Priorities of the Church

[Russell Roberts]

One popular cry among pastors of evangelical churches is that the top priority should be to 'win souls'. One method employed towards this end involves Christians blanketing neighborhoods going door to door to spread the gospel. Potential converts are guided through a series of questions designed to convict them that they are sinners but if they repent, God will let them into heaven.

Is this whet the Apostles envisioned when they spoke of spreading the gospel? To find out, let's consider the biblical use of the word gospel. This word translates the Greek word euangellion. The euangellion has both a Jewish and a Hellenistic background. Jews looked back to the prophet Isaiah who foretold of a time when God would return to Zion to reign as king. Here is the verse:

Isa 52:7 How delightful it is to see approaching over the mountains
the feet of a messenger who announces peace,
a messenger who brings good news, who announces deliverance,
who says to Zion, "Your God reigns!"

Thus, the Jewish background depicts someone who announces the good news that God has returned to rule and reign. The Hellenistic background is very similar. When a new Caesar would come to power or a great military victory won, runners were sent to nearby hilltops to announce the euangellion. The euangellion carried with it the promise that the kingdom would now experience peace. Therefore, the gospel is simply a statement of fact. The Apostles went about proclaiming this good news that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead and now reigns as Kurios (Lord) of the entire earth (Lord was also the title claimed by Caesar).

With this background in mind, we Christians should realize that the gospel is simply an announcement of fact. Jesus Christ died and was resurrected. He has been crowned as the King of creation and everyone is commanded to give him loyalty and obedience. Now I don't know about you, but I have honestly never met a person who has not heard this announcement...the announcement that Jesus Christ died, was resurrected, and is now Lord.

The Apostles knew that this very announcement is the power of God to bring about salvation (Rom. 1:16). The Apostles also knew that when someone heard the declaration and believed it, this was a sign that the Holy Spirit had ALREADY worked in that persons' heart to bring about salvation.

My point is not to denigrate the efforts of well-meaning Christians who love God and are simply doing their best to lead others to Jesus Christ. My point is to challenge the Church to reconsider where these efforts would be most effective. It has long been my contention that the priority of the Church should be loving and meeting the needs of other Christians, people already committed to the cause of Jesus Christ. Jesus told the disciples that the world would know them as such by their love for one another.

All too often Christians are quick to demonstrate their love for sinners while terribly slow meeting the needs of fellow believers. That charity begins at home is not only popular wisdom but is a Biblical principle. Our love for fellow Christians is the hallmark that we are disciples of Jesus Christ. Our priority should be to love the person on the pew next to us. Obviously, loving fellow Christians and loving sinners are not mutually exclusive ideas. But scripture makes it abundntly clear that ministry to fellow Christians should be our priority.

Gal 6:10 So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us do good to all people, and especially to those who belong to the family of faith.

[Dr. Ron]

As time permits, I will respond to this.....

[Steve]

Well, I for one agree with you. The church has been called a "soul saving station" in one popular song I remember, but I think that Christians are to be the ones witnessing, and God will do the saving.

The church, as far as I can read in Scripture, exists as a support system for the Christians who belong to it.

I know that is a lame reason to believe in something just because the SCRIPTURE says it......after all, I am sure there are PLENTY of nice anecdotes of churches who have had big revivals and had hundreds saved at once......

[dolfan]

You strike the heart of why I'm so against the exercise of power in any governmental or authoritative sense. Power corrupts because it is something to be gained.

For Jesus, it was, as you say, simply a fact of His being. And, John famously announced "to them gave He power to become the sons of God". Jesus gave and gives power without diminishing Himself. Earthly power, power of sinful man, is played as a zero sum game whereby if you gain power, I lose some. For Jesus, power is service and submission (Philippians 2, the best description of this); for humanity, it is control and self-service.

