The book gave a couple of popular answers:
1. The church exists to provide safe haven in a rough and tumble world. This view calls to mind the image of a quiet church in the middle of a loud, busy city, a place where people can come to pray and compose their thoughts before they rush back into their hectic lives. Or picture someone sitting quietly in a pastor’s office seeking counsel for a difficult issue. This is the church as a sanctuary for weary souls.
2. The other model of church ministry is similar: the church exists to make the world a better place. Here we visualize Christians wading into the fight against human trafficking or abortion or racial injustice; we see Christians volunteering for Habitat for Humanity or crisis pregnancy centers; we see Christ-followers visiting jails and prisons and nursing homes.
Both of these overlapping models are attractive pictures of the work of the church in the world, but is this what the church is for? Is this what Jesus had in mind when he established his community and God’s Spirit filled His people to carry out their mission?
The question itself – What is the church for? – may be misleading because it may be a confusion of categories. If the question is how the church can be an asset to the community, these are good answers. But since the question is about the purpose of the church, we must ask a different question: what did Jesus have in mind when he set up the church as his community on earth? And how did the early church understand and carry out its mission and role in the world?
What we have in the Gospels and in the history of the early church is a curious combination of a laser-sharp focus on the church’s mandate and a broad range in the impact of the church on the community.
What did Jesus charge the church to do?
Jesus didn’t establish the church to be a sanctuary for weary souls. In fact, in the Roman Empire anyone who wanted to be part of a Christian fellowship would find anything but sanctuary in the church. Christ-followers were religious misfits, neither pagan nor Jewish. And with their insistence on integrating people from all peoples and all social classes into one body, Christians were regarded as dangerous subversives, a challenge to Roman order.
Nor did Jesus establish the church to make the world a better place. In fact, it is significant that Christ and the apostles were silent on the social injustices of their day – slavery, the subjugation of women, the casual brutality of Roman justice, just to name a few. Eventually, Christians would lead the way to fight those injustices, but not because those campaigns were integral to the charge they received from the Master.
So what did Jesus charge the church to do?
His one mandate: make disciples.
And that’s what the church did. As she spread and planted churches throughout the Mediterranean Basin, the church made disciples by the thousands. And that’s just what we know from Luke’s account in the Book of Acts. Biblical history doesn’t tell us how it happened, but within the first century of the church’s life, we know that churches were established as far east as India and as far west as Britain and south into Africa as well.
What effect did those churches have on their communities?
As Christianity spread, churches did provide sanctuary for weary souls and they did work to make the world a better place, but they didn’t do these things because that was her mandate. They were a blessing to their communities because they were disciples of Jesus living out the Way of Jesus.
As Christ-followers learned from their Master, they reflected His compassion and courage in their own communities, and they “paid forward” the grace that God has shown us in Christ.
Christians in the Roman Empire made a name for themselves during a plague. When everyone who could afford it fled the cities to escape the contagion, Christians stayed behind to tend to the poor and the sick, sometimes at the cost of their own lives.
When families would “expose” their unwanted infants (dispose of them by leaving them outside, a common practice in the Roman world), Christians would take in those babies and raise them as their own.
It is a common criticism to point out the complicity of the church with the institution of slavery in America. And that is to our great shame. But it is a vicious caricature to reduce the role of Christianity to pro-slavery advocacy. It was also Christians who led the fight against slavery. William Wilberforce and his band in England and the early abolitionists in our own nation were Christians whose faith compelled them to oppose the injustice of slavery.
On a larger scale, critics love to point to the damage that has been done in the name of Jesus by hypocritical Christians throughout church history. They are right, and again, this is to our shame. But again, this is a caricature of the role of Christianity has played in world history. For centuries, it was Christians who led the way in establishing orphanages and hospitals and schools to serve marginalized communities all over the world.
So, yes, even though their mandate from the Master was to make disciples, Christians throughout history have also created sanctuary for weary souls and worked to make the world a better place.
And here is where the category confusion can get us into trouble.
Churches carrying out Jesus’ mandate is not the same thing as Christians acting like Jesus.
Churches make disciples because Jesus told us to. Christians work to help the vulnerable because they want to be like Jesus.
One of the debates that has embroiled the church in our day is what role social justice should play in the church.
Job One for the church is making disciples. One way we can get this wrong is to let our ministries be taken over by social justice issues. Whenever any other cause takes priority, we see mission drift, regardless of the justice of that competing priority. This means that lots of worthwhile causes must not be allowed to become the tail that wags the dog: the welfare of unborn babies, racial justice, opposition to gun violence, the welfare of immigrants… Name the cause, and the temptation is the same, whether it comes from the Left or the Right.
In Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis called this temptation “Christianity AND.” In his advice to his junior tempter, the more experienced tempter Screwtape advises,
“What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call ‘Christianity AND.’ You know––Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring.”
The examples Lewis uses, taken from his times, clearly grow more ridiculous as the list goes on. But he makes his point: in our laudable passion to make the world a better place, we are always tempted to “substitute for faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring.”
But there’s another kind of imbalance.
If allowing our fellowships to be centered on social justice issues is one kind of imbalance, ignoring social justice issues is the other kind of imbalance.
To argue that Christians can ignore the plight of the marginalized is to defy all that the Bible says about our obligations to the poor and other victims of injustice.
More to the point, ignoring the plight of the vulnerable is not being like our Master and Teacher.
Even more serious, Jesus said that ignoring the needs of those in trouble is tantamount to ignoring him: in the face of the poor we see the face of the Master.
How do we find balance in our polarized culture?
So how do we find our way as churches and as Christians in these polarized times? How can we be faithful to the church’s mandate and also follow the example of our Master?
We find balance by distinguishing between the mandate of the church – making disciples – and the responsibility of individual believers – to “pay forward” the grace that God has shown us in Christ.
We find balance by paying close attention to the Way of Jesus rather than mimicking the talking points of our tribe (and our tribes are nothing if not talkative).
We find balance by resisting the temptation to give in to the toxic either-or thinking of our day and letting God’s Word shape our lives instead. This temptation is not new. James would be pulling out his hair to see the American church’s polarization, with faithfulness to the gospel on one side pitted against care for the poor on the other. James would have none of it: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (James 1:27).
Let’s be faithful in our churches to Jesus’ mandate to make disciples.
And let’s be faithful in our own lives to reflect the compassion and courage of our Master in the way we treat the vulnerable and marginalized.
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