Rancho Bernardo Community Presbyterian Church

Matt. 9:35-38, Matt. 28:18-20

Do you know the primary purpose of the church? Or, to be more specific, do you know the primary purpose of our church? Believe it or not, churches regularly forget their purpose. Jesus’ last words to his apostles announced his primary purpose for founding his church. We call these last words of Jesus to his followers the “great commission.” They are as clear as can be, yet each generation of Christians struggles with the church becoming nothing more than another institution. Churches fall prey to multiple distractions that can side-track their congregation. Unfortunately, too many churches wander away from what Jesus told us was our primary assignment.

What happens when a congregation loses its focus? Over the years, I’ve been invited to consult with various struggling churches and several floundering pastors. One of the first questions I ask when we meet is what their congregation does best. I figure starting with their strengths, we can find a way to revitalize the local congregation.

Picture the situation. Most of these are struggling congregations who have been losing members for at least a decade. Most of them have not seen an adult baptism in recent memory. Some of these churches have grown older and no longer have any young families—no children or youth. They are hanging in there barely paying the pastor’s salary and holding on in desperation.

So, I ask their pastor and leaders what they do best. Ready for their answer? “We are such a loving congregation. Why we treat each other like family.” Gag. This is the consistent answer of dying churches. By the way, this is not a bad answer for a garden or Kiwanis club. It is a very acceptable answer for a country club. But it is a terrible answer for a church. Jesus did not picture his church as a group of people who gather together in holy huddles in order to lovingly support each other while we wait to go to heaven.

We discover Jesus’ purpose not only in his last words to the apostles, but also by the prayers he taught them to pray. Jesus taught his followers to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” He told us, his modern followers, to pray that God would send more workers to join us in the work of the harvest field. Jesus looks at our world and sees millions of people desperately in need of God’s love. Our job is to work in these fields by helping people encounter Jesus. Not only is there plenty for us to do, but we need help getting the good news out that God loves the people all around us.

So how does a church founded by Jesus with the purpose of carrying God’s love to others turn inward and become captive to the idea of taking care of its own members? I don’t think we are bad people. Nobody is intentionally subverting Jesus’ intentions to save the lost and love the desperate. I doubt that any of us wake up thinking, “I’m so glad God loved me and reached me, now I hope nobody else finds out that God loves them so I can keep God’s love all to myself.”

No. The problem is that local churches shift from being a movement into becoming an institution. Founded by passionate followers of Jesus who have discovered God’s love for themselves and so they want to share God with others, churches founded as a movement turn into third generation institutional churches simply doing what most institutions do. Every institution, all kinds of organizations after a certain period of time, have a natural tendency to turn inward and focus on taking care of themselves. They shift from taking what they have out to others, to waiting for a few who are interested to come join their club. Let’s be blunt: churches too often turn into social clubs.

What must Jesus think of the local church that has lost its passion to love the loveless and instead settles in to take care of its own members? Fortunately, this pattern recurs throughout history. Whenever the church loses its primary purpose, God anoints a leader to raise up the “great commission” banner again and remind us what Jesus said his people are, the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Let’s review the last words of Jesus as he declared his primary purpose for his church.