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The church obeys the Great Commission to evangelize and make disciples. The church is an evangelistic community where the gospel of Jesus is constantly made visible through its proclamation of the gospel, the witness of the members' lives, and its Spirit-empowered life of love. From the first day, 'the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved' because they took Jesus' command seriously: 'You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.'

The church is to be an evangelistic people on mission in the world, passionate to see lost people meet Jesus Christ as Savior, God, and Lord. Any church submitting to the Holy Spirit and obedient to Scripture wants fewer divorces, addictions, thefts, and abuses and knows the only way to see that happen is to make more disciples. The church loves people and is continually and painfully aware of the devastation that is wrought in this life and in the life to come for those who are not reconciled to God. Therefore, while not imposing religion on anyone, the church of Jesus Christ is to constantly be proposing reconciliation with God to everyone.

As local churches implement these characteristics of the church, it is vital that the distinction between principle and method be retained. These eight characteristics give us timeless biblical principles that are unchanging regardless of culture. Nevertheless, they also require church leaders to use timely biblical methods that are changing depending upon culture. This is the essence of what it means to be a missional church that contextualizes its ministry. Paul demonstrated this by not changing his doctrine or principles but often changing his methods, depending upon his audience.

From Doctrine, Chapter 10. Church: God Sends (pgs. 312–313). Doctrine is out now.

Doctrine Book

Doctrine: What Christians Should Believe is available now. Read a free chapter and find out more.

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What should Americans learn from the post-Christian culture of western Europe? In this short interview, Steve Timmis talks about how the church is God's mission strategy and why Americans should learn from Europe.

Total Church

Tim Chester and Steve Timmis present a vision for churches centered on gospel community. Find out more.

In a recent sermon from the Luke Series, Pastor Mark used humor to make fun of legalists and the inclinations to legalism that we all have. He wrote a post on the Mars Hill blog explaining the rationale behind using humor in a sermon this way:

The reason legalism is so insidious and repugnant is that, at its core, it is about us, our team, and our works instead of Jesus. No one, no denomination, and no team is immune from the temptation to pursue their own esteem, righteousness, success, comfort, or power instead of Jesus’ glory and righteousness. So, in this latest sermon we have a good laugh at a lot of religious silliness, and then turn the tables on reverse legalists, who laugh at legalists only to become a new form of legalist.

You can read his whole post at the Mars Hill Blog. Also see the recent post How to Become a Legalist.

I am on a team headed to Haiti to serve, equip, and deploy Haitian pastors so they can rebuild and minister to the people in their churches and communities.

God Sympathizes

One of the main points I want to communicate to them is found in Exodus 3:7-8. While the context of the passage is about oppression and not natural disaster, God’s response is the same: He sees, hears, knows, and acts. God sympathizes with the groans of his people and gets involved with their suffering. He already sees, hears, and knows their suffering and is facing it in its fullness even before they cried out. Now he is inviting them to face it with him, not alone.

Many of the psalms reveal the compassionate disposition of God toward those who suffer: “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18). Suffering does not repel God. Instead it draws God near. God promises never to cut himself off from those who cry to him in distress (Psalm 9:9, 12).

God Grieves

God’s solidarity with and compassion for those who suffer is the motivation for his response of grief. Grief is not negative. People may claim that grief is usually negative and not something God does. But God knows their suffering. He sees, responds, and invites them to participate in the sorrow and grief he has for their situation. Those suffering are not encouraged to be silent or deny, but to feel and express their emotions, to cry or weep, to grieve the destruction they have experienced.

Jesus Has Compassion

Hebrew 2:17 links Jesus’ suffering to his disposition toward us: “Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God.”

Commenting on this passage, John Calvin explains Christ’s desire to sympathize with us as we suffer:

And it is the true teaching of faith when we in our case find the reason why the Son of God undertook our infirmities. For all knowledge without feeling the need of this benefit is cold and lifeless. But he teaches us that Christ was made subject to human affections, that He might be a merciful and faithful high priest…For in a priest, whose office it is to appease God’s wrath, to help the miserable, to raise up the fallen, to relieve the oppressed, mercy is especially required, and it is what experience produces in us. For it is a rare thing for those who are always happy to sympathize with the sorrows of others…The Son of God had no need of experience that He might know the emotions of mercy. But we could not be persuaded that He is merciful and ready to help us had He not become acquainted by experience with our miseries. But this, as other things, has been as a favor given to us. Therefore whenever any evils pass over us, let it ever occur to us, that nothing happens to us but what the Son of God has Himself experienced in order that He might sympathize with us; nor let us doubt but that He is at present with us as though He suffered with us…An acquaintance with our sorrows and miseries so inclines Christ to compassion, that He is constant in imploring God’s aid for us. (Commentary on Hebrews)

Churches Helping Churches

Who will help local churches in the wake of catastrophes? You can. Learn more here.

You can download this article, with footnotes, as a PDF here.

According to numerous studies, most Americans consider themselves “spiritual, not religious.” In other words, they dabble in whatever beliefs and practices they find intuitively valid and useful for daily living, but they resist any threat to their individual autonomy. Consumers in the spiritual marketplace they are willing to be, but not disciples of Jesus Christ. In spite of all the evangelistic efforts over the last several decades, including sprawling megachurches catering to every niche market, there has been no growth in reported conversions. In fact, church attendance is on the decline. Most Christians cannot articulate what they believe, much less why they believe it, and these tragic statistics include evangelicals as well as Unitarians.

