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No True Church Just Preaches the Gospel

No True Church Just Preaches the Gospel

People get in debates about the mission of the church and talk about it in really abstract ways. Sometimes this leads to people saying or thinking, “The church should just preach the gospel.” Well, should it?

Defining the Mission

Commissioned by Jesus, for a church to be the church it must be in the business of “making disciples.” The church goes about making disciples by “baptizing” and “teaching all that I commanded,” says Jesus (Matthew 28). In other words, preaching the whole counsel of God and administering the two sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper are central to what the church should be doing. Each local church should also be gathering together publicly to worship and pray together too (Acts 2:42).

The theological tradition that my church belongs to would frame it like this: The local church is called to preach the gospel, administer the sacraments, and exercise church discipline (See the Belgic Confession, Article 29 and Westminster Confession of Faith, 25.3).

As a bare minimum, for the local church to be the church it must have these things happening regularly. The proclamation of the gospel itself creates the community of the church, so we can say, for example, wherever you preach the gospel and the sacraments are administered—there is the church.

The thing is though, in order for us to be doing this faithfully in a local community, there has to be actual participation in the local community by the local church beyond the Sunday gathering. Otherwise, there’s no way of bringing other people into the social environment by which people can actually be made into disciples of Jesus. So discipleship itself has to go outside of the walls of the local church in order for disciples to be invited, gathered and made into disciples inside of the church.

No Church Just Preaches…

The reality is, no church just preaches the gospel. Every local church does a whole host of things that go beyond, but still support, the preaching of the gospel from Sunday to Sunday.

Let me give a few examples from the officers in a local church.

Pastors (called “teaching elders” in my denomination) feed the people of God through preaching, teaching and administering the sacraments (or ordinances), prepare sermons, commune with God as a disciple to lead other disciples, faithfully pray for people by name, make time for visiting both the well and the sick, new visitors and the oldest of members, attend, lead, or moderate various meetings meetings, and manages emails, phone calls, event planning, writing projects, committee meetings and reports (according to his various calling and ability), in addition to everything that an elder and a Christian and a husband and father (if he is married and/or has children) is responsible for. All of this is to aid and carry out the official function of preaching the gospel every week, but much of what a pastor does is not just preaching the gospel.

Elders (called “ruling elders” in my denomination) meet regularly to shepherd the whole flock of God, oversee the spiritual and general activities and interests of the church, visit families and individuals in hospitals and homes, pray for people, teach people, protect and catechize the children of a church, and if necessary, go after stray sheep and maintain the peace and purity of the church. All of this is in support of gospel preaching, but it’s not just preaching the gospel.

Deacons likewise pray for others and visit the sick, the hurting, the downcast and broken, those struggling financially, and find ways to support those in the church community first, while still providing mercy ministry and care to those in need outside of the church. We call this “mercy-in” and “mercy-out” at our church. All of this supports the message of the gospel, but itself is not the gospel.

All church members are called to gather regularly for the public worship of God, everyone is called to serve to edify the whole body according to particular gifting, need and desire, and support the work of the church through prayer and cheerful financial giving. The life that each Christian has exists all because of the preaching of the gospel, but much of the life of every member exists outside of the Sunday hour (or two).

In the average week of any given local church, a lot of activity is going on from week to week that supports the preaching of the gospel, but is not part of the mission of the church. People meet together, pray together, study God’s Word together, share life together, help, serve, volunteer, joke, play, etc., all together. The majority of any new members a church gains from week to week happens because of conversations and invitations and calls given out—not by the pastor from the pulpit on Sunday morning—but from individual members and families doing this necessary work.

Two Local Churches

On the ground, no true church can “just preach the gospel.” That must be happening—every week, from every Bible passage—but a whole lot more has to go on to support the ordinary means of grace in a church. So each local church has to make wise decisions about how its leaders are going to spend their time (and where), and how we want to encourage and shepherd our people to be spending time. Do we want people to only be surrounded by church people in their free time? Or do we want to be reaching out to our communities and neighborhoods so that others can be called and gathered into the embassy of grace that we all need each Sunday?

In order for the mission of the church to be carried out faithfully, each local church needs its own people to live as embodied creatures in our local areas. That means spending time with others inside and outside of the local church, always bringing more people into the missionary activity of God in Christ that happens every Sunday morning.

But we spend a lot of time bickering over the mission of the church, and we assume that it has to look the same everywhere, when in reality, in addition to preaching, sacramenting and disciplining, each local church has to make specific, unique decisions that affect the people immediately around them.