Category: General Reflections
I haven't posted for a few days because I was out of town (in lovely Omaha, NE) for district meetings. I won't recap all that went on there, but one thing stuck out in my mind. The presupposition of the main speaker was that the purpose of the church on earth is evangelism. Sure, there are other purposes like teaching and encouraging one another (and we have to give lip service to them because the NT talks about them on every page), but they really pale in comparison to evangelism and missions. "Yes, Jesus said 'Make disciples' in the Great Commission, and discipleship is largely concerned with current believers and their growth in godliness, but surely no one is a mature believer who is not incessantly concerned about evangelism, right? So, we might as well skip past the rest and get straight to evangelism as our primary focus with the church."
One of the results of this line of thinking is that the purpose of the church gathered is to evangelize unbelievers. If a church is going to have a service for edification and worship by believers (as opposed to worship by unbelievers?) it should be pushed off to a mid-week time so that the Lord's Day can be reserved for people who do not love the Lord. And everything we do on Sunday mornings should make unbelievers feel welcome and comfortable. If you design things for the Bride of Christ, then you are labeled as "ingrown" or "exclusivist" or "unconcerned for the lost." Of course, when this is presented biblically, the appeal is always to the Great Commission passages and the Gospels, never to the epistles of Paul, Peter, and John. There is a reason for this. Paul, Peter, and John are writing for believers in churches, and they emphasize the purpose of the church to be edification, encouragement, building up of one another, singing songs to the Lord together, growing in our understanding of the truth, and so on. The NT epistles do not help the cause of someone trying to argue that we should orchestrate our Sunday services with the unbeliever primarily in mind.
Here is my challenge to you. Search the New Testament for all texts which describe what believers ought to be doing when they are gathered together, and see whether the primary purpose of our church services ought to be geared toward believers and edification or unbelievers and evangelism. And I would be happy to interact with you on the "comments" section below.