Whether you consider yourself a Christian or not, or whether you’re heavily involved in church or not, you’ve probably heard of Rick Warren’s book, “The Purpose Driven Life.” It sold over 20 million copies. Before Warren wrote that book, he wrote another one, known mostly to clergy and other church leaders called “The Purpose Driven Church.” In it, he outlined five purposes which within the church, always need to be in balance. Those purposes are worship, fellowship, discipleship, ministry and evangelism.
While I think those are all great purposes for a church to have, I like to probe deeper. When you think about it, those purposes make sense if you’re already in church and bought into the whole God and Jesus thing. What if you haven’t? Or what if, like some of us at Vision, you’re a work in process and just exploring Christianity? In other words, to ask a deeper question, what is the purpose of the five purposes?
What is the purpose of getting together a worshipping, or assigning worth to God? And fellowship - it’s such a churchy word. Why do it? Isn’t it just a fancy word for socializing? Discipleship - we’re big on that here in Vision. We say our mission is form disciples or followers of Jesus? But why? Why not make followers of some other wise good teacher? Ministry - is it just to give people in the church something to do? Is it merely to make us feel like we’re doing something worthwhile? Can’t we do good things in the world without bringing God into it?
And evangelism? Why is it so important to let invite other people onto our journey? As Larry David puts it in “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, “Why do you Christians take everything so personally with Christ? Not only do you have to worship him, you want everybody to. It’s like I like lobster. Do I go around pushing lobster on people… It’s not only where you live you travel all over the world. You go to Africa,’Eat lobster! It’s good!’”
Actually, Larry David asks a very good question. Some of the deepest theological questions are in fact, being asked outside the church in movies and TV shows. That may make us squirm a bit. Possibly because we secretly fear we have no real answer to those sorts of questions. So what is the purpose behind the purposes we give for being the church?
The apostle Paul was not afraid to answer that kind of question, no matter where it came from. In reading 2 Corinthians 5, I believe he answers the question, what is the real purpose behind our purposes. The answer is simple - reconciliation. Paul says we have been given a ministry of reconciliation.
The first time I understood that, it was revolutionary to me. I started thinking of my own life and the life of the church differently. To hear some church people talk, you would think our purpose is something else. Maybe to get people into heaven and avoid eternal punishment. Maybe to pass judgement on the morals of those deemed outside the church. But Paul says just a few verses earlier not that we are not to judge, but that one day we will be judged - judged on what we have done. I think the criteria Paul would suggest by which we are judged is how good a reconciler we are. How is that possible?
Paul says that God was in the life, death and resurrection of Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself. The world. The kosmos. Christ is for everyone, not just Christians. That reconciliation is available to everyone, though not everyone responds to it. Christ’s death reconciled everything, not just religious things. The cross was not a religious event, but a kosmic one.
Our ministry, our ultimate purpose, is one of reconciliation. That should be good news to everyone, Christian or not, part of the church or not, because the world is a fractured place. Everyone is need of reconciliation. In fact, not just people, but the whole universe is in need of it. So our mission, our purpose is not limited to the agenda of a particular civic organization. Our mission is a cosmic one.
This cosmic mission incarnates itself in many dimensions, the first of which empowers us to do the rest. Last week we began this series “Re-Imagine You”, and we talked about the need to leave our past hurts, regrets and disappointments behind us. Although we may think we can do that, we often cannot. Even worse, even if we think that we can leave our past behind, we worry that perhaps that God may not. We wonder if God can put all our mistakes behind us. There is much about our nature and our actions that put distance between us and God. It’s what we call sin. More than just our mistakes, it is something about us that is fundamentally at odds with God.
Therefore, our first need for reconciliation is with God. The kind of reconciliation we’re talking about here is not just God overlooking the things we do wrong or compromising God’s principles. Neither is it something we can do for ourselves through hard work or moral effort. Instead, it’s a fundamental change that happens within us because of the life, death and resurrection of Christ. It’s an ongoing new creation of Christ within us. We become, as Paul says, new creatures. That is something everyone needs and is something that we are helping bring into the world.
Besides repairing our relationship with God, we also need reconciliation with one another. We all have disagreements, rifts, and broken relationships. Those relationships remain broken so long as we look at others from a human point of view. We look at someone who hurt us and all we can see is the pain they caused us. While perfectly understandable, that is seeing the other from our perspective. God does not view them that way. Oh sure, it would be great if God hated the same people we do. But as we have just seen, God does not. Through Christ, God offers everyone forgiveness and a new start in life. So why can’t we?
In many churches, there is a time in the liturgy called the Passing of the Peace. In many congregations, this has turned into simply a time to greet your neighbor. At Vision, we have always had that friendly atmosphere and we all greet one another as we enter the room. Consequently, we never saw much need for a “greet you neighbor” time. However, I have learned that originally exchanging signs of peace and reconciliation was taken much more literally and seriously. It was time when one would approach a fellow member of the community with whom one was having a conflict. It was a time to reach out and resolve the conflict, offer reconciliation - and here’ the tricky part - both of you would put it behind you.
Our need for reconciliation extends beyond ourself and another individual. As human beings, we have a nasty habit of getting together in large groups with other human beings and creating immense rifts betweens groups of people. We do it through prejudice, exclusion, war and violence. We do it in the name of God, country, and good business. There are whole groups of people, countries and religions who need to reconcile with one another.
Our need for reconciliation is not limited to other people. Over last couple of centuries, our species has unleashed havoc on this planet. We have taken the beautiful Creation in which God has placed us and mistakenly viewed ourselves as separate and apart from it. Consequently, that attitude has made it possible for us to pollute our air and water, cause the extinction of other forms of life, and pave over much of the world’s beauty.
All the things I have mentioned comprise a huge list. Repairing them is an awesome daunting task. Reconciling all those relationships with God, with others, with the Creation is the most difficult and most important purpose anyone could ever be assigned. Yet that is the purpose to which God has called you and me. That is why the church is here.
We gather to worship, not because God needs our compliments, but so that we can become attuned to what separates from God, and give thanks for how that relationship has been restored. We fellowship together, not have friends, but to create true community. We create the kind of community that messes up, that hurts one another, but learns how to reconcile with one another too. We do ministry together, not have programs or be good citizens, but to create more reconciliation in the world. We form disciples so that there would be more of us who are whole and healthy people. We evangelize so that more people could hear the good news that in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself.
Some days it’s hard to follow Jesus. Some days it’s hard to be a church. We wonder if it really makes a difference to make coffee, or teach kids, join in the conversation. At the same time we long to do something that matters in this world and to the world. We long to re-imagine ourself as someone who makes the world different, more loving, more compassionate, more like God.
As people who are in Christ, and as people who have Christ at work in us, we discover that we are in fact doing that. Re-imagine yourself, from someone who just comes, sits and watches church happen to someone who has been entrusted with God’s biggest project - reconciling the whole world back to God.
Comments