It’s been a few weeks since we’ve written anything new. We’re shifting away from an every week schedule and trying to focus more on examining specific topics for a few weeks at a time. It’s funny. We started writing to explore issues of science and faith, but then COVID hit and then the racial reckoning hit and our focus shifted to more pressing issues. More and more we have felt “done” with the church, not with the faith, not with Jesus, not with historic Christian thought and practice, but done with the form that the church generally takes in our world today. We now write to try and give voice to the frustration and hurt that so many including us, have experienced in the church. And we seek to find a faithful path forward.

Articulating that frustration and hurt and imagining alternatives will be our focus for the next few weeks. We are eager to start re-constructing church, but every time we start talking about it, we find that there is more to deconstruct first. So we will do some deconstruction, then begin to explore ways of moving forward. As we see it the reconstruction process must focus on two areas: listening to the world and being radically local. That is where we are going. But to get there, I want to start by looking at one of the most important texts for modern (Evangelical) Christian churches.

The Great Commission

If you are familiar with church, you probably have heard that its purpose is focused around the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. The Great Commandment is to “Love the Lord your God with all you heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” And to “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:37, 39). The Great Commission says,

Therefore 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 everything I have commanded you. (Matt. 28:19-20, NIV)

The whole mission and purpose of the church is expressed in these statements. At least that is a common assertion in churchy spheres.

Now I take a little umbrage with the idea that the purpose of the church can be simplistically reduced to two short passages, but really it is the application of the Great Commission that I want to explore. (Side note: I have heard John 20:21-23 referred to as the Johannine Great Commission. Read it and ask yourself why we don’t seem to ever focus on it as the purpose of the church.)

There are four verbs in the Great Commission. According to the NIV they are Go, Make Disciples, Baptize, and Teach. In English they all look like imperatives, commands. But in the original Greek they aren’t all imperatives. There is in fact one primary verb and three subordinate participles, or supporting verbal ideas. If that sounds complicated, don’t worry. It just means that there is just one action that is essential to the Great Commission and three supporting actions. Here’s the kicker: the essential action is not “Go”.

The one true verb in the Great Commission is the command to make disciples. The actions of going, baptizing and teaching are there to support the central action. Making disciples is the only true command in the Great Commission. Baptizing and teaching are actions that help describe the process of making disciples. But what about the action of going? Must we always be on the move? Is disciple making something that must happen in some location other than where we find ourselves?

Jesus spoke these words to his disciples knowing he would be leaving them soon and knowing that they would be dispersed. A grammatically legitimate way to translate the “go” participle would be “After you go…”. In this interpretation Jesus would be anticipating the scattering of his followers and would be encouraging them not to despair when they find themselves in Gentile cities surrounded by Gentile people, but even then, after they have gone, to make disciples by baptizing and teaching.

While the translation of this specific participle isn’t a hill I’m going to be dying on, I do think it is important to recognize that there is some interpretive flexibility here. Going somewhere else is not a prerequisite to making disciples. And focusing on going hasn’t always yielded the best results. The church has a long and ugly history of colonial missions that sought to “bring God” to foreign lands and ended up bring a whole slew of cultural accretions instead. There was no recognition that God might precede the missionaries and already be at work among the people. There was no recognition that there may be hints of God’s truth and character already in the people’s myths and religions. There was no recognition that a culture’s story might already be primed to find its resolution in the person of Jesus Christ.

I think missions are important and am pleased that so many mission organizations have shifted to expecting God to go before them and that missionaries are much more respectful of the cultures they enter now. But now it is time for the American church to learn from them.

Unless you are called to be a missionary, your primary mission field is right outside your door. In the world and culture that surrounds you. This is a fairly cliché statement in the church. What is not cliché is approaching that mission field like a non-colonial missionary.

What if we really believed that God was active in the lives of the (non-Christian) people that we met daily? What if we really believed that there were glimpses of His truth, beauty and goodness in the world and culture around us? What if we truly believed that God is actively pursuing every person we meet during the day, and that they experience some sense of this pursuit?

Believing these things would shift the church’s stance towards the culture from explaining to asking, from speaking to listening, from correcting to exploring. The church is not an ark that we use to escape a world that is going to hell in a handbasket (whatever that means). Nor is it a group therapy session meant to whitewash the messiness of the world and make us all feel good about ourselves. It is not a social club or an entertainment venue.

The church is meant to actively participate in God’s ongoing work of blessing and redeeming this broken and fractured and hurting world. But I’m pretty convinced that today’s church will not be able to do this work unless it can first learn to sit down and shut up. The church needs a time out. It needs to be still for a while and listen to some other voices. It needs to step out of its recursive inner monologue and realize that the world is crying out for it, yes the church, to be more like Christ. Don’t believe me, listen to TalkTalk by A Perfect Circle. No seriously, go listen to it. It’s a good habit to develop.

P.S. If you’ve been reading this and all along you’ve been cringing every time you read “making disciples,” I get it. And I’ll talk more about that next week. Now go listen to that song.