After the resurrection of Jesus, Matthew’s
Gospel is wonderful in its simplicity. You may be familiar with different
post-resurrection stories: John has a bit about Jesus meeting the disciples by
the lakeshore, Luke has the walk to Emmaus, Mark ends things dramatically with
a cliffhanger, but Matthew’s ending is not as dramatic as Mark’s or with as
much narrative as Luke or John. In Matthew, there is only a single scene after
the resurrection—just a few verses—where the disciples meet Jesus on a mountain
top and he gives them a simple command. “Go, make disciples of all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”
Sometimes we make our life of faith
way too complicated. The Great Commission is simple, elegant, challenging, and
engaging for people of every generation. We are called to go out. This means we
are not to be a church in one place and hope people stumble upon us. And we are
called to go out to all nations, not
some people who look like us, and not just the kind of people we approve of.
Then we are called to make disciples of them. Then we baptize, teach, and
remember God’s promise to us. That’s it. That’s all we do. God does the rest.
Matthew offers no special programs,
no evangelism tricks, and nothing in particular about how we are to be church
apart from these commands, let alone the specifics of how divine things work.
We are simply called to tell others about Jesus, to make them into disciples, to
baptize, and to help them understand what all of that means: to help all of us
to become followers of Christ.
Nowadays we have flipped the Great
Commission upside down and we do it more or less backwards. We don’t go, make
disciples, baptize, teach, and remember. Instead, we remember first. We look
back on what was, putting a premium on understanding where we come from and
often reaching back into that past for an imagined golden age when everything
was perfect. Then we teach. We share our history. We study the Bible. We read
the catechism. Then we baptize. Sure, we often do baptism before these things
but we tend to believe that baptism is a step on the road to discipleship and
not the other way around. Only after those things do we focus on making
disciples; once we have figured out what it means to be faithful; once we’ve
checked the boxes required for membership. Then, finally, we go… if we have
time. But most of our energy is spent on the other tasks at hand. We only go if we have the energy to do so. Most
of the time we expect others to come to us.
This is an issue for the whole
church. It’s an issue when we spend a good deal of time trying to be attractive
to others in the hope that they’ll find what we do to their liking. And it’s an
issue when we don’t ever consider the outsiders at all. If Matthew’s Gospel is
any indication, a church that does not go out into the world isn’t a church at
all, because it is missing the primary identity of what it means to be a Christ-follower.
We have to go.
Now I think when I say that you
might get an image of hopping on a plane and flying to Africa. But it doesn’t
have to be that at all. All you have to do is go into a place that is not
“Grace Lutheran Church” or “Red River Lutheran Church,” in other words, not
this building but the places where you meet people all week long, and out there
you make disciples, you tell people your stories of what God has done and you
listen to theirs.
The other side of the Great
Commission that we don’t talk about much is that Jesus is light on having a personal
relationship with him. For all our talk about getting closer to God in our
devotional lives, it seems that Jesus would rather we skip the whole devotional
life thing and focus our attention on telling others. Jesus’ priority is always
the lost sheep and not the 99 who are already in the fold. I’m going to hazard
a guess that Jesus is not against deepening our faith lives, but I also tend to
think, especially in light of these verses at the close of Matthew’s Gospel,
that our own personal devotional life comes second to our primary mission which
is to go and make disciples. Faith can never be a me-first thing.
We have to go to places that are
distinctly not-church. And there we act as the Evangelical Lutheran Church. We become God’s hands and feet. We
share the Gospel—with words and actions. And, most importantly of all, we do
this without any expectation that they
will become members of our church. That is not our goal. I understand this
sounds funny, because most door-to-door salespeople are in the business of
getting us to buy their particular product, but that’s not how we work.
Instead, the church is the natural outgrowing of the production of disciples,
but it is not the goal itself. The goal itself is the going, the disciple making, the baptizing, and finally the teaching
and remembering.
We are an evangelical church,
because we are a church whose primary interest is sharing the good news of
Jesus Christ. That may be compatible with getting more butts in the seats on
Sunday morning, but those two things are not the same, and getting people here
is not the primary goal. This means
that it is not a failure when we engage in making disciples and they end up
going to worship at the Catholic church or the Covenant church or somewhere
else. That’s a success. Also, it’s not a failure if somebody leaves our church to
worship at a different church for reasons X, Y, or Z. That might strain our
community, but the formation of a community is a secondary goal; not a primary
one. Our community matters profoundly, but it is only a small extension of a
more important community, which is the body of Christ, and the body of Christ
is always wider than our view of it. So somebody who leaves us will be missed,
but if they find another community to worship then they are no less part of the
body of Christ than the rest of us.
We only fail when people stop
growing in their faith. We only fail when we forget our primary tasks; when we
stop going out and stop making disciples, when baptizing and teaching and
remembering slip through the cracks or when we dwell on one over the others. A
healthy church does it all. We go, we make disciples, we baptize, we teach, we
remember, and we don’t allow anyone to fall through the cracks. Looking at us
today, I’m not concerned about the latter three. We baptize, we teach (and
maybe we need to do more of it, but we do teach), and we certainly remember,
but are we forgetting about the first, primary, verbs of the Great Commission?
Are we too afraid to go? Are we not even sure what that means in a place where
nobody wants to hear about Jesus?
We lack a creative evangelical lens,
imagining only door-to-door salesmen of the faith. But evangelism should be
much more creative, meaningful, and moving than that. It means seeking out the
lost, which isn’t just the person you would think of as a bit odd, but also the
person who is a “member” of the church but is in a rut—the person we never see
who just seems to be going through the motions. That is a person to whom we
must go. And we go by remembering them, by being open to interaction with them,
even by challenging them, but always with their best interest in mind and not
our own. Evangelism also means going to the young, the people who are here but
aren’t sure what their faith means or whether they have any at all. Then it means
going to people in the prime of their lives: the generation who is always
“busy.” It means going to them and making of them disciples who put their faith
at the forefront of lives with full calendars, and it means reminding them of
promises they have made to their children. It means going to the elderly with
the very same Gospel that was heard once with young ears but now takes on different
importance when life nears its end.
This is only the beginning of what
it means to go. It means not assuming that just because so-and-so seems that
they have it all together they don’t need a word of encouragement, or that you
are judging a person if you ask them what their faith means to them. You see, I’m
worried that we’re a scared church, and not just us here in Kittson County, but
our wider church as well. I’m worried that we’re scared because we’re not sure
we know how to be disciples ourselves, so how can we go and how can we make
disciples of others?
But here’s the secret: Knowledge is
not a precondition of going and making disciples. You’re not called to enter into
deep theological arguments. And if you don’t feel confident with your own faith
there’s a great remedy for that: practice it. You see, the Great Commission is
so beautiful because it primes us to go out and give of ourselves for a world
in need of good news, but it inevitably challenges us to also deepen our own
faith, because we come a place where we realize we aren’t confident enough,
smart enough, or we didn’t memorize enough Bible verses growing up.
That’s OK, but it doesn’t mean it
doesn’t apply to you. It does more than anything! This is still what it means
to be the church. It’s a huge challenge. Are you up for it?
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