If it is the responsibility of the church to participate in the Mission of God, and it is the responsibility of the church to do just that, then we need to act redemptively toward the people around us.

Keeping in mind that every Christian is the church, the body of Christ, then before we can effectively act redemptively to the people around us as a corporate body, we need to be doing so as individuals.

But we haven’t.

To those apart from God, we have engaged them with programmed sales pitches with pamphlets and intrusive knocks on strangers’ doors.  When they say they are uninterested in being invaded, we shake the dust off our sandals and move on, saying to ourselves that they have rejected the Gospel. They really just rejected our failure to live redemptively in a poor imitation of the Gospel.

To those apart from the body, Christians who have been burned or burdened by church and choose to separate themselves, we have no programmed response.  We simply call them names (“backsliders”) and give them the attitude that they know better and should be in church.

To those actively participating in the body, we’ll teach them to death and call it discipleship.  Sunday School, Sunday morning worship, Sunday night worship and Wednesday night “Prayer Meeting” where we actually pray very little, but at which we are expecting yet another lesson.  Accountability?  Mission?  Ministry?  Service?  Intercessory Prayer?  Mentoring in parenting?  Etc?  …  That all comes with special programs in which few participate.  Fellowship.  We do that really well within the body.

In short, individually and corporately, we’ve not been very redemptive.

We short-circuit the actual responsibility of the church and substitute the by product as our goal.  Translation: Instead of working hard to be redemptive, we work hard to get big.  The downside of that is that we can cheat our way to big.

You don’t have to be redemptive to be big.

Our goal is neither to be busy or big.  Our goal is to be redemptive.

If we are that, then no matter what else happens, we will stand before God unashamed.

Posts with related content

• February 9, 2010 -- The Missional Church: A short, simple video (0)
• November 3, 2009 -- Ed Stetzer & David Fitch (0)
• June 29, 2009 -- Missional and Relational via Paul in Athens (0)
• April 6, 2009 -- Mark Driscoll on Evangelism: Not Imposing but Proposing (0)
• November 5, 2009 -- Driscoll on Grace for the Disgraced (0)