The Missional Church

John 15:13 says, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” That’s a picture of the love of Jesus. He laid his life down for every one of us and gives us the choice to respond.

It’s exciting to hear what’s happening in PNG at the moment. Paul is there preaching and amazing things are happening, so keep that in your prayers. But I believe that great things can happen here too, in Melbourne. As Kingsley said, it can seem like our country is more and more secular, as if God has abandoned it. I believe God can still do great things here. That’s what I’ll be talking about today.

My message is called The Missional Church. I like to start by reading the text, because I want what I say to be grounded in the Scriptures.

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we would like to know what they mean.” (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)

Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.”

— Acts 17:16–23

Father in heaven, thank you that you are a God on mission. Your mission looked like moving into our neighbourhood, becoming one of us and meeting us where we are. You call us to that same mission: to go into the world, make disciples, and bless the neighbourhoods we’re part of. Jesus, may we see your gospel spread through communities and transform lives. Just as you’ve done great things in the past, you can do them today if we’re willing and open. May this message not just pat us on the back for what we’re already doing. May it challenge us and push us to see greater things in our neighbourhoods. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Church as an airport

My family loved to travel when I was growing up, and one of the things I enjoy about travelling is airports. Two of them stick in my mind.

The first is Broome Airport. It’s nothing fancy. It looks like an RACV caravan park. There’s maybe one vending machine, one runway, one gate and about one flight a day.

At the other end of the spectrum is Changi Airport in Singapore. It looks otherworldly, like something from the 2050s. No offence to Paul, who loves putting AI images on the screen, but it honestly looks like an AI picture. There are slides for the kids, entertainment, and places to chill out, sleep and even stay the night. It’s a lovely place.

But it would be weird if Changi said, “Come and stay with us. We are the destination.” That’s not what an airport is for. Airports are places of temporary arrival and ongoing sending. They’re places of transit.

So here’s something that might challenge you: perhaps church should be like an airport. So often all we think about is how to get people to come to our programs, come to our services, stay with us and make us the destination. What if our church wasn’t known for how many people attend, but for how many people we send? What if it wasn’t known for how many seats we fill, but for how many missionaries we send into their spheres of influence?

That’s a challenging idea, because for so long we’ve been wired to think church is a program we attend once a week. We get our fix, and then life carries on as usual. Our Sabbaths look completely different from our Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Being a disciple of Jesus means we can’t switch it on and off. We can’t be church people one day a week and live completely differently the rest of the week. Jesus has called us to a life of mission. That’s what it means to be a disciple.

Synagogue and marketplace

Look at Paul in verses 16–17. He’s in Athens waiting for his friends, just chilling, and he’s greatly distressed to see the city full of idols.

Paul is provoked by the idolatry around him, but he doesn’t use that provocation as a reason to disengage. He uses it as fuel to engage with the culture.

He reasons in the synagogue, a religious space where people probably shared many of his assumptions about reality. But he also goes to the marketplace, where people go about their daily lives, do business and work. There’s far less common ground there. There’s a range of competing beliefs, and he can’t rely on the religious language he’s used to.

What this shows me is that mission isn’t something Paul switches on and off. It isn’t “I’m a missionary now, and later I’m not.” Mission is his whole life. I want to suggest it needs to be part of our whole life too, whether we’re sitting in a church service, at work, at uni or at school.

Someone once asked me, “Jeremy, with so much going on in life and so many church responsibilities, how do I add mission on top?” As I thought about it, what clicked for me was this: mission isn’t something you add to your life. It’s a reorientation of what you’re already doing.

Sean Brayton writes in The Table I Long For: “Making disciples is not about putting any additional stuff into your schedule. It’s about simply being intentional about what you’re already doing.”

In the Great Commission Jesus says, “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). The “go” is a participle in the Greek, describing something ongoing. You could translate it, “As you go, make disciples of all nations.” Whether you’re at work, at uni or wherever, make disciples in the places God has put you, because God has put you there for a missional purpose.

It’s wonderful to hear about missionaries in places like PNG, and God is doing amazing things there. But we need to stop thinking mission only happens somewhere else. It can happen right where you are.

Your unique sphere

It’s interesting that we all have different fingerprints. It’s as if God is saying, “There’s a part of the world that only you can touch.” Your work has inherent meaning and value.

