Lord willing Tomo and I will be moving to Japan next Summer to begin planting churches. Consequently I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what a church actually is, how it should function, what it is supposed to be doing. A blog post is not going to do a topic of this scope justice but maybe I can get one point out and spark a little dialog.
The church has been given the tremendous task of taking the gospel to all nations and making disciples, yet in many instances it is less effective than it could or should be in accomplishing this goal because the members of the church do not realize that they are the church and if they do not work together to accomplish this task then the church will never be able to accomplish it either.
This is my opinion. It seems to match what I have observed. To most Christians a Church is a place that they go to, or an entity they belong to, like a club. Often Churches appear divided into two groups: attenders and leaders. The attenders are interested in finding fulfillment, fellowship and spiritual nourishment. They seem to assume that the leaders will do the work of fulfilling the great commission, or that they and other individuals will do it on their own. Meanwhile The leaders often seem to be most interested in attracting more attenders, and therefore cater to their needs and desires. If this all that a church does, then the church is never going to be very effective in fulfilling the mission Christ gave it to do.
When I look at the local church I see the front lines of God’s army. (I know it’s not politically correct to mix war metaphors and religion these days, but let me be clear that this is indeed a metaphor, I’m not talking about jihad.) The leadership should prayerfully set the church on an active mission to spread the gospel and make disciples. The members should latch hold of that vision and every single one of them should find a way to serve and help fulfill the mission. Rather than being a place people are duty bound to attend on Sunday mornings, the church should be the focal point of ministry and service to Christ. It should be a place where we worship, mature, tithe, serve, teach, plan, meet, fellowship and work together all to the glory of Christ, in the hope that Christ will bless our efforts and through them call people everywhere to salvation and cause them to grow and mature to complete and perfect sanctification.
Committing ourselves to serving under, over and alongside a group of people requires a certain amount of vulnerability and emotional risk. It requires a huge portion of our time and our lives. But as I read through the New Testament, it seems this is exactly the way the church functioned and is supposed to function today. When it did, God blessed it and the gospel spread like a wild fire throughout the known world.