disciples and encouraged them to continue in the faith.” In verse 23, they appoint elders in the various churches they’d planted. The act of appointing shepherds over these groups of new believers formalizes them into a church body as they become led from among their own members.
I do not have direct experience with church planting. When I became pastor of Venture a few years ago though, we treated it as a church plant in some ways. The church had been battered by difficult leadership situations, and though it has a history longer than 100 years in the Youngstown area, only a handful of people remained. The church was not firmly established, so we employed several church planting strategies to begin the revitalization work. I’ve also done some work with the Central District on their BASICs church-planting program, so I’m very familiar with that curriculum. It has significantly influenced my thinking on church work.
A district leader recently shared with me that a new church that doesn’t plant within its first 3-5 years of ministry is not likely to ever plant a church. Though Venture is an old church, we have a new life in the redemptive work Jesus has done the last few years, and I consider this the dawn of a new church. At our annual meeting, I challenged our congregation to begin thinking of what it would look like to plant a church in the inner city of Youngstown by the year 2021. I don’t have a clear vision on this yet, as God has just begun stirring my heart about church planting, but I think it’s important for our church body to understand the value of planting. It excites me to consider what God could do if we begin positioning ourselves, as a small revitalized church, to plant a church within five years.
World Missions
In Acts 1, before ascending to the Father, Jesus tells his disciples, “you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8b). This passage, along with the Great Commission, and Matthew 24:14 make it evident that Jesus desires and compels the church to reach the entire world with the Gospel. The church has a direct role in advancing the Gospel locally but is also called to participate in the global evangelization of the world. This participation is both direct and indirect.
Indirectly, the church supports missions through giving and prayer. Paul writes in Philippians 4:16 regarding his missionary journeys, commending the church for supporting him financially. Repeatedly through his epistles, Paul asks the churches to pray his missionary efforts. Passages in which he asks for prayer include 1 Thessalonians 3:1-2, Romans 15:30-33, Ephesians 6:19-20, Philemon 22, and others. The greatest missionary who ever lived saw the irreplaceable importance of God’s people rallying to support and pray for the work of missionaries advancing the Gospel around the world. The church must respond accordingly.
The church can and should also participate in world missions directly. This participation can include commissioning church members to enter the mission field as international workers and arranging or participating in short-term missions trips. A.B. Simpson firmly believed that a fully mobilized universal church could reach the entire world for Christ within ten years. That was more than 100 years ago, but the vision remains powerful. As our District vision goes, every believer and every church must intentionally and aggressively advance the Kingdom of God.
A Great Commission Church
I preach regularly and passionately about the Great Commission, petitioning the church to get involved. I pray with believers that we’d do our part to advance God’s Kingdom. I provide avenues for my brothers and sisters in Christ to grow in their ability to share the Gospel and build Godly relationships. All of these things are good and beneficial, but recently God has been giving me a new message of powerful impact. My Father is telling me that to fully equip and launch a Great Commission church, I must model Great Commission fulfillment. This is what Jesus did, and nothing less than this is acceptable for church leaders.
I’ve mentioned some ways my wife and I have been growing in intentionality in building relationships for sharing the Gospel. I’m exploring some personal approaches as well. I’m a bi-vocational pastor, working 40 hours per week for the United States Air Force as a civilian Public Affairs Specialist. God has me in a diverse mission field every weekday. My schedule is busy, so I haven’t often taken the time to build relationships with coworkers, but God is leading me in building inroads. I’m a tea drinker and would often make a pot of tea in the afternoons at work. A couple coworkers expressed interest, so I starting serving tea in my office every day at 2:00 P.M. This seems like a trivial thing, but it has welcomed 5 or 6 people I’d not normally get to talk to into my office for 30 minutes each day. This has led to some powerful conversations and one solid discipleship relationship. I’m excited to see where God takes it from here.
Last Summer, I gathered a few young church members to start a weekly ultimate Frisbee group. We play on a school field across the street from our church and have seen more than 40 high school students join us. This has given me an opportunity to share the Gospel with teens, but also to mentor emerging leaders on how to share the Gospel and build Christ-centered relationships. I’ve often shared that this type of group is something I would have started without a thought for the Gospel. It’s a natural rhythm of my life, but Christ has caused me to intersect it with the rhythms of Christ.
