Six Counsels for a Sending Church
In our church, we have a service review every Sunday night where we get the staff and interns together and try to go over the core seminar classes, the Sunday school classes, the morning service, the evening service, the prayers, the hymns and service, the sermons. We're trying to model four things: giving godly criticism, giving godly encouragement, receiving godly criticism, and receiving godly encouragement.
I think the most advanced test is receiving godly encouragement, to not to be confused by it. Especially when it comes to the powerful important topic of sharing the gospel with those who've never heard, we tend to idolize success, apparent success. We know that the Great Commission will succeed (Revelation 5 & 7). There is no doubt. What His word is purposed to do, it'll bring about. The question that I want us to consider is: how will this happen? What will success in the Great Commission look like?
Here are six counsels for you to think of, note down, and meditate on.
1. Question Current Norms
First, let's learn to patiently question current norms. For example, the other day I was lovingly told by a dear Christian brother that our goal in the Great Commission is to make disciples. Making disciples is certainly good, it is certainly commanded, but we have to be very careful. We need to look at the apparent agreement we have and ask a few questions. I think it's sometimes harder for us to remain faithful through half-truths presented as the whole truth, as J. I. Packer used to warn us about, than it is for us to deal with complete untruths.
I remember what John Owen said once: “I would rather meet a hundred devils roaring than one smiling.” I think I know what he means – when somebody seems to agree with you and yet events expose the fact that they really don't. We need God's help, His Spirit to help us see the truth, to discern. My friend deployed the phrase “making disciples” in distinction from and possibly in opposition to planting good churches. But what I understand from the witness of the New Testament, from what the men who heard the Great Commission did in Acts, what they wrote about, is that they were planting churches in order to obey the Lord Jesus's Commission.
2. Define Terms
Another way to be faithful stewards of this gospel going forward around the world is to define our terms. Now, I have found by personal experience that this exercise is not the way for you to become popular. It is seen by some as the nerds crashing the jocks’ party. The jocks know what they’re doing, they don’t want to waste time defining it. But I would suggest that a little time spent in definition can bear lots of fruit. There are plenty of good examples of words I've seen used significantly differently than we might assume. Words like gospel, Christian, church, missions, conversion, elder, conversion, and others.
Do you assume when somebody else says they “affirm the gospel,” that they mean what you mean by it? I remember once being in a group of pastors gathered from around the country and different denominations to settle some issues on the doctrine of the church. After a morning's conversation, I went up to the guy who was leading it and I said, “You know, I think it would probably be a good thing if we would just define the word gospel.” And he kind of laughed at me and said, “Well, we don't need to do it. We all agree on that.” I said, “If we all agree on it, it won't take long.”
So after the break, he invited us to go up to the whiteboard. Immediately, as soon as someone wrote down a weak starting point, the criticism started. In about five minutes, it was like we were at the Tower of Babel. That was on “the gospel” with a room full of seminary presidents, denominational leaders, bishops, and pastors all calling themselves evangelical.
Brothers and sisters, define your terms. Make sure you know what you're talking about.
3. Make Distinctions
Let me suggest, especially in terms of missions, that we distinguish long-term work from short term work.
I say that with real appreciation for short-term work. Our church regularly has short-term mission trips going out. But endeavors that don't result in sound healthy reproducing churches are generally supplementary. There's nothing wrong with that. But we believe work that results in healthy multiplying churches is something we need to be able to discuss clearly and distinctly without meaning any offense to others. Matt Rhode’s book No Shortcut to Success offers some useful guidance in that area.
Some methodologists have made distinctions like this seem insignificant. Charles Van Engen, in his 1996 volume Missions on the Way, wrote that “to confess with one’s mouth and believe in one’s heart that Jesus is Lord—that is all there is. Nothing else really matters. All else is to be held lightly. Everything else is negotiable.” That sounds good to modern American evangelicals, but if we want to be sensitive to the revelation God has given of Himself in His word, we'll find there are many things that are not essential for salvation, but that might be essential for us to be able to have a church together or to go on a missions trip, like Paul and Barnabas found out when they wanted to take Mark. These aren’t unimportant matters. They're not essential for salvation, but they're still significant.
This kind of “essentialism,” the belief that all that matters is what's essential for salvation, is actually a small island that's always making itself smaller until it shrinks and vanishes. You defend what God has in His word. What He has revealed, He has a reason for revealing.
4. Listen to the End of the Great Commission
Resolve to listen to the end of the Great Commission, the sort of “lost dimension” of the Great Commission.
In Matthew 28, you see the alls: We tend to concentrate on the “all nations.” It’s a great thing to concentrate on, but we don't know the other alls as much: “all authority,” “observe all that I've commanded you,” and “I am with you always.” I want you to notice that “always to the end of the age” seems to presume that the work we're to be involved in is work that is not of a passing nature. The work of seeing churches established will endure until Christ returns.
The quality of the work is related to the goal of the work. What we want to see in our own churches, is what we ought to desire in our missions. When somebody buys a house owned by a builder who built it for himself, that’s a good sign. The buyer knows the house will be well-built. That's what we want our churches to be like. That's what we want for the churches that we establish. We want them to be solid and well-built.
