This morning I begin two weeks of posts (for a total of ten posts) in which I am going to try to pull together some thoughts on what expectations should exist for Great Commission Fellowship (or any local church, for that matter)
During the first week, I want to focus on what you and I can and should expect from GCF as members and attenders. In the second week, I will explore what the community and the world around us should expect from GCF.
Since we are Great Commission Fellowship, the first two posts in this series will break down the two main components of the Great Commission to discern what you can expect from GCF based on the Bible passage for which we are a namesake.
“And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit . . . -Matthew 28.18-19.
The first component of the Commission focuses on baptism.
We understand baptism in two ways. First, baptism is the seal of the work of grace that God has done in our hearts in revealing to us our salvation through Jesus. In other words, baptism takes place as a sign and marker that we have, as Paul says it in Romans, “confessed with our mouths that Jesus is Lord and believed in our hearts that God raised him from the dead.”
This confession and believing in Jesus Christ, which is a work of God’s grace in our lives, is also called conversion. The first of our Great Expectations from GCF should be conversion. We should expect that God wants to use GCF to bring about a great change in our lives that leaves us matchlessly in love with Jesus Christ. So in love, in fact, that the rest of our lives will be shaped and molded around loving and being loved by him.
Pete Hise is the Lead Pastor of Quest Community Church in Lexington, KY. Being that Quest has grown from zero to over 3000 members in just under 10 years, they are often the receiving end of a lot of criticism from a lot of people. Perhaps some of it is deserved.
A couple of years ago when I first met Pete Hise, he was sharing with me what he considered to be the most important lesson God had revealed to him in the early days of his time with Quest.
Pete had learned that ministry here in the Bible Belt was quite different than ministry in New York or other largely “unchurched” regions of the nation. In those largely unchurched areas, people know that they do not know Jesus. But here, in the Bible belt, Pete discovered that people think that they know Jesus but what they actually know are the external dynamics that have been used to define the stereotypical “good Christian”.
Knowing the external standards for being a good Christian and knowing Jesus Christ, as Pete Hise points out, are two very different things. Pete began calling for Christians to actually discover the person of Jesus Christ.
Say what you will about Pete Hise and Quest Community Church, but I have discovered Pete’s realization to be all-too-true truth in my time as the Lead Pastor of GCF.
Certainly more than once – in fact more times than I could count – I have sat with college students, seminary students or people who have grown up in the church to find that they are beating themselves over the head because they have a constant sense of “failure” as they try to live up to the external standards of the “good Christian”. Frustrated with their efforts, they settle for what we might call being “the good-enough Christian” which usually results in some combination of luke-warm church attendance and tepid obedience to what they perceive to be the all-too-hard commands of scripture.
In his classic book, Conversion, the great evangelist and missionary E. Stanley Jones, quotes the great writer H.G. Wells from his deathbed: “A frightful queerness has come into life. Hitherto events have been held together by a certain logical consistency as the heavenly bodies have been held together by the golden cord of gravitation. Now it is as if that cord had vanished and everything is driven anyhow, anywhere, at a steadily increasing velocity. The writer is convinced that there is no way out or around, or through the impasse. It is the end.”
Such were the dying sentiments of a man who had always trusted the “logical consistency” of the universe. Make no mistake about it, the end result of efforts to be a “good Christian” or a “good-enough Christian” are not much different than the end result that H.G. Wells discovered from his trust in the “logical consistency” of the universe.
What is needed, as E. Stanley Jones notes, is conversion: a radical, life-changing experience with the living person of Jesus Christ!
Expect this from GCF: to be called to a radical encounter with Jesus Christ that “converts” the rest of you life from one of working and striving to be a good person or a “good-enough Christian” which leads only to hopelessness and despair TO a life that is filled with, as the United Methodist liturgy for baptism says, “a joyful obedience” to a living and loving Lord who gives you the awesome assurance of an eternal life and the power and will to live an abundant life of love in Him.
There is also a second understanding of baptism that gives rise to an addendum to this first expectation. We understand baptism to be an initiation rite into the community of God’s called and set-apart people; also known as the church! A part of the radical nature of conversion is that it joins us to a new people. These new people are nothing less than the old people who have been made new through God’s conversion of their hearts and lives to Jesus Christ. For these “old-people-made-God’s-new-people” there is a radical joining together as one people.
We see this radical joining-together displayed in what we call local churches. GCF is a local church.
Not only should we expect GCF to call us to a radical conversion to Jesus Christ, but also to a radical commitment to God’s new-creation-people, which is his Church; of which GCF is a part.
Here a couple of questions to ponder . . .
1. Which more accurately describes your life as a Christian: working to be “good-enough” for God OR joyfully following Jesus where ever he calls you to go?
2. What does a radical commitment to God’s new-creation people look like?
