The Great Commission does not ask churches to act as the automotive department. Nor does it require them to act as an information office. Now I have another one for you: the Great Commission does not call on the churches to act as professional sports teams.
My church staff likes to joke with me because I don’t know much about sports, which may be fair, but I know the goal of every sports team is to win the championship. A team will try to hire the best players, build the best training facilities and optimize their technical team to win the biggest trophy in the championship. Of course, one team is happy that there are other teams. Without them, there would be no championship. But their main goal is to beat the rest of the teams.
- Now.
- I doubt that so many churches.
- If any.
- Will explicitly think.
- “We must overcome these other churches!”But let me ask you some diagnostic questions to evaluate a mood like “Is our team the best?”:.
Often, grotesque competition between churches characterizes evangelical churches, but a church committed to the Great Commission is not in competition with other churches that preach the gospel, because it knows that all churches proclaiming the gospel play on the same team.
Here is the broadest point: a church involved in the Great Commission is an evangelistic and disciplined church, but it is also a church that plants and revitalizes churches She wants to see the kingdom of God grow through her own ministry, but she also wants to see the kingdom extend beyond its own walls through other churches.
Therefore, such a church is interested in facilitating many evangelization activities beyond itself, in order to attract strangers to itself, but it also wants its efforts to lead to the establishment or support of other local churches. She’s not satisfied with her own, health; wants to see many other healthy congregations who believe in the Bible and preach the gospel.
Such a church encourages other churches and establishments of evangelical churches, even if they are several blocks away, and pray for them by name. She is willing to send good people to help these other churches. He will also try to establish or build other churches on the other side of the world.
A church committed to the Great Commission works and prays to raise qualified men to become elders, and then returns them selflessly.
It strives to align its budget with these priorities of the Great Commission. It saves some money for the local ministry, but some money is allocated to help in other jobs, both near and far.
It strives to recover declining congregations whenever possible
He works in all kinds of public and private media to cultivate this team mentality with other gospel-centered churches among his own members. Members and leaders are as happy with a new church preaching the gospel as with a new restaurant opening in a hungry country.
So what does a church involved in the Great Commission do?I would like to propose four strategic actions.
First, a church committed to the Great Commission will cultivate a culture of discipleship among its own members. This helps each member have a responsibility to help other believers grow in the faith. Pastors hold the Saints accountable for the work of ministry, Paul says (Ephesians 4:11-12), which means that the work of ministry belongs to all saints; the whole body, which speaks the truth with love, grows as it is built, each part doing its work (Ephesians 4:15-16, see also 1 Corinthians 12:14).
Discipleship is my follow-up to Jesus; discipleship is me helping someone follow Jesus (for example, 2 Timothy 2. 2); and in a church committed to the Great Commission, older men in the faith of disciples of younger men and women seek older women. For example, if you’re a single woman, you can offer a mother full-time laundry help in exchange for the opportunity to ask a lot of questions!If you’re an alumnus who teaches in an adult class in Sunday school, you can certainly hire an adjunct teacher. And his goal, in a sense, is to train him and provide him with teaching work. You can then start another class and generate another attached teacher.
Such a church has the geographical sensitivity implicit in Jesus’ command to “go”. For those who stay, then, come on, it may well mean approaching the church or groups of its members. In this way, it is easy to serve others during the week Where do you live?Does it help cultivate a culture of disciples in your church where you have chosen to rent an apartment or buy a house?
A church committed to the Great Commission must be uncomfortable, even provocative, for a nominal Christian. If you show up as a visitor to a church like this on Sundays only as part of your occasional religious duty, you may not like it very much. you may be welcome, but church members cannot stay like you. They give their whole lives to follow Jesus and commit themselves to helping each other to follow Jesus. This commitment and activity is part of the culture itself: intentional questions, meaningful conversations, prayer, and continued memories of the gospel.
See Robert Coleman’s Master Plan of Evangelism [Christian World]; A Trelia ea Videira, by Colin Marshall and Tony Payne [Fiel Editor]; or my own disciple [New Life] to learn more about this topic.
Secondly, a church committed to the Great Commission will cultivate a culture of evangelization; on the one hand, members know that the gospel will be preached at each weekly meeting; therefore, they are encouraged to invite their non-Christian friends. through praise, prayer and every sermon.
Do you think all non-Christians you bring to your church will hear the gospel?If not, what can you do about it?
On the other hand, a church committed to the Great Commission strives to train its members in evangelization, because it knows that collectively they will see more non-Christians during the week than ever before in the church building. it’s not just about taking your non-Christian friends to church so they can hear the gospel. Success is sharing the gospel with your neighbors and non-Christian friends.
Therefore, the church works to give its members the power to evangelize so that they know how to share the gospel with others. My own church does so through Sunday schools dedicated to evangelization. I try to formulate what commitment to non-Christians should be in My preaching, especially in the way I explicitly approach non-Christians. We try to empower our members by offering them tools of evangelization such as “Two ways of living?Or resources like? or “Exploited Christianity. “Greg Gilbert’s “Who Is Jesus” to members to give to their non-Christian friends. We also share opportunities for evangelization at our Sunday night meeting. Listening and praying for other members’ opportunities for evangelization encourages their own personal attempts to share good news.
What does the Great Commission mean to you? This means that Jesus called you to be a person who makes disciples. He calls you both to evangelize the unbelievers and to become believing disciples. You have to do it yourself; at home, at work, in your neighborhood, among your friends. You have to do this in and through your church.