Brothers and sisters, human strategies are often fads. They come and they go. God's evangelism plan is the local church. If we can see what the New Testament teaches us about the local church, we'll know that it's the love that we have for one another – that interior work of the church – that is used by God's Spirit evangelistically. That's how the world will know Christ. The world will know that you are mighty disciples by the love you have for one another (John 13:34–35). Sometimes we see the fruit and sometimes we don't. Know that as you share the gospel with your kids who don't seem to respond to it, at least right now. Know that when you're sharing the gospel with friends or neighbors who seem unresponsive. Charles Bridges said, “The seed may lie under the clods till we lie there, and then spring up.” We like immediately visible results, but God has a different timetable. God will sometimes use us, call us home, and then keep the work going with others. We need to trust him with that, and establish our churches toward that end.
5. Fund the Good Stuff
This is a simple one but an important one. Let's fund the good stuff.
Pastors, I need you to get involved with your church missions committee. I need you to get involved with your church missions budget. Please take some of the theological acumen that you bring from your study of God's word to your sermons and apply it to the missions work that you support too. Have you seen what the people who you're giving your dollars to are actually doing? Have you weighed up and evaluated not merely their own personal sacrifices, but what it is specifically they're doing on the field? You should be leading and encouraging your elders to do exactly that. Encourage them to be the main leaders in searching out good missions to be able to get behind with your money and your emphasis and your leadership.
In our church we spend money on sending our pastors to visit our missionaries. It's very useful (Acts 15:36). But at the same time, in our church, we’ve found spending money to advance the gospel is, frankly, a challenge. I've been wrestling with Romans 10:14: “How then will they call on him and whom they have not believed and how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And now how are they to hear without someone preaching and how is someone to preach unless they are sent?” And I’ve had to ask, as Capitol Hill Baptist Church, do we send people to preach to those who've never heard? Well, yes, in terms of individuals. But, in terms of reaching an unreached language? No, I've been there for 30 years, and I'm not sure we've directly sent anyone to do that, and I'm not proud of it.
Pray for us, as a church, that we would see the missions work that we are involved with prosper, and that we would recover a concern for, and an ability to reach unreached languages. And I would likewise challenge you to look at your own church's mission's budget. See what you're supporting. If we want to send, we have to spend.
6. Treasure Personal Obedience
Teach your congregation to esteem, even to treasure, personal obedience, even small obedience.
“And he said, with what can we compare the kingdom of God or what parables shall we use for it? It's like a grain of mustard seed, which when sewn on the ground is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet when it is sewn, it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” (Mark 4:30).
The contrast between the smallness of the seed and the largeness of the plant is striking. The point is not simply that the kingdom of God will be great. Everybody knew the kingdom of God would be great. The surprise is that the kingdom of God could appear insignificant.
Even so, it appeared at the time to be an exceedingly insignificant movement composed of an itinerant rabbi and a varying band of hangers-on, hardly a movement to shake the world, let alone to shape it. Surely there must be some more obvious means of growing a kingdom – the media, the academy, the military, the marketplace, politics, or multiplying disciple making movements. But Jesus already faced that temptation at the beginning of his earthly ministry. Satan had said, worship me and I'll give you all the nations of the earth. Instead, Jesus looked over that small band of disciples and said, I'll take them instead. Surely we can sympathize with the incredulity of the disciples. Surely if we wanted some way to affect the world, we could find something more powerful than preaching, than sowing seed.
Any seed looks insignificant the day you plant it, but then it grows and how it grows. And this seed, the word of God, is particularly prolific. This parable was to cause the disciples to look to the future when they could imagine it being the largest plant, and to reinterpret the present in light of that future. When we do this, we begin to see what God is doing, not only with you and me, but with all creation. You begin to want to be a part of it. Pastors, teach your people this. Teach them to treasure the small specific obedience that will shape the ultimate gospel victory.
The Will and Wisdom to Send and Go
In 1857, from Prince Edward Island in Canada, came young George Gordon with his young wife, Ellen, to take the gospel message to the island people of the South Pacific. They landed on the island of Erromango, an island already well known for producing some of the first missionary martyrs. Gordon spent time learning their language. He shared his medical skills and established a good reputation for the new religion that he brought. He established a school for the people. He gave most of his time to translating the Bible into the language of the people. He felt that this was the longest lasting service he could render the people of Erromango. Though threatened and repeatedly told to leave the island, Gordon resolved that to do great things a man must live as though he never had to die.
After four years of living there, on May the 20th, 1861, George Gordon was murdered, and then mere minutes later, his wife Ellen was as well. When the news of the martyrdom reached George’s aged and sightless mother, she cried out “my son, my son,” and she wept. He had a younger brother, James. James was studying for the ministry. When the news came to him, he was plowing on the family farm. He immediately sent in an application to the mission board. He asked that he might be sent to take his brother's place in Erromango and preach the message of forgiveness and love to his brother's murderers. He knew that even his brother's death had not ended God's plan for the gospel to go to the Erromangans.
In fact, James did see the fruit of the gospel on Erromango. But in the strange providence of God, James too was martyred there. News of the martyrdom reached Canada, and at first they were afraid to tell his mother. But when the story of her second son's death was told to her, she quietly exclaimed, “I wish that I had another boy to send, that the heathen may receive salvation.”
Friends, I would say that Mrs. Gordon's gospel resolve matched her sons. She was as willing to give as they were to go. May God give our churches today that kind of willingness, that kind of wisdom to do so as well.
This article was adapted from Mark Dever’s talk at The Missionary Conference 2024, “The Church and Missions”