A Gospel-Centered Missional church doesn’t first ask the question, “What works best?” Instead, it asks, “How do we fulfill the mission of Jesus to make disciples who believe and live out the Gospel by displaying and declaring who God is and what He has done in and through Jesus Christ, teaching and training others to do so as well?” (JV-SOMA)
A Gospel-Centered church is defined by what God has done and is doing, not by the activities of people.
The Church is God’s People (who we are) saved by God’s Power (what He has done and is doing) for God’s Purposes (the good works he created us in Jesus Christ to do)-- (JV-SOMA).
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first
and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, "The righteous
shall live by faith." Romans 1:16-17
We center all of our activities around the workings of Christ and the Gospel to provide God glory. That is why we were created. Our goal is never to convert people to The Bridge. Our goal is see people converted and discipled by the Gospel and play a role in them living out God's purposes on mission. They can, then, BE THE CHURCH on mission with the Gospel in every aspect of their lives.
Obviously, there is nothing we can DO to earn salvation. It has been DONE for us by Christ's substitutionary atonement on the cross and is a gift of grace. But, once regeneration and conversion have taken place by repenting and believing the Gospel, we have a huge role in the "what now" part of our life -- our being made holy in sanctification. Christ defeated sin at the cross, but we still have to fight our sin nature until glorification. The Bible essentially asks us to 'go to war' with that sin nature. Martin Luther said that repentance from sin was a daily fight. I thought I might give you an idea of what that might look like after the challenges of the 'games that we play' over the past two weeks. If God is pressing us on a sin area (the barn in the next county), what do we do? Do we play a game or do we go to war with sin. True REPENTANCE!
You know that you are at war with sin if you are willing to do whatever it takes to get it out of your life. Sanctification and spiritual maturity come from being submitted to an intimate relationship with Christ and at war with sin. We are to allow God to go deep in our being and reveal everything that is in opposition to His will. He does all of the heavy lifting and transforming, but we have a huge roll to play in this war. There are too many 'to do' verbs in the New Testament to ignore. Watch, test, flee, submit, obey, offer, 'do not conform, hate what it evil!' Summary: Submit to God's authority -- Put sin to death! Go to war!
Remember the Summer on the Mount, so says Jesus:
"If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell."
How about Paul (which he repeats about 5 times in other Epistles)?
In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness. For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace. Romans 6:11-14
Christ has freed us from sin and death. We are forgiven yesterday, today, and tomorrow, but for us to be used powerfully in the Kingdom, on the most exciting MISSION ever given, and full of deep inner satisfaction and joy, sin must go. Go to war with it. Invite God to reveal it and then with His power and might, put it to death. No game playing.
Most of us who have been hanging around church very long are very aware of the incredible statistics of kids who have grown up in the church (very involved in children's ministries and youth groups) and upon graduation from high school never darken the door of a church again. They have answered altar calls and gone through confirmation classes and been baptized and, then, for a significant period of time or maybe forever, they live as pagans. I was one of them.
We have always kind of thought that the problem was that the lure of the culture when they go to college or out into the world of work was too strong and they basically abandoned their faith for culture. I agree with a book that I am reading right now called Already Gone that proposes that the kids have actually basically shut the idea of the Gospel and the church down often by the 5th, 6th, 7th grade, or high school and not when they leave home. They are 'already gone.' The church has taught kids some basic lingo about 'Jesus living in our hearts' and taught them some moralism -- that they live out their faith by not drinking, smoking weed, or having illicit sex. So, we have teenagers walking around with a complete misunderstanding of what a life 'in Christ' really means. I understand this is a huge generalization as we see young people who also have truly been regenerated by God and have repented and believed the Gospel at many ages; however, for the most part these college age kids are not abandoning a true faith, they actually gave up the charade of a false conversion a long time before we thought.
What is going on? The American church has, for the most part, not taught parents or the children Biblical Christianity. We have not preached and taught the Gospel and/or repentance from sin. The reason I mention the parents is that it is a Biblical mandate for them to be the primary teachers and models of a Gospel-centered life. The church has not done its part in producing quality adult disciples who then pass that life of Jesus being the center of every area of their existence to their children. I think we have a defeatist attitude that says that 18-19 year olds are going to party and have sex outside marriage, so we quit trying -- we quit believing the power of the Gospel and the power of the transformation of the Holy Spirit. And I think we underestimate what 8-14 year olds can understand about the Bible.
