If you want to see the people of your congregation accomplishing the mission of your congregation consistently and frequently over and over again, they will need to have clear, simple answers to the following questions:
What is the mission of our congregation?
What does it look like for our people to participate in accomplishing the mission?
What is the discipleship process that prepares our people to participate in accomplishing the mission?
Let’s begin by answering question #1: What is the mission of your congregation? It only makes sense that if you want to disciple your people to participate in accomplishing the mission, you first have to clarify what the mission is.
So, what is it?
The good news is that we don’t have to make something up. Since the mission of your congregation is the mission of God, all we have to do is clarify what God already says is His mission. And what is the mission of God according to God? Simple. He wants His world back. All of it.
John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son…” Luke 19:10, “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.” Colossians 1:19-20, “For God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in Him [Jesus], and 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.” Revelation 21:5, “Behold, I am making all things new!”
That’s the mission of God according to God: to get back the world He so loves.
And that is the mission Jesus was sent to accomplish. He was sent by His Father on a grand adventure to redeem and restore all things to His Father’s Kingdom… in other words, to make all things new!
And He invites us to join Him.
However, let’s be sure to keep things straight. The actual accomplishment of the mission belongs to Jesus alone. He does the dying and rising and saving and reconciling. But He invites us to participate with Him in accomplishing the mission of getting back God’s world.
How? By us taking from the abundance He has already freely given us and then freely offering it to the people around us who need Him and His gifts so badly.
1 John 3:1, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” Matthew 10:8, “Freely you have received, freely give.” 1 John 4:19, “We love because He first loved us.” 2 Corinthians 5:18, “All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.” 1 John 4:10-11, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” Luke 24:46-47, “This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be proclaimed in His name to all nations…”
Wow! So, Jesus does the very hard work of saving people, and we do the very simple work that even a little child can do: loving people with the abundant love we have already received from Jesus.
That’s how we participate with Jesus in accomplishing His mission. We don’t accomplish it, He does. But we join Him in the nooks and crannies of our neighborhoods, communities, cities, and nations looking for people who need His love so He can do what only He can do through that love. We are His body, His hands, His means by which people experience His love in the created world. From Him, to us, through us, to the people around us who need Him and His love so badly.
You might have sensed that we are now starting to answer the second question. And you are right. So, we will stop here for now and unpack more next time.
To help you and your leaders answer these clarifying questions for your congregation, I offer leadership retreats in St. Paul, Minnesota. Your leadership team arrives on a Tuesday and on Thursday you leave with a clear, simple, biblical plan for making disciples who accomplish the mission.
Let’s set a date to talk so you can get started. Contact me via the button below.
P.S. What about “making disciples?”
You might be wondering, “I thought the mission was to make disciples.” However, making disciples is a means that still requires a mission. In other words, we have to answer the question, “We make disciples who do what?” According to Jesus in Matthew 28, we make disciples who are trained to participate in accomplishing the mission. Making disciples is not accomplishing the mission, it is the means for the mission to be accomplished.