Microchurch: The Great Commission

For over twenty years my family had been faithfully involved in a traditional evangelical church. For the majority of that time, I served as an elder and my wife worked and led in a variety of capacities. Despite that, we were never a part of the foundational core. We were usually hovering at the fringes, pushing the envelope of what was deemed acceptable by the traditions of our denomination. We had a lot of ideas that never gained traction – they were just too “out there” to be embraced by the inner circle that actually controlled the direction of the church. Our proposals to end long-standing traditions that we felt no longer served a legitimate purpose, were met with impenetrable resistance. I often received pushback in my teaching and preaching as I challenged assumed norms and on occasion was the recipient of some unpleasant expressions of displeasure. So, when I stepped down from leadership for the sake of my spiritual health, I’m sure many were not surprised – they had been suspicious of my spiritual health for quite some time, although the roots of our concerns were miles apart. While our departure was not entirely unexpected, when we walked out the doors for the last time, I am certain there were those who felt we were walking off a cliff, falling into a great abyss of blasphemy and turning our backs on orthodox faith.

Looking back, I find it ironic that the one driving force constantly pushing me to the fringes of what was deemed acceptable in our tradition, a tradition that held scripture in the highest regard, was, in fact my study of scripture. Often, there was a sense of dissonance when I compared what I was reading in scripture to what I saw in practice in the church. I asked a lot of questions and received a lot of well-rehearsed answers, but it was extremely rare to find someone willing to ponder along with me and ask what could be if we tried to read scripture with fresh eyes. There was a standard filter in place that we were expected to read scripture through, and my lack of participation was disruptive and unsettling.

When I dared to ask if our church practices truly aligned with the teaching of the Bible things got messy. I tried to imagine what it would be like if we started with nothing. What if there was no previous church to model ourselves after and all we had was the New Testament to guide us? If we started from scratch, would we end up where we are? That was at the heart of my questioning.

The reality is that much of what we traditionally do in the church can’t be found in the pages of the Bible. That does not necessarily make them bad or good, they just are not there. You won’t find a definitive way for participating in communion, in fact you won’t even find communion referred to as communion. You won’t find a prescription for the order of a worship service either, or instructions for the architecture of the church building, because those weren’t really things yet. Again, their absence does not make any particular thing good or bad, right or wrong. The problem comes when we claim, or assume, or imply, that a particular practice is “Biblical” when it is not.

Some dissonance, then, is neither good nor bad, it just is. It is what happens as we try to adapt the practice of our faith to constantly changing societal norms and cultural conditions. But there are some disconnects that cause me greater concern because I believe they really do matter in how we “do” church. There is no better place to begin looking for these than The Great Commission. We may disagree on the final expression and exact application, but I would challenge you to look at Matthew 28:16-20 with fresh eyes and honestly evaluate the integrity with which the church you are a part of implements three key aspects of this passage.

16“So the eleven disciples went to Galilee to the mountain Jesus had designated. 17When they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted. 18Then Jesus came up and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, 20teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’” (NET)

The Authority of Jesus

Before dealing with the actual command of The Great Commission, we must deal with the authority of Jesus. Without his authority, the entire passage is meaningless. So, Jesus sandwiches his instructions with a proclamation of his all-inclusive (“all authority…has been given to me”), endlessly enduring (“to the end of the age”) authority. But unlike the typical authority of immense human institutions, the authority of Jesus is a personal authority (“I am with you always”) promised to each one to whom the command is directed.

If we accept that The Great Commission is not just directed to 11 apostles but is also the key point of mission for the church through the ages, then we must also accept that this personal authority extends to each of us who are part of the church. Everything we do as a church, then, begins and ends with the authority of Jesus. Everyone in the church is subject to his authority, and each one who is part of the church has access to this authority. This is where my disconnect begins.

