Why the Mission Needs the Marks of the Church
by R. Scott Clark |
(page 3 of 7)
What the EM Gets Right
There are a number of fundamental disagreements between the EM and
the Reformed confession. Nevertheless, there are at least eight
points about the EM that confessional Reformed churches should
appreciate. Some of these points come directly from the EM and they
stimulate some indirectly.
1. Christendom was a mistake and more importantly we live after
Christendom. Christians ought to engage the whole world with all of
God’s revelation. The attempt to recapture or reconstitute
Christendom is a great diversion from our true vocation and the
mission of God at this stage in redemptive history. The gospel may
not be safely identified with any particular political program
(left, center, or right) and it may not be identified any particular
cultural program.
2. Christianity has always been and will always be a global
phenomenon. As we think about our relations to the “mission of God”
in the world, we need to reckon with the fact that we are part of a
much larger enterprise. We, in North America, are not necessarily
the center of world Christianity. For example, we can learn much
from our one million brothers and sisters in the Church of Christ
Among the Tiv (NKST) in Nigeria about what it means to be truly
submissive to the mission of God as they live their faith before a
largely hostile and often dangerous culture.
3. The “mission of God” has very little to do with the contemporary
evangelical obsession with programs. The “program-driven” church is
probably much more about satisfying the social needs of middle class
suburbanites than it is about the mission of the church.
4. The modern church is too closely associated with particular
cultural forms. We are not nearly as critical of our own debt to our
own time and place as we need to be.
5. The modern evangelical church is too easily reckoned as just
another voluntary organization. This is why evangelicals shop
churches. They do not think of the institutional church as a divine
institution to which they have a sacred moral and spiritual
obligation and connection. The local congregation has become just
another service provider.
6. Mission cannot be merely something that some people in the
congregation do. Mission, rightly defined, must be at the core of
our reason for existing as a congregation. The buzz word for this
notion is “strategic.” By “strategic” I mean this: we need to have a
godly and wise plan for advancing the kingdom by reaching the lost
through the planting of churches, through the administration of the
means of grace.
If we are to be strategic, we must come to believe that
congregations do not exist chiefly for the comfort of those who
presently attend. Yes, growth through having covenant children and
nurture of the same is a beautiful thing, but what about those who
are born outside of covenant families? Not having been raised in the
church I am perhaps more sensitive to the plight of those who are
utterly outside the visible church. Who will reach them? Jesus gave
to the church the mission of reaching the lost and of baptizing the
adult converts (and their children; Rom 4) and of teaching the faith
to and exercising discipline over those who are converted.
Too often the plan seems to be to wait for some group of people to
contact us. No, if we are to be missional and strategic, we ought to
be contacting them and announcing to them and witnessing to them
that the kingdom of God is near (Mark 1:15). I fear that we do not
have a strategy to reach the lost by planting churches because we
are satisfied simply by gathering up a Diaspora of dislocated
Reformed folk in a given area or we hope mainly to find disenchanted
evangelicals and to bring them to church or worst of all, because we
are not convinced that the visible, institutional church is the
divinely established and ordained entity in the world for
representing the kingdom of God on the earth. As a matter of
biblical and confessional principle I think we’re bound to say that,
as useful as the other agencies are (some of which I support
privately), they are not directly instituted by our Lord. They are
private associations doing good work, but they are not the visible,
institutional church authorized to preach the gospel and administer
the sacraments and discipline. Only the church may do these things.
Once convinced of the necessity and uniqueness of the visible church
as Christ’s means for advancing his cause, our congregations ought
to exercise prayerful forethought to planting churches toward the
end of actually reaching the lost rather than shifting the sheep. In
other words, one of the chief missions of the church is to reach out
to those who are not presently in our services, who do not yet
confess Christ. As far as I can tell, this sort of church planting
hardly goes on at all. There is a lot of talk about it but not many
folk doing it. Two-year plans are fine when there’s a group
ready-made and where we can, as it were, add water and stir. If we
are to reach people with little or no Christian background at all,
it is going to take years to reach them and to teach them.
To be strategic, our existing congregations must be willing not only
to part with financial resources but they must also be willing to
train and then part with human resources. Church plants need the
leaven of mature, well-taught Christians who can serve as a
receiving and founding core group. In this way, the mission is not
confined to the ordained ministry.
This is asking a lot of the older, established churches. Some folk
might be reluctant to undertake such a project. I understand that
reluctance — who wants to say good-bye to friends we see every
Lord’s Day? — but I cannot agree with it. Yes, not everyone in the
congregation is up to being part of such a mission, but some of our
people are up to it. They’re ready for it and they may not even
realize it. Our consistories need to identify those folk in our
congregations as part of the church planting strategy and we need to
be prepared to ask them to make the sacrifice of leaving behind
their family and friends, at least for a time, for the sake of the
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