Weekly Blog - 4 August 2024 - The Mission of the Church
The mission of the church
This week we are going back to basics with our weekly blog. We explore and unpack God’s mission in the world, and therefore our mission as his people. This is the foundation upon which all of Arise’s work (and all our lives as Christians) are built.
God’s big story
God’s story is one of creation, fall, redemption and glory. The story begins with the creation of the universe by God, as we read in the very first verse of the Bible, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1: 1). The world was perfect, whole and complete, for “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Gen 1: 31). Humanity lived in harmony and shalom in perfect relationship with God, each other, and creation. We hear how “The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it” (Gen 2: 15), and that God and his people together would go “walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Gen 3: 8). Humanity however has rebelled against God and gone our own way and sin has entered the world as a consequence. As Paul’s letter to the Romans says “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one … Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know … for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Roms 3: 10 – 23). This happened not just in humanity’s heart, but also in the physical world. Decay entered God’s creation for the first time and as a result, mortality, disease, storms, earthquakes and other natural disasters became normality. The fall essentially broke the world from the way it was meant to be. This can be characterised as broken relationships. The fall broke humanity’s relationship with God, with each other, and with creation. We read how God said to Adam “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Gen 3: 17 – 19).
However, God so loved the world that he was not prepared to leave it in that state. When humanity was still in rebellion against him, he took the first step and came in the person of his son Jesus to suffer, die and rise again, in order to pay the price for our rebellion. As Jesus himself said “the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matt 20: 28), and John testifies, “This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4: 9 – 10). Jesus’ death and resurrection brought about the possibility of redemption for every person who will repent of their sins and turn back to God, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3: 16). Even more than this, Jesus’ life, death and resurrection began to bring in the kingdom of God, and began to restore and reconcile all things – humanity and the rest of creation – towards its pre-fall state of perfection. Jesus restores those broken relationships between humanity and God, but also between ourselves and others, and with creation. Thus, Paul tells us that God’s plan was “through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross … This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven” (Col 1: 20 – 23) and elsewhere that “the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” (Rom 8 – 19 – 22).
After he ascended, Jesus entrusted the continuation of this work – to advance the kingdom of God in the world – to his followers, God’s people, the church, to every one of us who calls ourselves a Christian. Jesus instructed them to “go and proclaim the kingdom of God” (Luke 9: 60), to “go, proclaim this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give” (Matt 10: 7 – 8), so that, “you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1: 8). He didn’t leave them alone and unaided, but sent the Holy Spirit to empower them in this task. As Jesus told his followers, “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you” (John 14: 26) for they were to be “clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24: 29).
Whilst this work to grow and extend the kingdom must always continue, it will never result in a utopia. The work will only be completed when Christ himself returns in glory, “For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels” (Mat 16: 27), ushering in the kingdom of God in full, restoring all broken relationships; between God and humanity, between humans, and between humans and creation, restoring all of creation to its pre-fall state of perfection with God. We hear in Revelation, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Rev 21: 3 – 4), and in Isaiah, “The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox … They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain” (Isa 65: 25). Crucially, the restored kingdom in Revelation is noticeably different from the pre-fall world of Genesis. We have moved from a pre-fall ‘garden’ in Genesis to a ‘Holy City’ when the kingdom is restored in Revelation. Thus our story is really one of creation, fall, redemption and new creation. There is a moving on, dynamic quality of the kingdom of God. It will be different from the pre-fall world. Thus, scripture ends looking forward to this great day for “He who testifies to these things says, ‘Yes, I am coming soon’” and the Bible ends with a wholehearted “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus” (Rev 22: 20) (Arise Manifesto, pg 3 – 5).
Our part in God’s story
So, if that is God’s big story across history, where are we now within that picture and what is our role now as his followers, his church? Essentially, we are now living in the period between the redemption (when Jesus won the victory through his death and resurrection), and the final glory (when he will return to fully establish his kingdom and that victory). Jesus spoke at great length about how he was bringing in the kingdom of God. We hear how “Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness” (Matt 9: 35) and when the crowds tried to detain him for too long, he told them, “I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent” (Luke 4: 43). This was the task that he entrusted to all of us as his followers, who together make up his church, to continue after he ascended. As we have seen, this is not something we do alone, for Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to live, breathe in us, and guide us as we advance his kingdom. The mission of the church then, is to use all of our time, energy and resources to continue to expand the kingdom of God, for we read how Jesus gave his followers “power and authority to drive out all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal the sick” (Luke 9: 1 – 2) with urgency so that “this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations” (Matt 24: 14). This can be seen as a continuation of that process of restoring those broken relationships between people and God (evangelism and discipleship), between people and other people (social justice and development), and between people and creation (environment).