Unfortunately we’re affected by a dualism that divides the sacred from the secular, the synagogue from the marketplace. In reality all of life is sacred and part of God’s domain. God is as interested in your Mondays as he is in your Sabbaths.

My friend Marcos Torres writes: “We are no longer living as disciple makers, missionaries, ambassadors or a kingdom of priests leading all within our reach to an encounter with the heart of God. Instead we live as members of spiritual clubs that promise to cater to our needs with well-designed, well-executed programs and events.”

We’ve fallen into a consumer mentality: if I attend church once a week, I’m set. But God wants you to leave your comfort zone and reach the neighbourhoods and places he has put you. That’s how the gospel goes out and how the church becomes what it’s meant to be: the priesthood of all believers, everyone making disciples wherever they are.

Athens and Melbourne

Luke mentions two schools of thought in Athens. The Epicureans believed the main purpose of life was pleasure. They believed gods existed but were far removed, so you couldn’t interact with them. The Stoics were the opposite: anti-emotion, all about self-control, with a pantheistic view in which God is in everything.

Paul is standing among people who don’t share a single one of his assumptions about reality. I think Athens isn’t that different from Melbourne, a marketplace of ideas and beliefs. We live in a post-Christian world, and it helps to understand how we got here. Here’s a bit of philosophy for you.

• Premodernity. Religion and the church had authority over what was true. People went to the institution for answers. But religion failed in many ways: religious trauma, abuse, the Crusades, the oppression of people who believed differently.
• Modernity. In reaction, people said science has the answers. There were huge advances in technology and medicine, but also in weapons, leading to mass violence, two world wars and the atomic bomb. People began to think science didn’t have all the answers either.
• Postmodernity. Now the thinking is that maybe absolute truth is the problem. If there’s no absolute truth, everything will be okay. You have your truth, I have mine. You do you.

That’s why around 50% of people in Melbourne now say they have no religion. Christianity used to be the majority in this country, and now we’re a minority. The church is no longer the authority on truth in our society.

That’s okay. It wasn’t a problem for Paul either. He was in a very secular, non-Christian environment, and he still found a way.

Start with God’s fingerprints

Paul says, “I see that in every way you are very religious… I even found an altar… TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.” Despite all the differences, he finds a way to engage. He walks around and studies the culture.

If we want to reach our culture, we need to study it and learn the beliefs that shape it. Paul was provoked by the idolatry, but he didn’t condemn it disrespectfully. Sometimes all we do is complain about the culture: “These people aren’t Christian, these morals aren’t right.” That may be justified, but does your provocation lead you to engage in mission, or does it leave you just complaining? For Paul it led to relationships with the people around him.

Notice how he begins. He doesn’t start with how wrong they are and how right he is. He starts with a compliment. He commends their religious searching and looks for common ground.

So here’s the point: don’t start with condemnation. Look for where God’s fingerprints are already present in people’s lives.

I once heard evangelism defined as participating in a conversation the Holy Spirit is already having with someone. You join in with what God is already doing in their life. Your job is never to convert anyone. That’s the Holy Spirit’s work. Your job is to bless, to love and to plant seeds. We don’t draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe. We show them a light so lovely that they want to follow it with all their hearts and know where it comes from.

Paul goes on: “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else” (Acts 17:24–25).

He speaks their language and starts with something they can agree on. The Greeks believed in a divine being who brought order and existence to the world. Paul says, in effect, “This unknown God you’ve built an altar to is the God you’re actually looking for, the one who will meet the longings of your heart.”

And notice that although Paul’s speech is full of allusions to Scripture, he never directly quotes it. The only thing he quotes is one of their own pagan poets. He’s showing them that God’s fingerprints are present in their own culture.

Contextualising, not watering down

Some of you might think that speaking the language of the culture means watering down the truth. It isn’t about watering it down. It’s about contextualising the truth to meet people’s real needs, concerns and questions today.

Here’s a bit of Ellen White for you: “He did not follow merely one method; in various ways He sought to gain the attention of the multitude; and then He proclaimed to them the truths of the gospel.”

Jesus contextualised. With the woman at the well he talked about water. With Nicodemus, a Jew whose identity rested on his birthright, he said, “You must be born again.” That isn’t watering down truth. It’s meeting people where their questions are.

