Spicy church take. 🌶️
Jesus last command to us was this,
“go and make disciples.”
Mathew 28:19
In the West we took that as “go and plant churches and create programs and Sunday services.”
Not that these are in themselves bad,
I attend a local church and love the gathering of believers,
BUT, if we can be honest with ourselves,
the large % of people attending our services aren’t obedient disciples.
The stat is around 4% of church goers are faithful Christ followers.
We spent most of our energy, time and resources in the west on building the operation of the church,
the infrastructure of the building and programs, in hopes that those things will create faithful disciples.
The heart here is good but the execution largely neglects or at least severely limits our capacity to spend much else on actually making disciples.
The problem here is we are putting form before function.
If you read about the ministry of Paul,
he went about and made disciples,
and then those disciples would form churches, not the churches first.
If we focus more on the form of building churches,
we will continue to neglect the function of the church,
which is making disciples.
Our focus should be on making disciples first,
not churches before disciples.
This is not an attack on western churches,
it’s my attempt to help us ask the question,
“Is our current approach to making disciples the most effective way?”
I don’t have all the answers,
but I do believe we need to be willing to have these conversations if our hearts are really to make disciples and see the lost saved by the love of Christ.
We can’t idolize the form of church building so much that we aren’t willing to question its effectiveness at making disciples.
Building churches is great,
but that isn’t the gospel.