The process of restoration includes spreading the good news of the gospel so that people might come to a personal relationship with God through Jesus’ death and resurrection. However, it also includes restoring other aspects of this broken world to the way God originally intended them to be. That means meeting physical, social, economic and environmental needs, as well as spiritual ones. For much of history, large parts of the church have only focused on ‘spiritual transformation’; evangelism and personal discipleship, and rejected the need to also advance the kingdom of God by addressing social injustice, poverty and environmental degradation. Other parts of the church at various times in history have done the opposite, uncomfortable with the need for spiritual transformation through evangelism and personal discipleship, they have emphasised tackling injustice, poverty or environmental sustainability instead. However, most of the church throughout history and today, and from all the main traditions and denominations around the world, recognises the holistic nature of mission in expanding the kingdom of God. Mission is about meeting all needs, not just spiritual, but also physical, social, economic and environmental. All should be held together in the holistic way Jesus worked and talked about the kingdom of God – this is the mission of God’s people, and the mission of Arise.
We hear this in the way Jesus set out his mission statement at the start of his ministry in the famous ‘Nazareth manifesto’, “He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing’” (Luke 4: 16 – 21). Later when John the Baptist sent his disciples to see if Jesus truly was the coming messiah, Jesus once again describes a beautiful holistic picture of what the coming of the kingdom of God looks like, “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor” (Luke 7: 22).
The holistic mission that Jesus entrusted to his church is our mission as followers of Jesus in our own individual lives. God’s will for every Christian is to use all the time, money, gifts, freedoms, information, skills and other resources he has given us, to advance the kingdom of God in the places where we live and work. As Jesus said, the focus of our lives should be to “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness” (Matt 6: 33), to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptising 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), for “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6: 8), and “whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these” (John 14: 12).
The Bible is clear that the mission of the church, and every individual Christian to expand the kingdom of God will not be fully completed until Jesus returns, and indeed we may face significant opposition. A perfect world prior to Christ returning is not possible. However, when Jesus does return, he will not burn up creation and whisk away those who know him to a ‘heaven’ in the sky, but he will come down to redeem and restore all of creation in an earthy and real way – the way he originally intended it to be. He will fully restore all the broken relationships between humanity and God, between humans, and between humans and creation, to establish in full the perfect kingdom of God. Just as Jesus’ body was renewed and transformed, but still very real and physical, after his death and resurrection, and ours too will be renewed and transformed into our heavenly, but still physical, bodies when he comes again, so too the whole of creation, whilst it may similarly pass through some sort of tribulation, will be renewed, restored, healed and transformed to the way God always intended it to be, as the new heaven and earth.
Jesus explains how that day will see “the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne” (Matt 19: 28). In Micah we hear how “He will judge between many peoples and will settle disputes for strong nations far and wide. They will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore” (Micah 4: 3), and Isaiah tells us “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant will play near the cobra’s den, and the young child put its hand into the viper’s nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Isa 11: 6 – 9). In this context, all good works undertaken by the church and individual Christians before Christ returns will not be wasted, but will contribute to the final complete picture of restoration. Therefore, although we can never know completion and perfection, we can see the world in a much better state than it is today. Thus, the role of the church and every Christian, is to strive ceaselessly to expand the kingdom and to significantly improve our world. We are to lead lives of meaning, purpose and significance, lives that matter and make a difference, lives of radical discipleship in every area, bringing the kingdom into this broken world in our everyday actions. We are to Arise! (Arise Manifesto, pg 6 – 9).
Find out more
Find out more about how God is at work in the world, and the role we all have to play in that work, in the Arise Manifesto. This report is Arise’s big picture, researched, Biblical, holistic and practical vision for a better world. It looks at what the Bible says, and what we can learn from the best data and the world’s leading experts on the five major areas of evangelism, discipleship, social justice, development and the environment. It then draws these lessons together into a practical road map for the changes we need to see in our world, which the Arise movement campaigns to achieve.
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