Prayer # 1

That we would keep Christ and his command to proclaim Him and follow Him as the centre of our raison d’etre...When the women found the empty tomb on the Sunday of the Passover the angel said, ‘Don’t be alarmed, you are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here’
And when Jesus appeared to the disciples after the resurrections he said these words to them in the Gospel of Matthew… "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."
All over the place I see churches trying to set vision statements
‘a church of 500 by 2010’
‘A church that impacts the city’
‘A church…. whatever…’
These are all about the church. When Jesus’ command is all about the demonstration and announcement that the Kingdom of God is near. It is a subtle and easy but major difference to confuse the church and the kingdom of God. One is not the other. That same mistake has wrongly resulted in the church wrongly mounting armies. The church is here to serve and announce the Kingdom of God. The reign of God. No more, no less.

But it is not the Kingdom. And in time, it will pass. We must hold that truth and let it inform our priority for mission. When those anxious and scared women fled from the empty tomb they had never heard of the church but they did start to understand that their Lord and teacher, Jesus, who had been so publicly humiliated and killed was not just a wise teacher… but was the Son of God. And all of his words about the immanence of the Kingdom now started to make sense.

Our job as the church today is not firstly the expansion of our organisation. It is the introduction of people to Jesus and the demonstration of how his followers live… Bishop Leslie Newbigin said it this way (I have adapted this a bit):

"The church’s goal is not to make converts who make more converts who then make more converts in order to grow the church. There is no purpose to that other then the making of converts like one might advance the allegiance of a certain football team over other teams or sell cars to boost sales. That will not change society. That will not address justice or demonstrate the advancement and imminence of God’s reign. That will not promote healing and compassion. In sum, the world will not necessarily be better off with a bigger church. However the world will be made new when the name of Christ is advanced and those who call themselves his followers follow in his ways and in his purposes to his ends until he comes.”