This, as I see and understand, is the mission of the church: to order our individual and collective lives around the person of Jesus Christ, doing what He did and what He said to do and be. Well, we live a bifurcated life. We have a "spiritual life" and an everything-else-life. We categorize things into spiritual and natural that ought not be so categorized. The life of Jesus is thoroughly holy, about the Father, about the intent for His creation that the Father revealed and reveals (he has, and does, in these last days --- and I don't mean end-time last days -- spoken to us in His Son). We are content to live in a world governed by others with purposes and intents quite distant from and even hostile to God's rule. And, we act as if we are merely placeholders, subjecting ourselves as loyal opponents to this order of things until Jesus comes in an epic battle to evict those to whom we now give our loyalty. We are subversives, but we are not enemies of the order of this world.

That, to me, is milquetoast and missing the mark. There is another, better way of ordering our lives as the church. A wholly different way. If the kingdom is now, and God's rule in Christ is here, we do not live that way. Our lives deny the profession we make. We consign the duties of service in this kingdom to those who are set against it.

The mission of the church, again as I see it, is to commune in all things, share all things in common, and to minister first to those who believe. All the passions of life, the fruits of labor, the goals of living and being are called by God to be devoted to one another and to Him. Weekly meetings in neutral locations in programmatic fashion for brief periods is not the life He calls us to. All of our industry, our wealth, our fellowship, our work, our labor, our .... everything are demanded now. Any other placement of any of these is misplacement.

We should not be a part of the culture, as much as I've believed otherwise for a long time. We should be not even a counterculture. We should be another culture, with another purpose for existing when viewed by the rest of this creation. It is, again, IMO, arriving at a critical mass simply by pure population, that demands that we no longer order our lives in society but that we order our lives as the kingdom of Jesus Christ. The mission is not merely accomplishable as some goal or hope, but it is unavoidable as a matter of fact. The family of Jesus must live as the society of Jesus, as the kingdom of Jesus, as the workers of Jesus, as the "providers-of-one-another's-well-being" of Jesus. It is not merely an alternative lifestyle, but a calling to which, when it is demonstrated by obedience to it, will BE the gospel message, the power of God unto salvation, that the rest of the creation will have to be accountable for its response to the message.

My .02.

[Russell Roberts]

Dolfan,

THIS, I believe, would have the RESULT of attracting members to the body of Christ. Who wouldn't want to be a part of a society that really did love each other, a society in which all needs were met. I am certainly not suggesting a policy of isolationism simply a re-focus of our efforts in light of the historic meaning of the Gospel - the euangellion.

[dolfan]

Dolfan,

THIS, I believe, would have the RESULT of attracting members to the body of Christ. Who wouldn't want to be a part of a society that really did love each other, a society in which all needs were met. I am certainly not suggesting a policy of isolationism simply a re-focus of our efforts in light of the historic meaning of the Gospel - the euangellion.

And, lest I be misunderstood by anyone, I don't mean isolationism, either. But, a singularity of purpose for being here would likely be viewed that way. This whole idea of a balance is illusory. We cannot order our lives in this way, and have the kingdom kind of life, while balancing it with a way of life that is something wholly different to it, something as opposite to life as death, something as different from life as the vacuum of space.

[forestwalker]

Two bits from Robert Wilken come to mind:

"At this moment in the Church's history in this country (and in the West more generally) - it is less urgent to convince the alternative culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God."

and

"The greatest gift the church can give our society is a glimpse, however fleeting, of another city. But we can only do that if our worship is self-consciously, confidently, and unmistakably oriented to God. If someone wanders in off the street as we pray, he should sense that there is present a double church, as Origen put it: the one that is seen and the other that is unseen. Indeed if the visitor does not feel uncomfortable, out of place and out of step, something is terribly wrong. The visitor should experience a little vertigo, because something is going on that is beyond his ken. Yet one would hope, as he listens to our faint voices and feeble songs, that he would also hear, if only as an echo in the distance, the thunderous sound of the heavenly host singing, ‘Holy, holy, holy’."

[beckrl]

How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? 15And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!"

We should not confuse our commission to spead the gospel with what we as christains should show forth...Love

He said to them, "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.

[Russell Roberts]

How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? 15And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!"

We should not confuse our commission to spead the gospel with what we as christains should show forth...Love

He said to them, "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.

