Hey, friends, welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
It has been a little while since we saw you,
so we are thrilled that you would take the
time to come back and join us for another conversation right before we kick off our newest series.
We just want to note that this may look a little bit different,
and we want to just
say we have a lot of people to thank,
but we have had this real blessing to get to take
a space in the church that has always been used for education,
but we’ve been able to
reimagine that space as a more permanent kind of digital education space within the church life.
And we’ve had lots of people to thank to get us to this point.
Yeah, we’re joining you today from our first Presbyterian church studio through the
generosity of the Presbyterian and the hard work of Michael and a team of volunteers and
staff.
We have now a permanent place from which to do some of these digital online type ministries.
In some cases, we started doing them during COVID,
but as we learned how
effective they can be and the ways in which they can enhance the overall witness and ministry of First Press,
we felt compelled that we needed to continue to explore how to use those
medium and the today as we move into the studio really for the first time is kind of the end
result of that line of thought,
at least for now,
and this may continue to evolve.
Most of this,
nearly all of this is Michael’s vision and Michael’s work,
though he was not alone,
certainly had help, but we’re grateful to Michael for thinking through how we might do
this as well as we can and continue to improve as we do.
So special thanks to everybody who helped make this possible for Vonda,
for Megan,
for Tom,
for Arlen, who’s Tom’s friend, for Ron Williams, who made this backdrop.
We for Clinton who helped design a desk for everything that’s happened here.
We’re grateful for those voices
and people that made this possible.
But that said, we’re not here for the space.
We’re here for a study.
And that’s going to roll right on the end here.
Thanks for joining us.
Hi friends, welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
After a hiatus, we are grateful to
have you back with us.
We’re grateful to be in this new space.
Things probably look different.
We’ll talk a little bit more about that in a moment,
but we’re excited to be back with
you as we start a new series today,
one that we thought about quite a bit as we wrestled
with what do we do next.
And I think a really important one,
certainly a topic that has
been coming up a lot in the church of the last decade or so.
Yeah, actually, we have in some ways sort of intersected with this topic before we’ve
certainly talked about mission and its importance.
In fact, I believe we did that in our series
where we were talking about the fundamentals of the church.
I think we had a whole conversation
devoted to the idea of mission.
But it’s important that we turn to a more extended
series on that here, I think,
because fundamentally,
mission as the church now must really consider
it, must be a fundamental part of our identity of who we are as people.
And this isn’t like
a new advent.
It’s not something that has just come up.
But I think that the church
has had to grapple with the reality of as we move through the 20th century now into
the 21st century, we recognize the essential nature of mission being at the center of the church.
Because ultimately,
I think we discovered,
and Clint, you can disagree with me here.
I think we discovered how easy it is for us to replace the center of the gospel,
which is Jesus Christ,
with many other competing interests,
whether that be personal power or privilege,
or whether that be with our simply our own preference,
what we would like for worship to be like,
or what we would want the world to be.
It’s easy for us to put ourselves at the center of the busy intersection of our lives.
But when we do that,
church and the community of church,
I don’t really mean the
building when I speak church,
the thing that we do as a people of faith,
suddenly,
becomes more about us than about the one who calls us.
And we need to return to,
I think, some older wisdom, which is going to show us that the only way forward is to keep God at the center of that intersection.
One of the pastors that I worked with previously used to say the church gets in trouble when we
major in the minors.
And what he meant by that was when we take little things and treat them as if
they are the main thing,
when we take secondary things and make them primary things.
And I think,
Michael, one of the things the church has sort of been wrestling with in 21st century America
is that as we see the kind of decline of certainly our branch of the church,
what we call the mainline churches,
we see our churches,
Presbyterian,
Methodist, Lutheran,
maybe a few others,
kind of struggle with a general downturn that has lasted quite a while.
We’re beginning to wonder if part of that is we have put some time and energy,
maybe too much time and energy on things that weren’t the main things.
We worried maybe a little too much about
our buildings or about some of the things we had the luxury to fight over when things were going
really well.
And now we’ve begun to challenge ourselves with the idea that we need to return
to the core of what the church is called to be and what the church is called to do.
And those are not things that have to do with us and our preferences and even our practices,
but the very things that God calls us to,
and we’re rediscovering some of this language.
And I think really
stretching ourselves again to make sure that the things we are pursuing the most are in fact the
things that are most important.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think that’s true.
And I think the way that we
begin to understand that that is to discover that we are called as people of God to be engaged in
the mission of God in the world.
And I want to be clear when I talk about this,
that we’re not saying that we are somehow substitute for what God is doing in the world.