As I’ve begun to model these things in obedience to my Father (and please understand I have a long way yet to grow), I’ve seen changes among my church brothers and sisters. They’ve begun bringing testimonies of how they’ve reached out to neighbors or coworkers, joined community groups with a mind to build Gospel-centric relationships, and told me they’re praying for those they wish to see reached for the Kingdom. In our modern world, especially as a millennial, I’ve observed that church campus-centered outreach events are no longer as effective as they once were. This has renewed a focus on evangelism through interpersonal relationships and missional living. As our small church grows once more, we’re developing plans for how we will capitalize on these newfound commitments to Kingdom advancement.
In these ways, Venture is growing as a Great Commission church challenged to develop in evangelism, discipleship, community impact, and church multiplication. We’ve also set our sights more firmly upon world missions. Our renewed vision has rallied our people toward increased Great Commission Fund giving through an emphasis on special missions projects. We’ve selected some of our most missions-minded church members to select and champion special missions projects as listed on the Alliance website, then initiated campaigns to raise $1000.00 at a time for that project. Having a clear vision of a specific cause to which our funds are going has yielded incredible results on the stewardship of our people.
Discipleship
One of the guiding values put forth by our district office is Godly leadership development. As the district office has invested in developing me as a leader, I’ve begun to take much more seriously the call to disciple those whom God has placed in my care. The author of Hebrews explains this call well in Hebrews 6:1, “Therefore let us move beyond the elementary teachings about Christ and be taken forward to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God…” I recently polled my church to see who among them had been ever been discipled in a meaningful way at some point in their walks with Christ. Fewer than 5 out of 50 raised their hands. Tragically, some in this group who didn’t raise a hand have been following Jesus for 60 or 70 years. There is a discipleship deficiency hindering the church that must be amended. Paul devotes the entirety of Titus 2 to instructing Titus on how he is to teach and train the people of his church, demonstrating the importance of this aspect of ministry. I see two clear approaches to discipleship, both of which must be carefully and prayerfully developed and pursued for the church. These areas are programmatic discipleship and interpersonal discipleship.
Midway through 2016, I began developing a discipleship program called Launch. I invited 8 emerging leaders to begin meeting with me weekly to go through this program. We kicked the program off in November last year, and the rewards have quickly become obvious and potent. Launch exemplifies programmatic discipleship and is centered on the church ministry. Using a mix of discussion, instruction, group activities, prayer, study, homework assignments, and reflection we cover several key areas of discipleship. This is not an exhaustive list, but the areas we’re covering are: abiding in Christ (John 15:1-8), sanctification (Rom. 6-8), living as new creations using Steps to Freedom in Christ as a guide (2 Cor. 5:17), self-awareness (Prov. 20:5), and self-leadership (2 Tim.2:15).
We’re also developing modules where students will develop spiritual disciplines including prayer, study of the Word, fellowship, and worship (1 Tim. 1:19-20); review the C&MA Statement of Faith to ensure consistent theological standards; learn how to build Christ-centered relationships; share and defend their faith well (1 Pet. 3:15); and develop disciplines and habits for a life of sustained growth with Christ (2 Tim. 4:7).
My approach to interpersonal discipleship involves many of the same topics as programmatic discipleship but with different methods. From within our Launch group, I’ve identified three men with whom I’m intentionally building deeper relationships. To amplify the impact of our discipleship program I am following up on our Launch meetings by asking targeted questions, helping them go deeper. We’re meeting to pray together regularly and acting as accountability partners. I’m also inviting them to walk with me in discipleship by including them in ministry opportunities, both organic and structured, within the church and without.
Both these approaches focus on holistic, or whole-life, discipleship. I believe discipleship with Jesus is a much deeper well than just knowing the Word of God. It also involves application. A disciple growing with Jesus should also be growing as a spouse, parent, steward of finances, employee, student, etc. Venture Church will continue to tweak the Launch program as we grow, receive feedback, and evaluate. My primary focus in discipleship as we encourage others to walk more closely with Jesus is that they would begin discipling others to do the same.
Completing the Mission
The Alliance believes that completing the mission of Christ will require the mobilization of every fully devoted disciple. As an apostolically hardwired pastor (Eph. 4:11), I see my primary role in his church as calling and equipping disciples of Jesus into that full devotion and mobilization for the Great Commission. There is no perfect plan for discipleship as we work in a variety of cultural contexts and with disciples at varying levels of understanding and experience, but the Bible makes the mission clear and provides excellent guidelines and examples that inform how we approach discipleship. The world desperately needs Jesus. Jesus has appointed the church to reach the world with his Gospel. I want to do my part as a worker approved, running the race as one who wants to win, that the church might be further empowered to carry his mission out. Our mission belongs to Jesus.
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