MC — Missionaries

We’re wrapping a 3-week series looking at the identities and rhythms that we live out as disciples of Christ together in the everyday stuff of life. We do this primarily through what we call Missional Communities.

A Missional Community is more than a small group (but not less than one). They aim to be a family of servant missionaries sent by God as disciples who make disciples. Our Missional Communities gather weekly to apply the sermons and seek to live life in Biblical community that challenges and encourages each person to grow in following Jesus. These groups are about more than existing primarily for ourselves and instead seek to engage those who are far from Christ as part of our mission.

This week we looked at our identity as missionaries. We focused on Matthew 28:16-20:

16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus haddirected them. 17 And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted. 18 AndJesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Fatherand of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I havecommanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Lesslie Newbigin once wrote that “the commission to disciple all the nations stands at the center of the church’s mandate, and a church that forgets this, or marginalizes it, forfeits the right to the titles ‘catholic’ and ‘apostolic.’ … The truth is that the Gospel escapes domestication, retains its proper strangeness, its power to question us, only when we are faithful to its universal, supranational, supracultural nature…” Of the lack of missional faithfulness he goes on to say, “It is, I fear, much more clearly evidence of a shift in belief. It is evidence that we are less ready to affirm the uniqueness, the centrality, the decisiveness of Jesus Christ as universal Lord and Savior, the Way by following whom the world is to find its true goal, the Truth by which every other claim to truth is to be tested, the Life in whom alone life in its fullness is to be found.” These words are prophetic and startling.

But the antidote is not the oft-cited Western sentiment of ‘try harder,’ ‘do more,’ or ‘be better.’ The antidote — and the serum — is the gospel. The gospel shows us that Jesus’ grace precedes, accompanies, and follows disciples’ obedience. Put another way: the indicative of Christ’s strength goes before, alongside, and after the imperative of disciples’ responsibilities. Just like our identities of family and servants, we’re only able to live into and out of our identity as missionaries when we first and properly understand who Christ is, what he has done, and who that makes us.

Give the sermon text a read and a listen and we hope to see you this week at a Family Meal and/or a DNA group to dive even deeper.