What is the mission of the Church?

That’s a big question — and trying to answer it keeps a lot of pastors and church leaders up at night. Trust me on that. I didn’t sleep well last night.

I think part of the struggle in defining the mission is understanding the difference between the universal Church and the local church.

The universal Church is made up of all the people, past, present, and future, who place their faith in Jesus Christ for salvation and eternal life, and who love and worship Him by obeying everything He commanded. When you see Church spelled with a capital C, it refers to this magnificent universal Church, the radiant Bride of Christ that will soon celebrate with Jesus at the marriage supper of the Lamb. See Revelation 19:6-9. My dear friends, we will be there soon. All of us. Hallelujah!

The local church is the people you worship and serve with on a regular basis. It may be a big church with hundreds or even thousands of participants, or it may be a living room or underground church with less than twenty. Regardless of size, organizational structure, or denominational affiliation, if you gather together in the name of Jesus Christ to worship Him through obedience and to love and serve one another, then you are a local church.

Jesus gave His universal Church a powerful mission statement in Matthew 28:18-20, “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.”

In this concise statement, Jesus identifies the making of disciples as the mission of the Church. The disciple-making mission shouldn’t surprise His Church or our local churches. He invested all three years of His public ministry into making disciples. Jesus did other good things, like preaching and performing miracles, but the gospel record clearly reveals that He prioritized the making of disciples above everything else. By example and by decree, Jesus made disciple-making the number one missional priority of the Church.

As such, disciple-making must also be the number one missional priority of the local church. Friends, there are many good and redemptive things our local churches can do, but if we aren’t prioritizing disciple-making into our calendars and budgets, then we are failing the mission.

And this is what keeps us, leaders, up at night. There are so many good things churches can do. We sometimes get sidetracked. In the organizational world, getting sidetracked by good things is called missional drift. Missional drift leads to organizational irrelevance — and sometimes death.

In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins makes this statement regarding missional drift:

“Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.”

My friends, doing good can sometimes detract from the priority mission. Doing good results in good churches — but can we afford to be good when God needs His churches to be great?

In the sixth chapter of the book of Acts, we witness the Church struggling with mission drift. The Church was doing something good — feeding widows — but the need was so great that the disciples were spending their days handing out food instead of focusing on the ministry of the Word and prayer. They weren’t making disciples; they were waiting on tables. Doing so was good, but it wasn’t great.

A meeting was held, priorities were re-established, new leaders were identified and empowered, and the disciple-makers got back to work making disciples. The result: the missional capacity of the church expanded, and it became the great Church that changed its world.

Mission drift in our churches is insidious. It happens so gradually that no one notices, but the cumulative effect becomes apparent as the church begins to suffer. Leaders get burned out as they take on more and more good work. Waiting on tables squeezes the Word and prayer out of the schedule and the budget. The cycle continues downward as attrition results in fewer people to manage the workload. Attrition also hits the budget, and the church begins focusing on financial survival needs like maintaining buildings and paying utility bills and salaries. Frustrations rise as attendance and offerings continue to dwindle. To overcome, the church calls an organizational meeting and decides it needs to take on more and more good work to reach the lost. A short burst of inspiration and activity just leads to more and more frustration. A final meeting is called, and the church is dissolved. The death of a church can take up to forty years, but the cause can always be traced back to missional drift. Somewhere along the line, good became the enemy of great, and good works replaced disciple-making.

If you want to have a great church, then prioritize the mission Jesus gave to His Church: make disciples. This pandemic has created a valuable opportunity for our churches to revisit and re-establish our mission priorities. If we’ve been drifting, now is the time to get back on track.