Beckrl, since you took this passage totally out of context, I will finish it for you:

Rom 10:18 But I ask, have they not heard? Yes, they have: Their voice has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.

In principle, the Gospel already has been proclaimed to all the nations. Read Acts chapter 2 and see if you detect the reversal of what happened at Babel. That is a great little study.

Here is what Jesus told his disciples in Mark.

Mar 13:9 "You must watch out for yourselves. You will be handed over to councils and beaten in the synagogues. You will stand before governors and kings because of me, as a witness to them.
Mar 13:10 First the gospel must be preached to all nations.

Have the Apostles been handed over and beaten in synogogues? Yes, they have. The Gospel has been preached to all the nations.

Addition: Don't think that I am saying we shouldn't preach and proclaim the Gospel...we should. We should be Isaianic heralds of the Gospel. My suggestion, however, is that we re-formulate our approach based on what the word Gospel really MEANS.

[dolfan]

It has been and is still. But, beckrl, please don't misunderstand the idea here. I would not for a moment say the church should not proclaim the message of Jesus. Do it. But, it is a hollow proclamation, a cloud without water IMO, when we do it in the context of the way we presently order our lives. Certainly, there are pockets of transformation, anecdotes far and wide where God's rule is realized in the lives of people where they are "working" in the current sort of model that we know as "Christian life". Undeniably so, or this board wouldn't even be here, populated with all of these success stories of just such people.

Your concern, though, and mine are the same. What are people gonna do without us? You say, "They need the message and we need to preach it to 'em." I say, "They need the message, and we need to demonstrate the substance of it (the kingdom life now), and part of that demonstration will naturally be declaring this present kingdom to those who are having no part in it." I do think, though, that the format of that declaration will be less familiar to both of us than the ones we are now accustomed to, and it will be un-dis-connectable (I just made that up ) to this new, other,different way of ordering not just personal life, but whole life (including community life where our neighbors are our fellow believers, where our industry and work is devoted not to just our own roof and comfort and food, but to providing the same for our fellow believers, where we receive the same care from them that we freely give to them, where we are dependent on each other in a way that is subjected to the present rule of God in Christ in us and not dependent on the matrix, to borrow a word, of this world's order of things). That declaration will be far different from this other context than from our own current way of doing/being/living. And, I'd argue, way more powerful than anything anyone could imagine.

[Pastor Bill]

Basically if I'm understanding the conversation correctly (skimmed a little more than read every line as I am behind little on this one)

We MUST reach out to the lost and let them know about Christ and His loving church.

We often as a church body, and not fully embracing what it means to be that church. Which is a problem in itself, BUT it brings up an even deeper question.

How do we show people Christ and His love if WE aren't living it in our lives and our churches?

Evangelism is great, but if we don't have the body to continue accepting, loving, forgiving, nurturing and lifting one another up (personally not just "Oh I'll pray for you..." then aren't we showing them a hollow version of Christ that has turned more away that drawn and kept?

[dolfan]

We often as a church body, and not fully embracing what it means to be that church. Which is a problem in itself, BUT it brings up an even deeper question.

How do we show people Christ and His love if WE aren't living it in our lives and our churches?

My heartburn is over the distinction we draw between "our lives" and "our churches". They should be one and the same. The fact that we mentally make any difference in them at all shows just how far off the mark we've strayed, IMO. And, I don't know how we are to go about reforming that except to just do it. Problem is, there is almost no one in our culture willing to do think if things in these terms. I can't say with any certainty that anywhere else is doing any better, although I have my totally uncorroborated suspicions.

[kurt73]

The church is the house of pray/worship, as christians the work is to be done outside the building. The harvest is ready to reap, who will do it?

[beckrl]

irthnvesl and dolfan please don't get me wrong.
I do feel we should shine forth and be the salt to the dark world,
But without the preaching of the gospel no one would be saved.
We hold the keys.

It has been and is still. But, beckrl, please don't misunderstand the idea here. I would not for a moment say the church should not proclaim the message of Jesus. Do it. But, it is a hollow proclamation, a cloud without water IMO,

I may have misunderstood the idea, I just didn't want to belittle the preaching of the gospel.