PRIMED: MISSIONAL
Noel K. Anderson
First Presbyterian Church of Upland
Text: Matthew 28: 18-20 NRSV
18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.
A MISSIONAL MINDSET
This World is too Worldly
The word missional was coined nearly 30 years ago to describe that the Church does not exist for itself and its comforts. The Church exists as the primary means by which God’s will is communicated and activated in the world. It isn’t just about “getting people in;” it’s equally about getting Christ’s will and presence out into the world. How we think about being missional matters because it determines what the Church needs to be doing.
Part of it is understanding the proper relationship between the Church and the world. Some see the role of the Church as to keep Christ’s followers pure and unsullied by the world. They get this idea from many Old Testament texts that called Israel to be set apart from the world. In the New Testament, we have verses like Romans 12:2a:
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds….
This way of seeing the Church’s role is very un-missional, and it sees the Church as a haven from the wicked world. By staying away from the world, we can make ourselves pure and acceptable to God. This was the motive behind many monastic movements—keeping out of the world helped you stay pure and holy. It’s also part of puritanism, and we see its effects in Amish and Pennsylvania Dutch communities which set themselves apart completely.
The world is an evil place, so stay out of it—is the central attitude. We see this in some extremist evangelical churches as well. If you are a good Christian, you’ll only listen to Christian music, have only Christian friends, and only do business with Christian businesses. If you get the picture, this is only a couple of steps in from being Amish.
At the other extreme are the uber-liberal churches, who are so completely this-worldly that their theology doesn’t seem to affect their lives at all. The old word for this was “Churchianity.” They may be good Presbyterians, or Episcopalians, or Unitarians, or Catholics—but they fulfill the entirety of their Christian obligations by attending Church once a week. Otherwise, their lives are unaffected by genuine faith because, to them, the world isn’t evil at all, it’s good, and we should enjoy being part of it.
The Reformed faith, coming down from John Calvin and others, stands somewhere in the middle. It holds that we are here in an evil world for God’s purposes. We are sent as Christ’s disciples not to hide out from the wicked world but to change the world from within the world. That doesn’t just mean pulling people out of the evil world and into the Church—which is a large part of evangelicalism. Nor does it mean simply accepting the world as it is and refusing to call it evil. We are in the world, but the world is not in us.
The text from Matthew gives us some keywords:
•GO therefore,
•DISCIPLE-MAKING “disciple-ize” all nations,
•BAPTIZING them in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit,
•TEACHING them to observe all that I have commanded you.
This isn’t the same as “soul-saving”—which we cannot do, only God—but we have our work cut out for us all the same. The problem with the idea of soul-saving is that it presumes to be something we can do. You and I cannot save souls, neither can the Church—any church. Furthermore, nowhere in the New Testament are we told to “save souls.” Jesus doesn’t say it, nor does Paul. The only verse about soul-saving is found in James 5 and refers to the work returning wandering Christians back into the fold, but that is not the same thing as suggesting that our evangelism saves people from Hell.
A MISSIONAL PASSION
Locating one’s missional heart
We don’t save souls, but we are on a mission to deliver good news. We are on a mission, but the word mission never appears in Scripture. Aside from the words we’ve mentioned—go, disciple-ize, baptize, and teach—The words we get are proclaim, gospel, and sent.
The word “gospel” is euaggelion, which looks like evangelism, but means “good news.” Romans originally used it as a military term because the “evangelist” was the messenger who went town-to-town to proclaim the triumph of Caesar over the Gauls, Ptolemies, Thracians, etc. The evangelist announced the good news to the towns and villages of the Roman empire.
By the way, this is what angels are as well. Consider what an angel is—a messenger of God—and the word angel comes from the same root as evangelism. Even in English, we see it:
EvANGELism
Our mission is to bear the good tidings to the world. We don’t think of it this way, but our job is to be angels—deliverers of God’s good news.
We split hairs, but at heart, mission and evangelism are one and the same. We are on a mission to deliver the good tidings that God has won the war against death through Jesus Christ. What we proclaim is the utter triumph of God. Get that—our proclamation is not of an ongoing battle whose future remains in doubt. Our preaching is not of a triumph yet-to-come but not yet in effect. Our good news is that God’s action in Christ has totally vanquished the power of death—and that means human sin and impurity are no longer a threat. The response is a life of following Christ and seeking to grow into His image, His future.
