Catching the Vision for a Dynamic Church

Let’s go back in history for a moment to 1776. Have you ever wondered how a ragtag bunch of American colonists were able to beat the highly trained, professional British Army in the Revolutionary War?

The British had everything going for them. Their soldiers had better training. They had a professional supply organization to keep their army in the field. They enjoyed overwhelming naval superiority. And when it came down to the actual fighting, the British actually won more battles than they lost. So why did they lose the war?

They lost the war because they could never figure out exactly what it was they were fighting for. They didn’t have a clear purpose. They just couldn’t decide what it was they were really trying to accomplish. So they lost the war for lack of a clear purpose.

The same thing has happened to many local churches. Did you know that 8 out of every 10 churches in N. America is either plateaued or in decline?

It’s not like there’s nothing happening in these churches. There’s a lot of activity, there’s a full schedule of programs in most of them. But they are not the kind of programs or activities which produce growth. For all the busyness, for all the hustle and bustle, they are spinning their wheels.

And that is because they have lost the vision for what it is they are supposed to be doing. These churches are losing the battle because they don’t have a clear sense of purpose. I don’t want our church to be like that, so we want to examine that subject today.

In Matthew 28, Jesus gave us the Great Commission. He told us what he wanted us to do while we were waiting for Him to come again. It is very clearly stated in v. 18–20…

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Now some of you long-time saints have probably heard dozens of sermons and Bible studies on this passage. But let’s look at it again, because in it, Jesus gives us a blueprint for what the church ought to be doing.

There are three things that he wants us to do…

1. Go and make disciples… In this verse, “make disciples” is the imperative; “go” is just a participle. It means “as you go” or “in going…” In other words, Jesus isn’t commanding us to go. It is understood that we’re going to go. What he’s commanding us to do is to make disciples of all nations as we go.

The word nations is the word “ethne” from which we get our word ethnic. We are to go to all ethnic groups, crossing cultural, social, political, and geographical boundaries in the process.

What are we to do? We are to make disciples. What is a disciple? A disciple is someone who has set aside his own agenda in order to follow a leader or a teacher. So we are to get people of all nations, all ethnic groups, to do that with Jesus Christ. We are to get them to become followers, disciples of Christ. They are going to go from being followers of someone else, or followers of some other teaching, or followers of themselves, to being followers of Jesus Christ.

Now there’s a second thing that he wants us to do. Look at the second half of v. 19…

2. Baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…

What does that mean? Well, you have to know what baptism is all about. A person who is baptized as a Christian is declaring that he is standing with the Lord Jesus Christ. He is identifying with Jesus in his death and burial and resurrection.

Baptism is not for infants or young children. It is for people who are old enough to really understand the significance of what they are doing. They’re not doing it just because Mom or Dad wants them to. They are standing up as an individual and saying “I understand what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ, and I am ready to declare to the world that that is what I am.”

Now in order for a person to reach that point, they need to have some grasp of what it means to be a Christian. After all, you can’t identify with a cause you don’t know anything about. So that means that a baptized person is a person who has been taught the basic fundamentals of the faith. Remember, before Philip baptized the Ethiopian, he spent some time explaining the faith to him.

So when Jesus says that we should baptize people in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, he’s saying that we should make sure that these people have a grasp of the basic principles of the Christian faith. They should understand the teaching. They should know what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Baptism without that instruction is meaningless.

Now there’s a third thing that Jesus wants us to do…

3. He wants us to teach them—that is the disciples who have been won to His cause, and who have been baptized and instructed in the basics of the faith—to obey everything Jesus has commanded us.

Notice what kind of teaching this is. It is practical. It is not academic. It is not filling their heads with a whole bunch of theological facts. It is applicational—teach them to obey.

Teach them how the principles of the Christian faith apply to life situations, and then help them to apply those principles. This is really more than just teaching… it is training.

It’s like a pilot learning how to fly. A pilot goes to ground school where he learns all about the basics of flight. He learns the principles of aerodynamics, meteorology, navigation. He learns all about the features of the particular aircraft he is going to be flying.

But if all he ever did was go to ground school, he never would become a pilot. He needs flight training, where he actually gets into the airplane, takes the controls, taxis out to the runway, takes off, and flies.

That’s the difference between teaching and training. Teaching gives you the understanding; but training gives you the experience. And once you’ve been trained, then you can really make an impact.

So Jesus gives us a 3-step blueprint for what we’re supposed to be doing as a church:

1. Winning people to faith in Jesus Christ. Getting them to transfer their allegiance from whomever or whatever they are following to becoming followers of Jesus.

2. Baptizing them and, in the process, instructing them so that they have an intelligent grasp of the Christian faith.

3. Training them to apply the principles of the faith in every situation of life so as to be able to make a real difference in the world in which they live.

