If you don’t know the mission, you can never know if you are on the right track.
I believe this is especially true when it comes to churches. The church must understand its purpose and aim in order to most effectively measure every practice it engages in. The church’s mission helps determine what activities are the best use of time, money, and resources. Understanding the mission sets the church apart from just another nonprofit, just another social club, just another concert.
Bible classes, worship services, and fellowship groups–some of the most common events for churches to put on–should be put to the test to see how they fit the overall mission of the church and her specific sub-missions.
The Mission of Church
So–what is the mission of the church?
To me, there’s really just one task of the church: to position individual people’s identities toward Christ. The task is to help us “put on Christ” one leg at a time (Gal. 3:27) and transform us into a practically new entity (Rom. 12:1-2; Gal. 2:19-20; 2 Cor. 35:17; Eph. 4:22-24). We need the institutional church and Christian community to help construct this new identity given by God.
However, “identity” can be a nebulous concept. So I like to break it down into just three components that generally make up a human being: thoughts, actions, and emotions. These three things are each the point of a triangle, with IDENTITY being the sum of the whole triangle. Identity encompasses our minds, bodies, and heart. People are a bit more complex than this, but I think the illustration does the job nicely of summing everything up.
Christian identity, as I argue in my book Who We Are: Seven Christian Identities to Shape Your Life is the orientation of our thoughts, actions, and emotions toward Christ. It’s matching up areas of our innerself and outerbeing with the way of Jesus. As a part of this new identity, we adopt God’s values and adhere to the system of being that God desires for us. Our individuality doesn’t disappear, but we are profoundly shaped by our Christian identity in the areas of our thoughts, behaviors, and emotions.
As I make plain in the book, this process, while it has self-guided elements, has to happen in community. There is no escaping the communal nature of faith in our spiritual development. When we are baptized into Christ and join the Christ-following community we become a new race/nation/priesthood (1 Peter 2:9). We take on a distinctive corporate identity that is markedly different from how everyone else not in our group is living. All Christians have their own unique journey to God, because we each have unique idiosyncriacies, but we all do this within the context of a “great cloud of witness” made up of both living and dead followers of God.
I could talk more about this. In fact, my masters’ thesis was titled “Infancy and Identity in Paul’s Spiritual Formation: A Close Look at 1 Corinthians 3:1-3” so I got to nerd out a lot about Social Identity Theory and Conceptual Metaphor Theory in relation to Paul’s view of Spiritual Formation. But I digress…
How a Church Can Influence Identity
If Church is all about shaping identity and orienting our thoughts, actions, and emotions toward Christ, then the practices of a church should reflect this mission.
Because identity is a big idea, I believe it’s most practical to focus an individual church function on a particular aspect of identity that it is orienting. Because if there’s anything I’ve learned through my entrepreneurial efforts it’s that focusing on One Thing is ultimately more productive than trying to juggle 45 different purposes. A single feature that is phenomenal is better than a variety of sub-part features. So we can evaluate anything a church does by asking “Does it orient our thoughts, actions, or emotions toward Christ?”
Let’s take Bible classes or Bible studies–however that looks in your congregation. I think the most obvious thing that this practice is doing is forming our THOUGHTS about Christ. The class format is great for telling us WHAT to believe and WHY to believe it. It gives us a foundation of doctrine. That’s not to say Scripture study isn’t practical or can influence our behavior, but the primary purpose is communicating the values, rules, and practices of the faith.
Then take small groups (or connection groups or life groups or whatever). I believe these should chiefly aim to build connections between people. This falls under the category of “emotions” because personal connections help grow in us the virtues of love, mercy, forgiveness, etc. Sometimes small groups are also Bible studies–and trust me, as someone with two Bible degrees, I won’t say that’s bad–but I think that the THINKING part of a person can better be developed in other ways. If you are getting together a group of 12-15 people, then try to prioritize fellowship over anything else (and of course, you can still study and fellowship).
That brings us to the Sunday worship service. Ah yes, that thing that is, for many Christians, the epitome of the Christian experience. So what should the worship service focus on? Obviously, it can have elements of forming thinking, behavior, and feelings. Singing, for instance, seems to train our hearts toward certain emotions–and I don’t mean it stirs in us a “good feeling.” Worship teaches us what to love, it trains our hearts for the adoration of God. Yet it also communicates theology. Hymns tell us what to believe. And more often than not, songs tell us how to live out the Chrisitan religion. In summary–worship hits all three parts of Christian identity. Though I think the emotional angle is its most obvious focus.
What about the sermon? There are lots of schools of thought on this. I personally believe a sermon should be dramatically different than a Bible class: a sermon should be more accessible, less dense, with less technical discussion. When I preach, I try to mostly encourage BEHAVIORS. I use the sermon to give people tips, from Scripture, on what to actually do with the thoughts and feelings associated with Christ. I paint a vision of what faith with legs on it looks like. Of course, sermons develop thoughts and emotions too, but, in my opinion, they are best suited for some kind of practical application of Christian living.
The Danger of the Singular Focus
Honestly, I don’t mind if you differ in what you think the primary focus of XYZ church event is. If you believe a sermon should promote good feelings, being a glorified motivational speech, then, fine, whatever. I have some theological qualms with that, but you do you.
But what I am passionate about is that a church MUST be sure to form the thoughts, actions, and emotions in some way, shape, or form. That means having a variety of activities and events that each develop a fundamental aspect of our identity. We are to love God with all our hearts, minds, and souls, after all. Not just our minds. Not just our hearts.
In my own tradition, the churches of Christ, we can have a tendency to focus only on the head. We’ll have Bible classes, Scripture-dense sermons, then a small group with a Bible study component, and then a Wednesday night Bible study. Again, I’m certainly not against Bible studies! Yet we need MORE than just that to function as fully-formed Christians. It’s totally legitimate to meet together as Christians for some other purpose than to study the Bible. We need to also form our other aspects too.
It’s like the food pyramid if that’s still even a thing anymore. A “balanced diet” means we need a little bit of that and a little bit of that and some of that. A diet of only one food group means we miss important nutrients from other food. Likewise, the church should provide us with a balanced spiritual formation. The Church should commit to shaping our hearts, molding our minds, and guiding our behaviors for the purpose of creating in us a Christian identity.
For me, this is what the church is all about.
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