The third word, apostle, means sent—an apostle is one who is sent on a mission. To the extent that we are all on a mission in this life, we are all missionaries and all apostles, for we have been sent to announce the good news of Jesus. The original Apostles were those sent out for the first time, and they left their homes and went to foreign countries to proclaim the good news. We call them missionaries, but each one of us—even the one who never leaves their hometown—is sent out with the good news, even if it is only to the corner store, the nearby school, or the neighborhood picnic.
As God sent angels to deliver good news, so He sends us. So let’s be angels in every way we can.
PASSION PREP
Identifying our brokenness, neediness, and love
The problem with being angels all the time is that we are fallen by nature. We mean well, but, as the saying goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Ever since the fall in Eden, we have been separated from perfect or pure motives. Our every good intention mixes with our self-interest—there’s no escaping it.
Following Jesus—especially if you fear Hell—is the way to preserve yourself from the eternal fires. So are you following Jesus for Jesus’ sake, or are you just naturally saving your own skin? It’s a problem. We want to think that we follow Jesus because we sincerely love him and feel deep gratitude for his amazing grace, but how are we to know? Couldn’t it just be a strategy to avoid our soul’s destruction? Sure!
Our heart-work in mission begins by identifying three things about ourselves: our brokenness, neediness, and love.
IDENTIFY YOUR BROKENNESS
We are human, all fallen and full of brokenness, and that’s a given. How brokenness plays into our missional motivation—our desire to serve—is something every follower of Jesus should ask.
Some of the most motivated Christians may be making up for past sins—many—too many people enter the professional ministry to compensate for past sins psychologically. Some become missionaries to prove that they’re good people because they feel worthless and unworthy deep down. Some may go into ministry because they want to be respected and couldn’t find another way to get that respect.
It might sound a bit dark, but it’s reality. Every follower of Jesus must account for their dark side and see how it plays into their missional motivation. “What about you, Pastor Noel?” Do I have a dark side? Yes, though it may not sound like a dark side to some people. I am a people pleaser. I want everyone to be happy and everyone to be content. I need people to approve of my leadership and feel willing to do whatever I need to please everyone and make it all work. That is my dark side and my Achilles’ heel.
As a seminarian, I went through a battery of psychological tests in preparation for ordination. Presbyterians tend to be very thorough about such things, for which I am very grateful. My counselor laid it out to me: “People pleasers have the highest, fastest burn out rate in ministry. You, Noel Anderson, must face and slay that dragon if you want to be a pastor for more than five years. What can I say? I had to deal with it, and did, and do. I live with it. I ran into people who liked me in churches I served as long as they could manipulate my desire to please. When they hit a wall, they considered me unfit because they could no longer control me. That’s the price of facing your dark side—for me, the need to please everyone—but I slew that dragon long before coming to Upland, in case you wondered.
You also have a dark side—something to compensate for as you seek to be an angel. What is it with you?
• Making up for hidden sins elsewhere in your life? (Mafia donates millions to the RC church)
• Feel unworthy of God’s love and grace, so you feel the need to work your way into his good graces?
• Trying to climb the spiritual, social ladder?
• Sitting pretty—enough money, enough security and happiness—and you want to be left alone.
IDENTIFY YOUR NEEDINESS
Motivations—though mixed—matter, and until you can identify your own needs in serving others, you’re much less effective than you could be.
•What need in yourself are you satisfying by serving God? By being good? By doing mission?
We’ve talked about some already—the need to feel respected, worthy, or atonement for sin, etc.
Some people become compulsive helpers of others because they can’t help themselves. There’s one in every family and several in every congregation. Others may develop what’s called a Messiah Complex, which is a form of superiority. These get great satisfaction from helping down—“I (up here) am here to help you (down there).” It subtly reminds people who is better.
How might you identify your needs in mission—your neediness or needinesses? It’s essential to do so—if you can name it and know it, you’ll improve your mission significantly.
IDENTIFY YOUR LOVE
What are you doing for love? For the love of Christ? How much do you care for the sinners—the unworthy, the broken, the fallen, and the oppressed. For the love of Christ, we seek to see every human being with a heavenly perspective, which means even the vilest and ugly personality is a creature of God whom Christ loves more than we can imagine. If we love Christ, we seek to make that perspective our own.
