Being missional involves both intent and intensity. It involves both sincerity and scope. I have discovered over the past few months that people have a relatively easy time understanding the intent and sincerity involved with living missionally, but a much harder time grasping the intensity and scope that is required to truly be missional. Without intensity and scope we’re just another nice, dying church.
The mission of Jesus compels us to love others and live a life that is a good witness. In other words, we learn to always have the intent of showing Jesus to others, and we are sincere about it. This is not an easy task, but it also does not require much sacrifice on our part. Once we understand what Christ has done for us, who doesn’t want to live a life so that others can also know this?
People are much more reluctant to acknowledge the intensity and scope of the mission of Jesus, because these things require much of us. I believe our English translations get Matthew 28 right – Jesus did not say “while you are going, make disciples,” he said “go and make disciples of all nations.” See here for a defense of this view. In this command we have both the intensity and scope of our mission.
First, we have to go actively and intentionally. It is not “missional” to reflect the love of Jesus to the people we come into contact with in our day-to-day lives – that is simply what a good person who knows Jesus would do, and certainly we must do this. But we become “missional” when we are intentional about going to other people, and if we are not doing this then we are not following Jesus’ command. As we always make clear, intentionally going to other people that we do not naturally come into contact with does not mean that we have fake relationships with people to tell them about Jesus, or that we go door to door. It is a tough, life-long commitment to intentionally form new meaningful relationships with people. You have to be intense about the mission in order to be willing to do this.
Second, the scope of our mission is everyone – all nations. From this we derive the command that we are to meaningfully reach as many people for Jesus in our lifetime as possible. It means the scope of the mission is unlimited, so there is never a point at which we can say, “we’re doing our part, we’re doing enough.” Christianity doesn’t work like that. We can rest confident in God’s sovereignty, knowing that we are being obedient and striving to reach as many as possible. But I don’t think that a Christian who knows his or her own sin will ever feel that they have arrived when it comes to the mission of Jesus. Realize that following Jesus involves a life-long commitment to a mission that will never be finished until Jesus returns. I’m just telling you the way it is. But as always, it’s worth it.
Posted on April 26th, 2008 by nateschlomann
Filed under: Church
thanks for this Nate. What a huge task we have before us. Now this is something to live and die for!
I really appreciate the repudiation of the common view of the Great Commission. I remember hearing in my undergrad classes that God commands us to go, but while we are going, to make disciples. Obviously, someone has had a little greek and understand the nature of an imperfect verb (present and future causality), but I have to agree that we cannot and must not separate the going from the making of disciples. Discipleship, meaning being and making disciples, is the action of going, or at least the end and sole purpose of going. This gets at the very heart of our message to Lynchburg, especially to LU students. We cannot “go”, meaning that we life lives in the world, with worldly jobs and worldly goals and desires, and still hope to make disciples. We are to be ambassadors of Christ, his exemplars in the world, after all. This is a fundamental shift from what I had assumed prior to conVerge.
What’s remarkable is that I assume, and I think correctly, that the scholars working on the major english translations most often know what they are doing with this sort of issue, and across they board they have never, to my knowledge, translated the Great Commission as “While you are going….”. It really seems to me that this view, which you’re right, might be majority held, is a result of just a little knowledge being dangerous, and people’s desire to make themselves feel comfortable with their lack of effort and frustration with what seems an impossible task.