We do not lack impassioned pleas for being more “missional.” A plethora of programs for outreach, discipleship, and spiritual disciplines are available at any Christian bookstore and on countless websites. Yet what we need most is a renewed understanding of and commitment to the Great Commission. We assume that we already know the nature of this Commission. We assume that we know its message, although the statistics do not bear that out. We assume that we already know the appropriate methods, although our feverish activism seems to lack the power of previous missionary movements.

In this brief space I want to explore some of the radical aspects of the mandate that Jesus gave to his church before he ascended to the Father.

1. The Indicative: Jesus Has All Authority

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matt. 28:18).

Every new covenant command is grounded in the gospel... (Click here to keep reading)

You can download this article, with footnotes, as a PDF here.

Exchange Conference

June 17-18, San Diego: A conference about identifying the Truth and the Lie of life. Learn more.

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In this 2-minute video from Advance the Church, David Platt talks about the state of the church today, particularly in the South.

If you live in the South, check out the Advance 10 conference April 26-28. The theme is Contextualizing the Gospel in the New South.

Advance 10

The Advance 10 conference will equip leaders to engage the changing culture of the New South with the unchanging message of the gospel. Find out more.

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We make the same mistakes the disciples did when we only focus on building the kingdom, not receiving and being stewards of the kingdom. In this clip, Michael Horton explains the difference.

In this interview series, Mars Hill PR Director Nick Bogardus interviews Dr. Michael Horton. For more information and resources from Dr. Horton, check out White Horse Inn.

Advance 10

The Advance 10 conference will equip leaders to engage the changing culture of the New South with the unchanging message of the gospel. Find out more.

From the recent sermon Jesus Loves Sinners. Here's the full sermon:

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Luke Sermon Series

The current Mars Hill sermon series traces the life of Jesus through the Gospel of Luke. Watch the preview.

1. The opportunity for extensive culture-making in the U.S.

In an interview, sociologist Peter Berger observed that in the U.S. evangelicals are shifting from being largely a blue-collar constituency to becoming a college educated population.

His question is, will Christians going into the arts, business, government, the media, and film

• assimilate to the existing baseline cultural narratives so they become in their views and values the same as other secular professionals and elites?
• seal off and privatize their faith from their work so that, effectively, they do not do their work in any distinctive way?
• or will they do enough new Christian 'culture-making' in their fields to change things?

2. The rise of Islam

How do Christians relate to Muslims when we live side by side in the same society? The record in places like Africa and the Middle East is not encouraging! This is more of an issue for the Western church in Europe than in the U.S., but it is going to be a growing concern in America as well.

How can Christians be at the very same time a) good neighbors, seeking their good whether they convert or not, and still b) attractively and effectively invite Muslims to consider the gospel?

3. The new non-Western Global Christianity

The demographic center of Christian gravity has already shifted from the West to Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The rising urban churches of China may be particularly influential in the future. But the West still has the educational institutions, the money, and a great deal of power.

What should the relationship of the older Western churches be to the new non-Western church? How can we use our assets to serve them in ways that are not paternalistic? How can we learn from them in more than perfunctory ways?

4. The growing cultural remoteness of the gospel

The basic concepts of the gospel—sin, guilt and accountability before God, the sacrifice of the cross, human nature, afterlife—are becoming culturally strange in the West for the first time in 1500 years. As Lesslie Newbigin has written, it is time now to 'think like a missionary'—to formulate ways of communicating the gospel that both confront and engage our increasingly non-Christian Western culture.

How do we make the gospel culturally accessible without compromising it? How can we communicate it and live it in a way that is comprehensible to people who lack the basic 'mental furniture' to even understand the essential truths of the Bible?

5. The end of prosperity?

With the economic meltdown, the question is, will housing values, endowments, profits, salaries, and investments go back to growing at the same rates as they have for the last twenty-five years, or will growth be relatively flat for many years to come? If so, how does the Western church, which has become habituated to giving out of fast-increasing assets, adjust in the way it carries out ministry? For example, American ministry is now highly professionalized—church staffs are far larger than they were two generations ago, when a church of 1,000 was only expected to have, perhaps, two pastors and a couple of other part-time staff. Today such a church would have probably eight to ten full-time staff members.

Also, how should the stewardship message adjust? If discretionary assets are one-half of what they were, more risky, sacrificial giving will be necessary to do even less ministry than we have been doing.

On top of this, if we experience even one significant act of nuclear or bio-terrorism in the U.S. or Europe, we may have to throw out all the basic assumptions about social and economic progress we have been working off for the last 65 years. In the first half of the 20th century, we had two World Wars and a Depression. Is the church ready for that? How could it be? What does that mean?

Copyright © 2010 by Tim Keller. Used by permission.
Check out more content from Dr. Keller at Redeemer City to City.

Resurgence Literature

Re:Lit is a ministry of Resurgence. There you will find a growing line of books to help guide the resurgence of the new reformed. Find out more.

How should Christians relate to Muslims? Why should we learn about Islam? Sojourn Church in Louisville has a 5-minute interview with Pastor Daniel Montgomery about these issues on their Inside Sojourn podcast. You can also stream the interview directly.

Sojourn is also hosting a forum this week called “Developing a Christian Response to the Challenge of Islam,” taught by Dr. Albert Mohler of Southern Seminary. [Updated with link to the audio from Dr. Mohler's lecture]

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