The Authorial Intent of the Church

They're standing with Jesus for the last time. As He told them earlier, He was going back to His Father, and now the time had come. They hang on every word; not one would be lost. They always remember the last thing He says.

Just before He ascends into heaven, Jesus says, "Go to every ethnic group and help them to become My students." So now, the whole world will be become their theater of operation. Did they looked at each other, stunned, at such a large order? But then they would remember that He promised He'd be with them as they went to do it.

His last command was their first concern. How did they decide to carry out such a dictum? Jesus had earlier decided it for them: they would do it by going wherever and set up a new organism on the planet, one the world had never seen before: the church.

The church would be the organism that would bring the command into reality. So, off they go, haltingly, reluctantly, and sometimes not understanding all the ins and outs of it (they had to get over their "Jews only" ideas), but that's what they did, and the book of Acts records their establishing churches from Jerusalem to Rome in order to do the one thing Jesus said He wanted: to make people into His students.

What does this command mean? What's a "student" of Jesus? What is a "disciple?" A disciple is someone who's made a very radical decision. A disciple is one who's decided to live his or her life as Jesus Himself would live it. A student of Jesus is one who's decided to rearrange his whole life, to plan his whole life to think and live as Jesus would.

This rearranging could only happen when the disciple positioned himself in the new community called the church which God set up in Acts 2. The student of Jesus is teachable because becoming a disciple means being taught. As Jesus' last command said, "Teaching them to . . ." Through a disciple-making church, the student of Jesus learns to think like Jesus, to set his heart on things above (Colossians 3:1).

The student realizes that Jesus is so wise, so powerful that he wants Jesus to guide him, teach him, and empower him. In so doing he is at one and the same time heavenly-minded and of great earthly good.

Every author writes with intent; he has a purpose for his book. Jesus has an intent for His church: make disciples. To do this, the church must intend to do it. Disciples rarely happen. We must intend to make them and this entails teaching.

This means that the church's intent isn't to make members, but to make disciples. By intent, the church makes disciple-making it's raison d'etre. Rather than seeking to make people into card-carrying church members, the church sets its goal on His goal: making people into those that are daily learning to live their lives as He would if He were here.

To make Jesus' last command the church's first concern, the church must get past a pastiche of tradition, inertia, a consumer mentality which sees the church's task as being to make people happy, and entertainment of its youth.

Hoping disciples will happen won't make them happen. It takes intent. Sometimes we forget that Jesus gave this command to the church, not to a para-church group. Without intent on the church's part, it's not going to happen.

A disciple-making church is a radical organism. That fits. Grace is radical and so is the One who is filled with grace and truth.

Dr. Mike Halsey, Pastor