I love what our Bridge Kids and Youth are doing for the young people of our church, but this topic is bothering me. I am driven to challenge our ministries to fight this trend with every fiber in our beings.
Two initial things must happen to get a start in the fight:
1. We must preach and teach the inerrant, authoritative Bible to parents and kids alike. The source is Jesus Christ; we must do our part to develop Gospel-centered lives.
2. We must continue to emphasize that the children's understanding of a Gospel-centered life is the primary Biblical responsibility of parents - not the church.
The life must be taught and modeled. This is no game. Parents #1 responsibility on this planet is to develop the Lord Jesus Christ in their children. Sports are neat -- I played them, coached them, still love them, but if they take priority over the Gospel, we have sinned. Music and dance are great, same deal. Even academic achievement can be set above Godliness. To sum this up, the world has taught us that our kids should be molded by 50 different things and we run them ragged to cover them all. We prioritize lots of things ahead of the Gospel; then, we are shocked when our kids are 'already gone' in middle school or high school, and completely gone from the faith and from church in their 20's, many never to return.
Saturday morning prayer musings --
On our "What We Believe" page at The Bridge it says this, "We believe that Jesus Christ, while existing as the Son of God, is also God; he is co-equal with the Father." Later we state, "The Bible is clear that this one and only God is revealed in three eternally distinct persons. God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit are equal yet distinct within the Holy Trinity." I believe that the preponderance of Holy Scripture supports that fact that the 3 members of the Trinity are equally God -- none superior, none inferior (John 1:1-18). So, as we read in the Gospels that Jesus willingly submitted Himself to the Father, we arrive at an interesting notion that although the three persons of the Trinity are completely equal, they have roles. Jesus prayed to the Father, worshiped the Father, and submitted to the Father. {Luke 10:21-22 John 4:34 John 5:19-28} The Holy Spirit was sent; He was obedient in His role. They are co-equal, but fulfill roles for the benefit of the Kingdom of God -- for the Glory of the God-Head. Jesus was not submitting as an inferior, but as a willfully submitted co-equal (Philippians 2:6-8).
So, when Christ asks us to fulfill our roles in marriage or in the local church as willfully surrendered servants to the Kingdom of God for the glory of the Kingdom, we just take that on with a Christ-like humility. The one that I have been given to love Kelley as Christ loves the church is a bear; as a matter of fact, it is impossible, but with Christ the impossible becomes possible. Headship is never for selfish gain, but for the edification of all. Headship never means superior. It is a role that if abused will carry some of the strongest punishments in Scripture. Accepting roles is just another sign of maturing along the path of sanctification like accepting that I have no rights or possessions.
We use the term 'missional church' around The Bridge all the time. We are about to use it a lot over Labor Day retreat and in the Sept. 13 sermon on "Where does The Bridge go from here?" We have defined it before, but I found this definition on Jonathan McIntosh's blog and it does a better job than I could, so here you go:
A pastor told me the other day, “I realize that we are not a missional church.” What did he mean?
Simply that, at some point, the church let something get in the way of actually bringing the transformative message of the gospel into contact with people.
Mission drift happens when a church lets something else take over: a building project, an unstated theology of “people should come to us,” or sometimes simple laziness. Often an unspoken attitude hangs like a cloud over the entire church; an attitude that those who don’t look like us, dress like us, vote like us, have the same skin color, or come from the same socioeconomic background are not really welcome here.
And the church stops. Reaching. People.
People.
Real, living, sweating, broken, sinful people.
People need hope. They need God. They need the light of the gospel. Please, for all our discussions and books and conferences and postulating and sermon prepping, let us not forget this.
And we won’t forget if we understand something simple yet surprising: God was a person (and still is!). The incarnation – God as a person – helps us understand and relate to people.
The cross provides the framework for our theology (what we believe about and how we relate to God). But it’s the incarnation, that provides the framework for our missiology (what we believe about and how we relate to culture).
The cross is our message.
The incarnation shapes & informs how we communicate that message.
