In many evangelical churches we often hear the church’s vision and mission cast in Great Commission terms. The impetus is to be a Great Commission church because this, it is thought, is the very nature of what it means to be a church. This aspiration on the part of the clergy or the clergy and congregation need not indicate a formal connection with one or more of the Great Commission Church associations. It often indicates simply a more general sense that Jesus’ commission to his disciples in Matthew 28:16-20 constitutes the essential nature and purpose of Christian churches. This is why the Church and churches exist.
There is no question that the Church and local churches should have a strong outward dynamic through mission, evangelism, and service. The Church is not an exclusive club or secret society. Jesus calls not only individual believers but the Church as a body to love God and love the neighbor with the wholehearted, sacrificial love he embodied and continues to manifest to the world.
Yet the nature and purpose of the Church cannot be adequately captured, distilled, or focused by the label or identity of “a Great Commission church.” For the Church is the new community of humankind or the new humanity created by God in Jesus. The Church constitutes in a real sense the vanguard of the new heaven and earth. Just as God first created humanity in Adam and Eve, so God has re-created humanity in Jesus Christ and the Church.
If the Church were solely or even primarily a missional body, it would cease to exist in the final re-creation of heaven and earth which God will effect at the end of history as we know it. Yet that prospect makes no sense. In God’s gracious power and love, the Church, humanity re-created by God, will continue, perfected, in the new age pictured for us in Revelation 21.
I speak here chiefly in theological and essential terms, not in terms of the practical realities of the Church of wheat and tares. However, it may be inaccurate to assert such a qualification. For indeed the Church may well be the new humanity and the vanguard of the new heaven and earth in both theological and practical terms in this world if we conceive of the work of Christ as source and guide of the Church and not only as goal or end result.
In other words, one of the category mistakes of Christian thought, and thereby of Christian experience, is to understand the work of Christ almost completely in triumphant and static terms of the finished or end product. Too often we hold up the work of Christ in the life of the Church and the lives of individual Christians primarily with the perfected end state in view. We emphasize what will be in perfection so much that we lose the sense of good in process in this life toward that blessed completion. Indeed, we may even thus lose the sense of progress in faith, hope, and love, truth, beauty, and goodness, that will surely mark our corporate and individual life not only in this age but in the glorious age to come.
We better understand and experience the presence and activity of Christ in our world and in our community of the redeemed in terms of dynamic process as well as result: Christ dealing with sins or our fallenness, not only Christ having dealt with sins. We understand and experience these aspects of Christ’s work as the “already and the not yet” reality of the kingdom of heaven in our world, as many theologians have put it. Here, in this existence, between the cross and the Second Coming, we are the Church in process, the Church of wheat and tares. This is truly the Church, in this age. And of course, when we speak of the Church of wheat and tares, we refer at least as much to the wheat and tares within our very selves as well as within the community.
We come back then to the point that the Church most truly and essentially exists not for, but because. The Church, God’s new creation, is not utilitarian. That would be like saying that God created humanity in the first place for utilitarian purposes. The Church does not exist for mission. The Church exists because God loves. The Church emerges from God’s love and because of God’s love through the suffering labor of the cross (in contrast to the painless labor of God which gave rise to the cosmos and humanity in the first creation), in and to the delighting and loving pleasure of God. Any for of the Church’s existence grows out of this irreducible because of its existence.
The for-ness of the Church then roots in and stems from the because-ness of the church. The for-ness is not rooted in utilitarianism but in essence. And this for-ness is multidimensional. The Church, being the new humanity in Christ, lives out the for-ness of its existence in several broad but fundamental ways. In terms of purpose and activity, the Church consists of a community of worship, fellowship, service, and witness (by word and deed). Worship, fellowship, service, and witness comprise the multidimensional purpose of the Church stemming from its essential nature as creature of God’s love. With this in mind, it is wrong to say that the Church exists for witness or mission. Therefore, to seek to be a Great Commission church as if this were the whole reason for the Church to exist is to misunderstand the essence of the Church and to limit the multidimensional purpose of the Church, which is to love God and love the neighbor.
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