According to an often repeated story, legendary football coach, Vince Lombardi, once expressed his frustration by stopping practice and saying to his Green Bay Packers something like, “Let’s start at the beginning. Gentlemen, this is a football. These are the yard markers. I’m the coach. You are the players.”
Imagine that. The coach gathered his whole team of professionals who prided themselves in their knowledge of the game, and said, “Gentlemen, this is a football.”
Apparently their intimate knowledge of the game was hindering them from actually playing the game.
The same thing can happen in church life. We often get caught up in doing more and more in “ministry” and forget the primary mission. I once heard Andy Stanley, pastor of North Point Community Church, say, “Church will naturally drift toward complexity.”
Every now and then we need to return to the basics of following Christ and ask, “What are we to do as a church?” Here it is in a nutshell. And Jesus came and said to them:
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, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. (Matthew 28:18–20)
This passage, known as the “Great Commission” is the primary task of every local church. The United Methodist Church echoed Jesus when it said, “The mission of the church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.” At Woodbine we have characterized that mission as, “Reach out in the name of Jesus, Grow in the likeness of Jesus and Live all for Jesus.”
In Jesus’ words we find not only our mission, but how we are to accomplish that mission as well. We are to make disciples by baptizing and teaching. This means that
disciples are made when people are lead to the point of conversion, where they repent of their sins and confess Jesus Christ as Lord of their lives. It also means that as a church our job does not end there, we are to teach them to obey everything Jesus said. By any standard this is a daunting task. The mission is clear, we are to make disciples.
In the business of church life, however, we can forget our primary mission. We can become so caught up in the various programs of the church that we forget the point of it all: making disciples.
A good number of the leaders of the church have been reading a book entitled Simple Church: Returning to God’s Process for Making Disciples by Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger. This book is all about helping the church stay focused on it’s main mission,– making disciples. If making disciple is the mission of the church then everything the church does should be purposed to move people toward that goal.
I would urge every leader, every member and every person who calls Woodbine home to begin thinking about our primary mission and what it means for us to actually accomplish it. You can begin by reading the book or by coming to our next Leadership Gathering on Friday October 22.
At this gathering we will begin the conversation about what it would mean for us to deliberately focus everything we do on the mission of the church. I will present the basic points of the book, Simple Church, and lead discussions around what it would look like for Woodbine to focus on the mission of the church. Join us for what promises to be one of the most important conversations in the life of our congregation.
Call Sharon in the church office, 995-0007 and put your name on the confirmed list for this gathering, you don’t want to miss it.