And what do we see in God as a person?
We see Jesus.
And we see him loving people. Spending time with people. Sharing his life with people. We see an outcast ministering to outcasts. We see grace offered to a prostitute. An adulterer. A tax-collector.
And he looks out at them and he is absolutely moved with compassion because he sees that they are “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” And he says I am here. I am here to “seek and save that which is lost.”
A missional church sees that people and culture are not enemies of the church, but broken treasures that God is restoring.
Because of this, a missional church is committed to:
• Cultural exegesis – becoming humble students of the varied people & cultures surrounding the church.
• Faithful contextualization – communicating gospel truth in ways the culture understands.
• Producing missionaries instead of consumers – equipping people to live out the gospel through their daily lives and work.
• Building a great city, not just a good church – the goal being more than a full church, but a transformed city.
• Social justice – healing real wounds and righting injustices in the community around them.
• Church planting – multiplying to new towns, cities, states and countries by starting new local churches.
Interestingly, however, Philippians 2:5-8 indicates that God came in human form so that Jesus could humble himself “by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” The man who was God was headed somewhere. The cross.
It is not enough simply that God lived among us. He also died for us.
Being “missional” is not enough. Mission fails if it does not point to the cross. The message that we are translating for culture must be “Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”
Of course, many churches that supposedly “get the gospel” fail to properly live out that gospel for their context; for them it is gospel in theory, not gospel in practical reality.
Because Jesus’ death has bought us life, we are now messengers of a new reality. We will faithfully proclaim and lovingly incarnate this new reality: to tell & live it for the hope of the world around us. This is the essence of mission.
So, as you can see, missional church is vastly more than just sending checks to some missionaries or even just being involved in international mission trips. The Bridge is committed to whatever it takes to be missional. HE is worth IT!
I am sitting here at MAC looking out at my beautiful surroundings and focusing on the parts of God's creation that are healthy for me to look at. I head to Farmington prison to speak tonight and I am contemplating what I can tell those men that might make a real difference in their hearts and minds as they go through their days inside the fence and then what will happen when they come back out. I will probably do what I always do -- give them the real truth about the condition of their hearts as Jesus looks at them. I will give them reality. I will tell them that they have same spiritual heart that I have (had) -- wicked, deceitful, and evil. And the only thing that can make that wicked heart righteous is the shed blood of Jesus Christ. It is difficult to make that believable and be very sweet. It also will only work if I make a connection with those men -- if they think I am real and I care. I will attempt to do so by showing that I have the same heart that they have. The only difference in us is that I have been law-abiding as I sin against God.
Just a few minutes ago, I finished reading an article in USA Today about why television had to shift shows away from "Leave it to Beaver" toward "Sex and the City" and "Grey's Anatomy." Everyone thinks it is because our society has gone to 'hell in a handbasket' in morals which may be a PART of it. But, the basic reason is that all post-boomer generations have no interest in their fiction showing a phony perfection. They require authentic; they require real. If "the Beav" was going to be redone today, it would never make it out of pilot unless we sense that Ward is struggling with the things that men really struggle with -- affirmation, fulfillment, proficiency in career, sex, and relationships. June would need to show her weaknesses as she fights the demons of aging and raging hormornes, not vacuuming in high heels and pearls. And Wally and the Beav would be considering dark thoughts as they were accepted or not by their peers.
These generations want the same things from their church. They do not have any interest in being a part of place that does not express authentic leadership and community. It is no accident that these generations respond well (I think) to my teaching, preaching, and leadership. I have always been one to lay out the whole package in everything I do. Should we not teach (including humor) about all subjects and not just the 'comfortable' ones? Should we not preach the perversion of the community at Corinth (Christians Gone Wild next summer maybe) as it relates to the current American culture or not preach the sexual intensity inside marriage from the Song of Solomon. I think we should and I am not afraid to. But,that feels weird to folks who really think that there are just some things that should not be opened up in public. So, on occasion, there are folks who think I go overboard in humor or subject material. They are probably right, but the "Leave it to Beaver" church almost destroyed the American church because it drove sin underground. Let's get it to the surface, so that we can truly 'repent and believe the Gospel.' Let's create authentic church, so that these generations may be saved.
