Mandate For Mission

An American described his Sunday morning corner of the globe as a bustling city of yuppies loitering on crowded sidewalks and the common lot headed for the nearest coffeehouse, Sunday brunch, or body-building salon. The sidewalk crowd varied from Asian to Middle-easterner with a smattering of Hindu couples. Further down the street and almost out of sight, a smaller crowd of white people threaded their way into a white protestant church.

The observer noted that the white crowd seemed to be a little out of step with the clashing colors, blended cultures and mixed creeds on the crowded sidewalk. With the media awash with issues of emigration, terrorism, genocide, and  catastrophic weather, how do you respond when you gather for fellowship at your church and listen to the gossip about our fractured and fragmented mass of humanity?

Do you feel a need to identify more closely with the needs of God’s World, or do you passionately wish for a return to more normal days when our problems all looked and acted just like you?

Accept the Idea

Finding your Mandate for Mission begins with accepting the idea that our mission is God’s idea and not ours. God calls us to saturate our world with His-story. It is not our option to choose or reject; it is his mandate for us to accept.

Any vision of the Church’s Mission  must begin with understanding who we are as people of God. It is essential that every congregation develop a firm conviction of who it is and what God has called it to do. When the church does not reach outward, upward, downward, and around it, who will?

Jesus launched his ministry by calling-and-commissioning twelve students to “go” and disciple others. He mentored his dozen ordinary citizens and trained them to go forth and represent him, in his name. Thus equipped, he sent them out to offer peaceful solutions to their fragmented humanity that badly needed reconciling with God.

Did he mean only for them to go, or did disciple them so they could eventually identify us, so that we too could accept that mandate and perpetuate it? A thorough penetration of the sidewalk crowd can happen only when we take the gospel continuously and share it perpetually with every person within our ministry area.

If we as believers do not accept God’s Mandate, who will?

Practice the behavior

The first-century Jerusalem church did more than just hold fellowship meetings and conduct worship services for the community. They saturated Jerusalem with their word-of-mouth literature and God did great wonders among the multitudes that came under the influence of the church. This created problems for the church and eventually caused the members to be scattered throughout Judea and Samaria and unto the uttermost parts.

As they went, they took with them the game-changing concept of the priesthood of believers and each believer became an active participant in the Kingdom of God, walking daily with the Lord Jesus and personally directed  internally by the Spirit of God. Can today’s church do less? If so, every nation become part us of our mission field, every congregation become a sending station, and every member becomes a missionary.

Once we accept this idea, leaders can teach the concept, devise strategies for accomplishing our identified mission, and lead us in modeling this behavior.

Promote the practice

Proclaim the practice and promotion of this Mandate from every pulpit. Teach it in every classroom. Model it in every congregation. Strong witness calls for involved leaders to guide the visioning process, to plan, and to organizing ways of providing opportunity for every member participation. Witnessing is every Christian‘s vocation.

Sunday school classes, small groups of every kind, and every part of church life should be a successful extension for witnessing and winning souls. Any organization within the organized church that does not contribute to the missionary mandate should be terminated

Prepare /Enlist and equip/ the personnel

Rather than focusing on the congregation as the minister’s mission field, believers need to elevate the concept of the priesthood of the laity, commission the people of God (the Laos) to do the work of ministry, and focus on the mandate of the church both inside the building and out in the community.

Begin with leaders that are committed to a biblical model. Enlist lay members in a variety of program opportunities for lifestyle and friendship evangelism. Do not neglect providing opportunities for confrontational and one-on-one evangelism.

Establish and maintain systematic ongoing witness-training classes. Equip people to present the claims of the gospel and make it a priority for every member. Sooner or later, every member will face an opportunity for leading another person to Christ; like any good Scout, be prepared.

Achieve your purpose by preparing to succeed

If you do not plan to succeed, you plan to fail. If you do not plan opportunities for market-place ministries, there will always be a reason for not doing it. Schedule regular outreach visitation. Conduct special projects. Provide opportunities for discovering new prospects. Enlist help for door to door witnessing, telephone calling campaigns, and community bible schools, but be sure to plan events that make the best use of the spiritual gifts available among current members.

Celebrate your victories

Hit and miss methodologies will not succeed in today’s complex world community. Only through total participation can you achieve total penetration. Therefore, expect every member to share the gospel with someone, somewhere, sometime, somehow.

Do not neglect celebration. When someone leads another to Christ, celebrate. Affirm one another for doing the one thing every member should be doing. When Jesus returned to the presence of the Father, his parting reminder to the church instructed us to be His witnesses. We begin at home where we live--Jerusalem. We model our faith in our community--our Judea. Some have influence among diverse ethnic peoples and will witness in Samaria. Others will become cross-cultural specialists and will witness to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8, NIV).

When every nation becomes our mission field, and when every congregation becomes a sending station, and when every member becomes a missionary, only then will we adequately fulfill our mandate to be God’s people on mission through ministry in God’s own unique and powerful way. This is walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com