Imagine a community…
defined by faith and love,
with EVERY MEMBER committed to growth,
each eagerly accepting lifelong roles of learner and teacher,
pursuing a shared purpose through developing their own unique giftedness,
dispersed throughout the larger community to serve, share, grow, & contribute,
seeking to uphold a single standard of integrity, love, grace, kindness, patience, goodness, & self-control,
having a growing sense of joy and peace regardless of circumstances,
having a story to share,
learning from the endurance, perseverance, and struggles of others,
empowered by prayerfully worshipping and trusting a holy God,
& generously sharing time, skills, property, money, and/or wisdom with others.
It’s not a school charter.
It’s not a new nonprofit community.
It’s not an isolationist or idealist manifesto.
It’s the calling of the Church.
But we’ve settled for less.
We’ve translated “Go and make disciples” as “Go and make converts.” We’ve replaced Jesus’ life-long whole-life approach to discipleship with cycles of continual ministry events. We’ve made didactic presentations, whether in sanctuaries, classrooms, living rooms, or transmitted as videos, audios, or books, synonymous with discipleship. We have delegated “discipleship” to the silver-tongued and well-studied and cloaked the privilege of discipling to be known only as a burden too complicated to grasp by the average member. Perhaps modern American clergy are not as far from Pharisees as we think.
Though Jesus seemed to think it meant sharing life, facing challenges together, discussing God & Scripture, and experiencing God in the context of our lives and circumstances rather than only gathering to listen to those who don’t know us.
We’ve lost sight of our calling. It takes little effort and no intention to just drift with the current. It’s easier to simply move from event to event. We know what is expected, what to do, who’s in, who’s out. Efficiency is easier to measure than effectiveness. We create systems to turn our preferences into practices. Our practices become habits. Our habits become traditions. Our traditions become sacred. Then we protect our beloved sacred from the untested and less holy preferences of younger generations, excluding them with neither malice nor intent. Then our sacred preferences become irrelevant to everyone but us.
By replacing our calling with our sacred, we have dimmed our light and lost our saltiness, making our datedness our most visible distinctiveness from the world.
Our calling is to follow Jesus, to go and make disciples as He demonstrated, to love and be loved. When strategies to host events, sing, teach, count attendance, broadcast… become actual goals rather than strategies to assist a greater calling, we replace Jesus’ calling with man’s ambition and we look a lot more like the average American church than the church Jesus calls us to be.