Here’s an example. Say I’m talking with someone who is very secular and anti-institution, anti-religion. I can actually resonate with them. I can say, “Did you know there’s a prophecy in Daniel 7 about the church becoming the very thing it swore to destroy? It describes a time when the church would become oppressive and corrupt and would advocate injustice. The Bible resonates with what you’re feeling.” We don’t normally think Daniel 7, with its beasts and horns, connects with people’s questions today, but it does.

There are so many ways to contextualise. Instead of framing our doctrines as “I’m right and you’re wrong,” we need to frame them in a way that speaks to people’s concerns.

God is a God of mission. He’s already at work, reaching and touching people’s lives. We’re invited to join in. Just as he moved into our neighbourhood, he invites us to move into the neighbourhoods around us.

Addition versus multiplication

Let me illustrate. Can I get two volunteers? Steve and Dane, would you come up? Sorry for throwing you under the bus. Give them a hand.

Steve is a great evangelist, the kind who goes to Papua New Guinea and proclaims the gospel with enormous charisma and incredible articulation.

Dane, on the other hand, is a really good friend. He knows how to connect with people and be relational with the people in his neighbourhood.

Steve starts with an evangelistic campaign. He preaches brilliantly, and eight people give their lives to Jesus. Steve, go and pick eight people to join you on stage.

Dane isn’t great at public speaking, but he’s great one-on-one. Dane, go and make three friends. Bring three people up.

So Steve has had a very successful campaign with eight people. Dane is off to a slower start with three, but he’s journeying with them, loving them and blessing them.

Now Steve is a bit burnt out, but there are more people to reach, so he runs another campaign. It’s not quite as successful: six people. Go and grab six more.

Dane has been journeying with his three friends, discovering the gospel side by side. Now those three each go and connect with someone else. You three, go and bring three people up. They’re blessing, loving, listening, eating with people, serving and sharing. It’s relational and intimate.

One more round. Steve’s exhausted and getting older, and his preaching is going downhill a bit, so this time three people respond. And everyone who came up through Dane’s friendships, go and connect with one more person each and bring them up.

Look at the stage. We might need more space! Dane’s side has overtaken Steve’s. Through one disciple making disciples in his study space, going to uni, making three friends and loving them, there’s been a ripple effect. Disciples have multiplied in their own spheres of influence.

Steve did a great job, and there’s nothing wrong with preaching. There’s a time and place for it. But Dane’s side overtook it because there we saw multiplication, while on Steve’s side we saw addition. That’s the power of discipleship. Thanks, everyone, you can sit down.

When we see multiplication, the kingdom of God becomes a reality on earth. Jesus is lifted up, and societies and cultures are transformed.

You have access I don’t

If we want the church to become everything it can be, we can’t depend on people like me. We can’t depend on pastors. When I’m connecting with people, I sometimes have a disadvantage. As soon as people find out I’m a pastor, they can put up walls.

You have a unique sphere of influence that I can’t reach, and sometimes I’m jealous. If you’re at school, you get to be with the same group of people five days a week. (Maybe that’s not good news for some of you!) It’s a unique opportunity to build deep relationships and show people what it means to follow Jesus. Don’t discount that. Don’t think, “If only I could preach like Jeremy, then I could be a disciple.” As we saw with Dane, the impact of simple relationships is exponential.

So if you go to work every day, build relationships with your co-workers, bless them and show them who Jesus is. If you’re at uni, connect with the people in your course: eat with them, listen to them, share with them. If you’re at school, connect with the friends you see every day.

We all have the same calling. Pastors don’t have a different overall calling from you. It might be fulfilled in different ways, but the calling is the same: to make disciples wherever we go.

So I want to encourage you to get involved in evangelism, to join the conversation the Holy Spirit is already having with someone. When you do, God doesn’t only reach them. He reaches you too. He teaches you about his heart for people and shows you that he’s a God who cares, loves, and lays down his life for everyone.

Prayer

Father in heaven, thank you that you are a God on mission. May we not doubt the calling you’ve put on our lives. May we not see church as something we switch on and off, but as an all-consuming way of life. Keep us from the trap of consumerism, where we just come and get our fix. Help us to be missionaries wherever we go, in every sphere of influence you’ve given us. Come and fill us with your Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit, we need you to empower us to be missionaries wherever we go. In Jesus’ name, amen.