Now how does this look in terms of the program of the local church? Well, it’s obvious that if we’re serious about following Jesus’ vision for making disciples, we ought to have a three-pronged emphasis: Winning, Building, and Equipping.

1. Some of our programs ought to be directed toward winning the lost. Now a lot of churches agree with that in principle. They are all for evangelism. But many churches do evangelism in such a way as to completely miss “connecting” with the lost people that they are trying to reach.

They use stale methods and outmoded programs. They think that lost people are going to flock into the church on Sunday morning to hear the pastor give an evangelistic sermon with an invitation at the end. But that’s not going to happen.

If we’re going to connect with lost people, we’re going to have to go out to where they are. That’s called outreach. We’re going to have to communicate the Gospel in terms that they can understand, that they can relate to.

Did you know that many Christians are simply incapable of explaining what they believe to a non-Christian in terms that the non-Christian can relate to? They use Christian jargon; words like saved and born-again and washed in the blood. These things mean nothing to the average non-Christian, and they may in fact be misleading.

So a lot of churches that think they are doing evangelism are systematically kidding themselves. And they are not seeing many results.

If we are going to build bridges to the lost in order to share Jesus with them, we’re going to have to go at it with a relational tone. Jesus spent the first year and a half of his ministry simply building relationships. He was called “the friend of sinners”.

And that’s what we’re going to have to be to non-Christians, as individuals and as a church, if we’re ever going to hope to reach them. We’re going to have to develop programs that emphasize friendship - programs like WIN and Mom ‘n Me and VBS that scratch people where they itch, create an interest in spiritual things, and make them thirsty to know more. Programs that an unbeliever would feel comfortable coming to.

Our church needs to keep building WINNING programs. And we need to keep training ourselves as individuals to intentionally build bridges to unbelievers. We can’t sit back and say, “Well, my church is going to win my neighbor to Christ.” You are the church! The church can help you do it, but you’re going to have to be part of the process.

2. If we’re going to be faithful to Jesus’ three-part vision for the church, we’re also going to have to have some programs in our church that emphasize BUILDING. And the target audience for these programs is BELIEVERS - people who have already made a commitment to Christ.

Now this is traditionally where the evangelical church in North America has been very strong. We have had lots of activities aimed at building believers and strengthening them in their faith. We have Sunday School, and Christian Ed. programs, and Bible studies, and sermons and clubs and youth retreats and adult retreats and Bible conferences and seminars, books, tapes, videos—all of which are geared to building the believer up in his or her faith.

The theme is growth and the tone is primarily educational. Building activities are aimed at communicating content. They are primarily informational. And this is necessary. It is important that Christians get good teaching. It is important that they know what they believe and get their roots down into the content of the Christian faith.

But if this is all we do—if we only concentrate on building and don’t do any winning or equipping, we’re going to be way out of balance, and ultimately, our church is going to die.

3. We also need a third emphasis: EQUIPPING. Equipping is where we begin to develop people to become spiritual leaders. We train them in how to apply the principles of the faith in everyday situations so that they begin to see how Christ can make a difference in every area of life. The target is leaders, the theme is training, and the tone is applicational.

People who are equipped like this are going to become spiritual leaders. They’re going to begin to see life from a ministry perspective. They’re going to begin to have an impact on others, because they are learning how to serve. They are becoming spiritually mature.

You see, for a long time, I think that we have misinterpreted what spiritual maturity is. We have assumed that someone is spiritually mature when they know a lot about the Bible, or about Christian doctrine. But that doesn’t make a person spiritually mature. I’ve known a lot of people like that who are no good to anybody.

A spiritually mature person is one who knows the Bible—but he also knows how to take that information and put it into practice in his daily life. And because he does, he has an impact on people and on the world around him. He begins to bear fruit.

And that’s the kind of person we are trying to produce here at First Baptist Church. Not just followers of Jesus Christ. And not just highly educated followers of Jesus Christ. But fully equipped followers of Jesus Christ who have been trained and know how to actually live the Christian life.

Imagine a factory that produces automobiles. It has all the required equipment, the assembly line, the raw materials, and the work force necessary for making cars. But among the workers there is no agreed-upon vision for what kind of cars they are going to produce.

Some of the workers want to make 2-door economy models. Others want to build large luxury sedans. Management insists that they should be assembling 4-wheel drive sport utility vehicles. There is no unifying vision for what the final product should be. That’s a recipe for failure!

We don’t want that to happen here at FBC. We want to have a clear vision of what we are supposed to be producing.

Our vision is to become a training center that produces fully equipped followers of Jesus Christ.

We’re going to follow that three part blueprint that Jesus gave us. Winning, Building, and Equipping. And over the next six weeks, we’re going to take a look at what a fully-equipped follower of Jesus Christ looks like. I hope that you will catch the vision!