Mission or Empire Building

Evangelical Christians – naturally enough – pay a lot of attention to evangelising. One of their main aims is often to convert people. A successful evangelical preacher is one that has had a large number of converts. A natural accompaniment to this is church growth. Evangelical churches want to grow. Churches are either pleased with their growth or believing God for the growth that is about to happen. A successful church is one that has a large number of attendees.

Now there’s nothing wrong with converting people or wanting a large church. However, I do think that some churches can focus too much on kind of these kind of empire-building things, neglecting the larger issue of mission.

Converting people to Christ can almost be a kind of scalp collecting exercise. The more we get the better. The higher our numbers, the more successful we are. But just because we have quantity doesn’t mean we have quality.

Every so often a Christian event will claim that a certain number of people made a commitment to Christ. That’s great, but how important is it? Not very, if they didn’t stick with it. How many of those people were still committed a week later? How many were truly seeking to live a Christ-like life six months later? How many were dedicated to the mission of Jesus Christ two years down the track?

I’m sure some would be. If such a huge number of people were committed, some of them will stick by that commitment. And so, one might argue, does it really matter that some of them fell away? Well it does, if they now have the attitude of been there, tried that, got the postcard and don’t need to go there again. It does if their sudden commitment actually prevents them from developing a relationship with God later on.

We wouldn’t be happy about anyone who came to us saying that they made a marriage commitment to someone they had only met that morning. So why are we so happy when people commit to Christ before they really know him at all? I’d much rather hear about one person who commits to Christ, after developing a relationship and getting to know who he is, than about 50 who made a spur of the moment decision.

I talk about Jesus all the time. Not in terms of if you don’t believe in him you’re going to Hell. Those kind of fear tactics may have worked well in medieval times, but we’re living in the 21st Century. I talk about Jesus in terms of who he was, what he stood for, what he said and what he did. I don’t do this to convert anyone. It’s just, as I said to one person, “Jesus was a great guy. I just want people to know that.”

The other way people get to know Jesus is through seeing Jesus in the lives of Christians. That’s where mission comes in. Christians should be the ones out in the world doing the kind of things that Jesus wants us to do. Christians should be out there feeding the poor, helping the homeless, comforting the lonely, reaching out to the those in need. And we should do all this in a loving and non-judgmental way. Not to convert, not to build our church. Just because we should – because it’s the kind of thing that Jesus would want us to do.

But that brings us back to church growth. Obviously the more people that are in a church, the more people can be released into performing the mission of the church and the mission of Jesus Christ. And that’s great. The more people there are out there following Jesus and doing the kind of things he wants us to do, the better. But just because someone is a church attendee, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re doing this.

So instead of counting numbers of church attendees or converts, maybe we should count the number of people we help. Maybe we should count the number of outreach programs we have. Maybe we should count the number of people who demonstrated a long-term commitment to the cause of Christ. Maybe we should stop focusing on empire building, and start focusing more on mission.