Therefore, use your classmates and church members to help you. Invite an old man to lunch and ask for advice. Share and pray with your small group. Go out and evangelize with your friends.
To learn more about this topic, see any book by Mack Stiles, especially Evangelization [New Life], or my book The Gospel and Evangelization [Faithful].
Third, a church involved in the Great Commission is working to reach out to those who have no reservations through missions. What is the difference between missions and evangelization and the establishment of churches in the country itself?In fact, missions are exactly what we call evangelization and church establishment. when they cross ethnic, cultural and typically national borders.
Jesus commands us, “Come on, make disciples of all nations. “I haven’t talked much about this topic because many other books deal very well with this subject. But it is difficult to know how a church can read this commandment and not commit to it. bringing the gospel to nations that had never heard the gospel before.
No congregation can target every place on the planet, so I think churches should focus their own missionary efforts in a few places. My own church, for example, is concentrated in several countries in the so-called window 10/40, which is the region of the eastern hemisphere between 10 and 40 degrees north of the equator, is the region of the world where there is the lowest percentage of Christians.
If you are a member of our church and express interest in completing the mission, we can invest more resources to support you if you go to one of the places where we have already invested. We simply cannot sponsor a hundred people who go to hundreds of different places, so we prefer to support some missionaries with more money than many missionaries with little money, this allows the missionaries we support to spend less time on fundraising and more time to church work. a relationship with them and offer responsibilities.
Our church works directly with missionaries and we work through missionary organizations such as the Board of International Missions of the Southern Baptist Convention. We also work with wonderful groups like Access Partners, which help locate business owners in strategic locations around the world in their vocations. can help long-term missionaries on the ground.
What role should you play as an individual Christian in helping your church reach the excluded?You should certainly pray for the missionaries in your church. Meet with them when they’re on leave. You may evaluate short-term missionary trips that will allow you to support long-term workers. Read the biographies of the missionaries. And maybe I’ll think about going. We’ll return to this topic in two chapters.
There is one last thing you and your church can do to reach the excluded: look for strangers in your own city. My own church strives to reach international students, but what groups of foreigners live in your city?If you reach them with the gospel right here in your hometown, the gospel is likely to spread from where you come from.
See John Piper [Christian Culture] rejoices to learn more about this topic.
Churches often have a budget line for missions. Do I think it’s worth adding a budget line?Do you support healthy churches? Striving to strengthen other churches is a fourth practice of churches that comply with the Great Commission.
My own church uses this line to support many things, such as our pastoral internship program. We pay twelve children a year to do an internship with us, most of whom end up as pastors or serving in other churches.
We also use the line to support the ministry of 9Marks, which is dedicated as a ministry to building healthy churches.
We intentionally structure our team so that people are trained and distributed; pastoral assistants serve us for 2 to 3 years, then they are supposed to be sent; The assistant shepherds serve us for 3 to 5 years, and then they leave. Pastors (as well as all pastors or elders who are not part of the team) must remain in our church for an extended period of time; the rest of us, we let them go.
Our church sponsors weekend conferences, where pastors from around the world join us for our regular meetings, as well as for various special conferences and Q&A periods. I also participate in weekly phone calls with several other networks of pastors from around the world for each of these conversations gives me the opportunity to pray and fight for healthy churches around the world.
Much of the work we are doing to strengthen other churches by establishing and revitalizing churches that we do in our own region, which is the theme of the next chapter (in other words, this whole chapter is an extension of this section). But we also do plantations and revitalizations around the world. For example, we sent a brother, John, to a church in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, while the church was looking for a pastor for nearly a decade. God used John powerfully to revitalize this international church. One of his main elders, who helped bring John there, was Mack, an old friend of mine. Once John and Mack took the church to a healthy state, Mack and another brother, Dave, left the church to establish another church in 30 minutes. We also sent a former pastoral assistant and intern to help Mack and Dave in this new job. At the same time, we sent another pastoral intern to establish another church in another city in the United Arab Emirates. .
We now have three healthy churches active in this Muslim country. None of this was part of one of our big plans. In fact, neither the opportunity for revitalization nor the two planting opportunities were initiated by us. We were just there to pray, help, and send financial and human support wherever we can. In fact, many of our members have moved their work to the United Arab Emirates to assist in the work of these churches. Our church obtains no other form than the sheer joy of seeing the kingdom of God scattered in this foreign land.
Many of these examples have focused on what I have been doing as a pastor. But assuming you are an ordinary member of the church, what can you do to help strengthen other churches, whether in your area or around the world?Of course, you can pray personally for other works. You can pray for other jobs with your family over dinner. You can financially support other jobs.
No doubt you should be careful when criticizing other churches. Yes, there are places where your church’s secondary practices or doctrines may differ from those of other churches. And yes, we have deliberate reasons for these areas of disagreement. I’m not telling you to throw them out. But keep in mind that secondary issues where your church may disagree with other churches are not as important as the gospel we all share, so protect yourself from a critical mind and look for ways to rejoice in shared evangelical associations.
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Editor’s note: This article is an excerpt from Understanding the Great Commission, in the Church Basics series, (B
By: Mark Dever. © 9Marks. Website: 9marks. org. Translated with permission. Source: 4 practices of a great commission church.
Original: 4 church practices committed to the Great Commission. © Faithful Of the Department. Website: MinistryFiel. com. br. All rights reserved. Translation: Camila Rebeca Teixeira. Review: André Alosio Oliveira da Silva.