If you love people—genuinely love them—what would you do for them? The answer is almost anything. If they were poor, you’d share your money with them; sick, you’d attend to them, depressed and defeated, you’d be there to cheer them up. That’s the right motivation for doing mission and evangelism. If we genuinely love, then we will act it out. If we love, we have a witness; if we do good but do not love, we are hypocrites, and as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, “we gain nothing.”
A MISSIONAL PROJECT
Everyone at First Pres has a mission
So we must stay focused regarding our missions. As we talked about last week, to be intentional is to have a target, and we do. The greatest challenge to proclaiming the good news of Christ in America is that after two hundred years of evangelization, much of the American culture has stopped listening. They’ve clapped their hands over their ears and think they already know all there is to know about what Christians think and believe. Even so, there are many ears still open and yet to be reached.
Here it is: there is no more crucial local mission for First Presbyterian Church of Upland than our children’s and youth ministries. We have—locally! Right near us!--young, fresh ears and hearts open to hearing about God’s saving love in Jesus Christ. In a few years, culture may close those ears, but we have a mission to plant something excellent and outstanding in every heart, mind, and soul before that can happen.
You should know that youth and children’s ministries have changed drastically in the past twenty years, and it takes excellent thought and heart to meet the present challenge. I thank God for putting his calling upon Matt and Erika to lead these critical missions.
Children’s and youth used to be all about nurturing—raising kids in the family. You remember how it was—-they all sat together with their parents in worship, and the whole family took the same ideas home. This still happens, but it is no longer the norm. Today, we have to specialize in programming by age group. Some people complain: “Oh! Those parents just drop off their kids on Wednesday nights and then go out to eat or something.” The reactions come from expecting the old paradigm—parents coming with their children—alongside them—but this has not been the norm anymore—it hasn’t been for a while.
We are happy for parents to drop off their children and eat, shop, nap, or do whatever else they need to do. We don’t mind because our mission is to those children. We have them for two hours, and we are going to plant the gospel—the good news of God’s love in Christ—within every child’s heart. We will build a spiritual foundation whether the parents want it for themselves or not.
This is why we’ve had a Preschool for 43 years—why we’ve constantly fed this vision—because we are planting the good news deep in their hearts.
Same with youth. Youth ministry used to be a gathering of family kids—the youth of parents who were active in the church. No more. Today, roughly half the kids involved in our youth group come from families with no connection to First Pres. I think that’s wonderful—we are reaching beyond ourselves out to the larger community, and that is missional.
One of our programming teams—the Serve Team—focuses on missions as well. This is not to say that the Serve Team does all the mission work because everything we do is mission, right?
Still, they have sought to hold a smart focus for our outside projects. Locally, we have SOVA, Bridges to Home, and Habitat for Humanity. Internationally, we’ve held focused on three excellent projects: one in Peru, one in Marera, Kenya, and one in India.
The projects I get most excited about are the ones that emerge from the pews—the ideas and projects that seep up from the congregation’s heart and sense of need. This is how the Holy Spirit works in our midst.
It is part of the DNA of First Presbyterian Church of Upland. Yes, we have skeletons in our closet—like all churches over 140 years old—but we also have some treasures. Here’s something you’ll find interesting: [Clip from Rochester, MN].
The best ideas come from you, from what God puts on your hearts and makes us resonate together.
A MISSIONAL FOCUS
Everything we do is missional
Doing missions—being missional—is not the work of the Serve Team alone, but the entire congregation. It is a value here at First Pres because we regard as good anything that gets us looking beyond ourselves into the community. We are here to be sent out, and we are blessed to be a blessing.
Our mission is to proclaim the insanely wonderful news that God loves humanity and has proven this through Jesus Christ. You are sent from this place to be the presence of Christ in whatever setting you live in day to day. †
Questions
- 1.What are some problems with using “soul saving” language?
- 2.Why are the words missional and evangelical synonymous?
- 3.In what way are all Christians “Apostles”what ?
- 4.In what way does our brokenness affect our outreach?
- 5.What needs do you bring to the mission of the gospel?
- 6.How does love affect the way we do mission work? What are the alternatives?
- 7.When we serve others in mission, what do we expect back from them?
- 8.What does “earning the right to be heard” mean?
- 9.What is the best language to make love known?