The Southern Baptist Convention is a group of autonomous churches working together for certain causes. Historically, the primary cause for denominational cooperation has been evangelism. 100 churches (or 42,000 churches in the case of the SBC today) working together can do more to send missionaries around the world than 1 church trying its own thing. Thus the Southern Baptist Convention has from the start been a convention organized to facilitate the missions work of the various individual churches that voluntarily participate.
The work of the local church, however, is a bit more broad. While true that churches exist to facilitate the missions and outreach work of individuals within the church, this is not all that churches do. At a bare minimum we must speak of at least two functions of the local church: going forth to tell, and drawing together to grow. Both functions together serve one purpose: glorifying God. Thus the functions are not ends in themselves but ways of working for God’s glory.
The first function is the function of missions. We go throughout our neighborhoods and towns and countries and world sharing with others the bad news about sin and the good news about the grace, love, and mercy of God through Jesus Christ, praying that God might use us to lead others to himself.
The second function is the function of discipleship. We work to grow and ground believers in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ. Recognizing that it is not enough to get someone to profess faith in Christ, we then lead believers in the process of growing more like Christ each day.
The distinction in these functions is important. More and more I am hearing voices within the SBC speak as though the first function were the only real work of the church. For example, take the following snippet from the Great Commission Resurgence proposal:
[The Southern Baptist missional vision should be] As a convention of churches, our missional vision is to present the Gospel of Jesus Christ to every person in the world and to make disciples of all the nations.
In and of itself, that would be fine. As a missional statement it gets across what missions is intended to do: spread the gospel around the world. But the proposal goes on to say:
This missional vision must drive everything that Southern Baptists do, and reset every priority of the local church and denomination.
Here we should see the problem. The problem isn’t just in the GCR proposal. I’ve heard it from pastors, read it on SBC blogs, and seen it in denominational publications. The problem is that this kind of focus leads us to ignore or at least downplay one of the two functions of the church. We become so focused on expanding the walls of the city that we ignore the condition of the things inside the city. We are so focused on reaching unbelievers that we neglect discipleship and have a denomination full of superficial faith.
It is striking to me that the majority of the Bible is written for those already claiming to be the people of God. The majority of the Bible calls God’s people to greater knowledge, to deeper faith, to more faithful obedience. In the New Testament, the passages calling believers to share the gospel make up just a small subset of the passages calling for holiness, for obedience, for knowledge and understanding, for lives of prayer and studying the things of God.
We must go and tell. We must share the gospel. We are right to stress the importance and necessity of evangelism. If we do not share the gospel, we are sinning. But sharing the gospel is the fruit of a life focused on Christ. The more we grow in our love for God, the more we walk in obedience to God, the more we live in the righteousness of God, the more we will delight to tell others about God. The reason so much of our evangelism sounds so superficial is because it is. We have trained our people to tell others God loves them but we have not trained our peopleĀ to love God.
I think the best concise definition of evangelism is, “Loving God enough to make him known.” There are several things that makes this a good definition, but for our purposes this definition shows that the one telling the gospel must first be growing in his love for God, something that can only happen through discipleship, through walking in holiness, through growing in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ. The more believers walk with God, the greater our love grows. The more our love grows, the greater our desire to share him with others.
Thus we cannot say that a missional vision should drive everything we do. Getting back to the distinction between the local church and the Southern Baptist Convention, we can and should define the SBC in missional terms since that is why it exists. But the work of the local church goes beyond the work of the convention. Drawing together the two functions of the church and its one great purpose, something like the following might be a better vision for the local church: “Seeking the glory of God by helping believers grow in their love of GodĀ and faithfulness to God and by helping believers share the love of Christ throughout the world.”
Subscribe to feed