When I look at the traditional structures of the western church, the practical reality is that the authority of Jesus is often talked about, but seldom seen. The authority of Jesus is no longer personal, it is distant and abstract, accessible only to the select few. On a functional level for the common person in the pew, the authorities of the western church have PhDs and MDivs, they write books, speak at conferences, and pastor megachurches. The authorities are power brokers of the evangelical industrial complex with charismatic personalities and an entourage. Even on a smaller local level, authority rests in the hands of pastors and other “full-time” ministers, as well as a select few chosen to “lead” the church.

It is true that we see a select few in the New Testament who have greater influence than others, but we must keep in mind who was chosen and who did the choosing. When Jesus chose his apostles, he did not choose the powerful, the educated, the charismatic, or the influential. He chose common people, and he empowered them with his authority. As we read through Acts we see others, more common people (with the exception of Paul), join the apostles in spreading the gospel and building up the church – ordinary people doing extraordinary things. That is not what we see today. Ordinary people are expected to leave the extraordinary things to the professionals.

The western church today has displaced the authority of Jesus. The disciples of the New Testament depended on the leading of the Holy Spirit, the authority of Jesus made available to each of them. Today we depend on programs, buildings, music, special events, and charismatic personalities. We pray for 10 minutes and plan for months. When we pray, we talk and forget to listen. We create strategies first and ask Jesus to bless them second. All these things point to displaced dependence on displaced authority.

The results are clear. The church in the west is not spreading and growing as it did in the first century, it is shrinking, dividing, and self-destructing. Our authorities are embroiled in scandals and the ordinary people who think of themselves as powerless, are walking away, disillusioned by the lack of similarity between what they see in Acts 2 and what they see in our version of the church today. “Church shopping” was once a problem, but it is a lesser issue now, because Christians are just staying home - Christians are not leaving one church for another; they are just leaving.

Somehow the church needs to find its way back to giving more than lip-service to the authority of Jesus. We need to depend less on our own plans and programs and rediscover the power of waiting on the authority of Jesus through the leading of the Holy Spirit. The leaders of the church need to make it clear, not just in words, but in deeds, that there is beauty in God using ordinary, flawed, even doubting (notice verse 17) people for his purposes instead of fearing what might happen if the common person is permitted to do too much.

The Call to Go

In most churches today it would be easy to mistake the command to “go” in the Great Commission, as a command to “come.” It is a long standing tradition, even if it is unspoken, that the goal for those of us sitting in the pews is to persuade people to come to us. Our most common evangelistic strategy is to get people into the church building where, in theory, they will be exposed to the gospel and have a life changing experience. We devise all kinds of programs and events with this in mind, even using our children as pawns in the process. But clearly this is not what Jesus had in mind. This is not how the disciples of Jesus understood the command. We can debate a lot of the specifics about what it means to “go,” but “coming” isn’t the same as “going.”

So, in the book of Acts we see a whole lot of disciples going. Some go great distance and go quite often, while others simply “go” within the community where they live. What we do not see in the book of Acts is disciples trying to persuade unbelievers to come to church. Never do we see in the New Testament an attractional model of evangelism. But that is the default model of the western church today. There is a classic movie scene where aliens land on earth and when they come out of the spacecraft, they ask of the people staring at them, “take us to your leader.” The people are confused and wonder who they should take the aliens to. If we imagine the non-Christian asking the ordinary Christian the same question, the response should be obvious. We should be taking them to Jesus, not our pastor.

Let’s be honest, going is hard. The attractional model is much easier, and it lets us off the hook. Taking someone to church is relatively easy, but taking them to Jesus, isn’t that the pastor’s job? If we take Matthew 28 seriously, going is not an option. We may not be called to go great distances (but we should not be quick to assume that we are not), but we can’t stay in hiding, venturing out only to find refuge in a church building on Sundays, hoping the rest of the world will come to us. Going is important because it is an expression of our faith in the authority of Jesus, and it is a demonstration that we truly believe that he is with us, just as he promised. When we take someone to the pastor, we are expressing faith in the authority of the pastor, not necessarily in Jesus. But most Christians do not feel comfortable taking another person to Jesus, and that leads to my third disconnect.

