God is calling the church to fulfill the Great Commission today! It is pivotal that all believers of Jesus Christ embody Jesus’ last words of commissioning.
Jesus said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:18b–20). Jesus’ intention was to make sure the disciples understood their mission when he was no longer physically present.
Some years ago during a church-planting convention in Orlando, Fla., the speaker said to the audience, “I have two pieces of important information for you; one is good news and the other one is bad news. [The good news is that] the total number of mega churches [churches with more than 2,000 in attendance on weekends] in the country has reached the amazing figure of more than 1,600.”
The speaker then said, “In the last 10 years, the United States has experienced a 10 percent decline [of the population identifying as Christians], from 86 percent to 76 percent.”
These are important facts that have a lot to do with the passage of Scripture from Matthew. Let us look at what the text is not saying to understand what the Great Commission is saying:
A. Notice that the commandment is not to go out and plant churches everywhere. And yet, we plant churches thinking that “if we build it,” disciples will show up somehow. If our final goal is to plant churches, that will become the center of what we do, and we will seldom make disciples of Jesus. But if our final goal is to make disciples of Jesus, we will always find a congregation inspired and willing to be the hands and feet of Jesus. (Credit to Mike Breen for this idea).
B. The Great Commission is not really about preaching the gospel. For some reason we equate good, effective preaching with the Great Commission. Great sermons don’t necessarily make for great, faithful disciples. Only godly disciples of Jesus make other godly disciples of Jesus.
C. The Great Commission is not about developing celebrated programs or lavish facilities. By emphasizing these things, we have nurtured a culture of busyness, and there is neither time nor energy left for us to fulfill the Great Commission.
D. The Great Commission has never been about numbers of people in the pew, but about faithfulness to the mission of God and the disciple-making task. The directive here is not to go and convert as many people as possible, as fast as we possibly can, so that they can come to church on Sunday. It is about how many people get so committed to Jesus that we can send them to bring God’s hope to others.
The Great Commission, then, is all about making disciples: true followers of Jesus who choose to lead a life transformed by God’s grace. It also has to do with teaching, as we model and embody the life of Jesus and personally obey Jesus’ commands.
Have we developed Missional Alzheimer’s that hinders our capacity to remember Jesus’ main desire for the world today? It is urgent that we go back to basics, back to making disciples of Jesus. The future of the church depends on this!
We at Mennonite Mission Network invite local congregations to experience a more intentional, relational, and organic form of discipleship that we call “missional discipleship,” the kind of disciple-making that reproduces the life of Jesus in others over and over again.
Amen.
