What is the church?

Luke 10

Everyone I read and talk to these days is in agreement that the calling of the church is NOT just to improve our methods, techniques, and strategies, but to get back to essence and core of who the church is called to be. One scripture that I have spent a lot of time reflecting on Luke 10 recently and I think it has a great to say to the church today about our mission and identity in the 21st century world. This is one time when we Jesus’ discipleship training, leadership development in action.

Identity: I love how Jesus sends out these 70 people two by two without mentioning their names. We really don’t know a lot about these people except that they followed Jesus in somewhat of close proximity as he went about His ministry. They weren’t the 12 disciples that were the closet in proximity to him, yet they were given a significant mission. I wonder in our churches today, what would happen if we were willing to follow Jesus without anyone knowing our name? It seems that they found their identity in the mission that Jesus sent them on and the text does not mention who they were in particular. While I do believe God created and values our uniqueness and changes our names so that we find our intended signficance (Peter, Jacob, etc), I think the first thing about discovering our identity as a church is as people sent in the image of God. After Jesus’ resurection, he came to discples and breathed His Spirit on them, not just to tell them how great and loved they are, but to sent them on His mission. “As the father, has sent me so I send you And with that He breathed the Holy Spirit on them.” I wonder how much excitement about their new identity they were filled with when they came back from their mission?

Mission: So what is this misison we are sent on? To bring the healing and restoration of the Kingdom of God being near. The church are agents of God’s reality and presence of the world. We are signs in the present of where the world is heading in the future and we are to embody that reality now. We bridge the gap between the brokeness of those around us and God and offer the healing through our very presence that only God can bring. I love how the instructions Jesus gives his discples are filled with honor, respect, and compassion for the other. They are to enter into the homes of the the people they go and enter into authentic relationship that brings healing. As the healing happens through these relationships, then they are to announce that it is because the Kingdom of God has become near to them. How opposite is that from the way mission has been talked about in the church so often? The mission has been talked about as a task of going and taking Jesus to people and annoucing the laws of the Kingdom of God rather than embodying the Kingdom of God through honor, respect, and genuine care for the other and bringing the invitation to enter into the way of healing and shalom that only God can bring. Through Jesus life, he invites us into the Kingdom of God, or reign of God, that is not a place we go, but a way of being human that never stops living. The Kingdom of God is a way of shalom- of finding reconciliation with God and other people and the world around us and to be apart of bringing hope into our broken world.

One other thing I love about this text is that they didn’t offer healing to each other before they were sent, they were sent to offer healing to others. I wonder how inadequate they felt along the way, but how much healing they experienced as God actually used them to heal others. I think it is the same for the church today. When we focus on getting the right information and spiritual nourishment, we miss the point because we are invited to find healing in the procecss of mission.

Communitas: A lot of talk these days is about community. Authentic community, healing community, etc. Starbucks has actually marketed community to us to sell their coffee even though real community rarely happens at starbucks in my experience. This text shows the basis for community grounded in mission: or communitas. The latin word, communitas, is really a community centered around a cause rather than just each other. Here we have a danger as well on either side- we can focus so much on the cause that we don’t care about each other or we can focus too much on each other that we miss the cause. We need to navigate and walk well in this tension as the church. Living in this tension is our calling that we cannot escape. We are called to be healing, missional communities that offer the healing presence of God as a community and participate in His restoration of the world.

Leadership: I love how Jesus sends out these unnamed disciples to learn through experience. Jesus is a genius when it comes to leadership. He showed them in his life by embodying a differenat way of being human, he taught them about what it looks like, called out the greatness in them by inviting them to participate, showed them a vision of what they could become, and sends them out to participate, and process their experiences with them. What would happen if the leaderhip of our churches did the same? What is we focused on sending and equiping our people to bring hope and life into the world rather than trying to do the right tactics to get more people to come and listen to us teach? Think about the brilliance of Jesus’ strategy, rather than getting everyone to come to him, people follow Him so they can be sent out. How many more people can the Kingdom of God touch, bless, and heal as people are sent out in all different directions. I think this is why he says that when he leaves, we will do greater things than him (jn 14:6) because His Spirit sends us in all different directions withou our unique gifts and abilities. How can we create spaces and opporutnites for the people of God to build these life-changing realtionships with those who are searaching for or not even yet aware that their hearts long for God? This is a huge part of our missional task as leaders.