Making Disciples

The heart of Jesus’ command in The Great Commission is to “make disciples… teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” Somewhere along the way, the western church began mistaking “evangelism” for “discipleship” as if the two are synonymous. The practice of making disciples became a practice of making converts. The expectation of obedience has faded and morphed to the point that the only thing that matters is a free ticket to heaven. Many lament this practice, and most Christians would acknowledge that this is not the same as discipleship, and yet it is still the default practice of the western church. But Jesus does not call us to make converts, he calls us to make disciples, and the two are vastly different.

There is an additional description that often goes unreported and unnoticed in The Great Commission – “teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” Obedience has become an unpopular word in our culture, and it has bled into Christian culture as well. We love grace (don’t get me wrong, grace is awesome), but we cheapen God’s grace when we believe that the only expectation God makes of us is an intellectual acknowledgement that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. Converts are content with intellectual acknowledgments, disciples are not.

As unpopular as the idea might be, being a disciple requires obedience – not the one and done kind of obedience of saying a sinner’s prayer or getting dunked in water, but ongoing, life changing obedience to the commands of Jesus. It is an obedience that goes beyond a Ten Commandments kind of morality, it is an obedience that loves unlovable people in uncommon ways. It is an obedience that lives sacrificially, gives generously, and rejoices always. It is an obedience that is not taught in a Bible study, it is an obedience learned through contact, through relationship, through proximity on a regular basis.

When we look at disciple making in the New Testament, we see the apostles planting churches and staying for a prolonged period of time. There was, no doubt, teaching happening on a purely informational level, but more importantly they stayed (see Acts 18:11, for example) to share their lives with those who they were teaching. That is why Paul would not only encourage the church in Corinth to follow his teaching, but he could also say, “I urge you to imitate me” (1 Corinthians 4:16).

The western church by contrast has reduced discipleship to learning the right doctrine and following the established rules. There is frequent talk of “living life together” but if we are honest, it is mostly talk. We have incorporated the worldly desire to privacy, personal rights, and independence into foundational elements of western “Christian” faith. These are not elements of the faith that Jesus passed on to his disciples. Genuine discipleship requires a lack of privacy for the sake of openness and honesty. Discipleship requires the sacrifice of personal rights for the greater good without regard for what might be received in return. Discipleship requires a trusting interdependence on one another knowing that the body is made of many parts of equal worth. Because of all this, discipleship is personal and messy. Discipleship can’t be done by delivering a sermon or leading a Bible study. Discipleship is done by sharing your life – giving your life to another person for them to see and experience in an array of settings that challenges the very faith that we proclaim. Discipleship is not merely a matter of the mind; it deals with the obedience of the heart.

Somehow the church must reimagine discipleship to be more reflective of the original intent and practice. It is difficult to see that happening effectively in the traditional church model. I’m sure there are measures of success that I am unaware of, but on the whole the western church is failing in this regard. Converts are now turning away from the church which is speeding its decline in the western world. Our response, unfortunately, has been to double down and making converts instead of recognizing that this has been a catastrophic failure of Christendom.

To address the dissonance that I have experienced in this passage and many others, I have searched for an expression of church that is willing to strip away the traditional conventions of evangelical churches to get to the very basics of Christian faith. The closest I have discovered is most commonly found, not in the western church, but in the global south as Disciple Making Movements (DMM). It is virtually unknown in the United States, but one of the few examples, Kansas City Underground, has thrived by implementing the basic principles of this movement. As they grow through this process, they are sharing what they have learned with anyone, like me, who is desperately interested in being the church in a different way. This is the beginning of my group’s journey as a “microchurch” as we seek to reconnect our understanding of scripture to the practice of the church.

I have been told frequently, over the last five years of my search, that I will never find the perfect church. I don’t deny that, but I find the constant repetition of this worn-out reminder, to be one more piece of evidence that we have given up on doing better. I have never been in search of the perfect church; I have been in search of a different church. I am unwilling to concede that we must settle for where we are without hope of doing better. God has been working on my heart for years and I have decided that if I can’t find something different, it is time to take my imperfections and be something different. In the posts that follow over the next several months (hopefully years), I hope to share my journey of reconnecting the pieces.