Does Jesus’ Mission Have a Church?

By amazon Monday, September 23, 2019 Comment Edit

Here are four things church leaders must do to ensure every person in their neighborhood has a gospel witness.

Teenagers long for responsibility; adults often run from it.

Think about the average 14-year-old itching to transition from the seemingly mundane tasks of childhood into the official assignments of an adult. They want to drive. Create their own schedule. Have a job. Make money and determine how it’s spent.

They’ll soon find out that these highly anticipated responsibilities aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Adulting is tough. Most of us have no shortage of adult responsibility, and if we’re honest, we’d like to step back from some of the burden that comes with it.

So, when ‘would-be disciple-makers’ are encouraged to take on new responsibilities—particularly those involving the church’s divinely commissioned mission—many seem quite understandably unenthusiastic.

And what makes things much worse is that the average churchgoer respectively equates a call toward missional responsibility with a request to serve on a church committee, or an appeal to show up a few minutes early to make coffee on Sunday mornings.

Even these seemingly low-threshold responsibilities make many weak-in-the-knees as they consider how to add something new to an already jam-packed weekly routine of must dos.

With busy believers neck-deep in personal responsibility, and a similarly frantic church calendar appealing for their most valuable commodity—time—a huge question remains both unasked and unanswered: Who is taking spiritual responsibility for the spiritual harvest that sits neglected all around us?

At first glance, we might answer that the local church, corporately, bears this burden of responsibility. It’s we, collectively, who give ourselves to declare and demonstrate ...