God’s sovereign will and God’s providence is at work many times overruling us rather than working through us.
But there is this reality that God has chosen to work through God’s people and God has
been doing this sort of rejuvenative work over a long stretch of time.
And I think that this is
an essential tenet of the Bible,
and yet we are quick to over to really miss it.
So I wanted to
point this out here,
share this with you here today.
This comes from the end of the book of Matthew.
There’s a very famous passage of scripture.
Jesus says here in verse 18,
“All authority in heaven
on earth has been given to me.
Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son,
the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I’ve commanded you.
And surely I am with you always and to the very end of the age.” And the point I want to make
with this text is fundamentally,
Jesus gives a task to the disciples.
He says, “This is what you are asked to do.” And then he follows that or ends that with a promise,
“As you do it,
I will be with you.” And so this reality is that we are people who by faith go into the world seeking to do a thing.
And then as we do that,
we do it with the confidence that we don’t do it alone.
And this is ultimately what we mean by the mission of God,
that ultimately we have a thing to do.
And as we do that thing, we seek to be faithful along the way.
Yeah, our ancestors in the faith that spoke
Latin referred to this as the “misio dei,” the mission of God.
Misio meaning one’s calling, one’s mission,
“dei” being “deo” for their word for God, for holiness,
the mission of God.
In other words,
what are the marching orders that God has given his people?
What are the things that God
wants accomplished in the world?
And for whatever reason,
God has chosen not to do those things
without us or even outside of us,
but to do those things through the gathered body of Christ on
earth, that we are invited,
we’re called, commanded even,
to participate in God’s vision for the world.
It is to come about in part through our work,
through our efforts, through our faithful living,
through our practicing the grace of Christ in the world,
is the mission of God partly accomplished.
Now, that doesn’t mean it happens because of us.
It doesn’t mean it happens because of our
abilities or our strength.
It is God doing the work,
but because God has called us to be partners,
God is doing that work through us.
We are invited.
It is an incredible thing to think about.
We are invited to do the work of the creator of heaven and earth,
the father of Jesus Christ,
the one who wants us to be redeemed and rescued and wants to send us out to accomplish that in
others and in the world as well,
and to work against anything that keeps people from what
God intends for them.
And God has chosen us to participate in that.
I’m not sure it’s the way
that I would have done it.
I’m not sure it’s always the most effective,
but it is an incredible
reality that we are invited to be a part of God’s mission.
You know, it’s interesting, actually,
when you look back and you use a sort of rear-looking lens to understand that what God is doing has
continuity with what God has always been doing.
And by that, I mean,
if you look to even the Old
Testament to see that God has been using the people of Israel as God’s promise keepers, his covenant people.
And he did this not because they were somehow super saints or because they
were super faithful or because they always got it right.
They carried the commandments.
They kept them.
They were a shining beacon of light to the world in all times and places.
In fact,
the witness that we have throughout the scriptures is very clearly that God has chosen these people
so that even in their faithlessness,
God’s providence, grace and faithfulness can be shown
so clearly.
I think that’s what is so beautiful about being the people who are called to be God’s
people is it’s not just your track record.
It’s not how perfect you’ve been in your faith or how
faithful you’ve been at church or whether you have practiced all the spiritual gifts or not.
These are things that we often get fixated on and we sort of bow up and we try to show to other
people.
But the reality is that’s not what we’re called to.
We’re not called to be people who are
always out doing the perfectly right things.
We’re called to be God’s children,
to be about what God
has called God’s people to do.
That is why we take so seriously community because you can only
be God’s people and community.
That’s why we take so seriously the call to find like we had in our
previous series when we were talking about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Life Together.
We as God’s people
find ourselves doing God’s work when we emphasize the reality that that is a reflection of being
who God has called us to be.
And that means that we’ve got to recognize we need grace because we’re
not going to always get it right.
I think as it pertains to mission one of the struggles is that
we use the word in a couple of different ways.
There is this classic sense where we talk about
the mission of God as the overarching big goal that God sets for us.
What is it that God wants to
do in the world?
What is it that God wants to accomplish?
And we call that the mission of God,
and we have historically taught that that mission should really drive everything the church says
and does.
Everything we do as a congregation or any congregation ought to be connected to that
bigger picture of what God wants to do in the world.
Why do we teach children the faith?
Because we are to share the good news.
Why do we, you know,
do our programming?
Why do we worship?
All of these things should have some connection to what is the mission of God as we understand it
in this place.
However,
we also then use mission in this kind of specific way where we mean
helping people.
We mean giving money to people who need it or giving food to people who need it.
Most churches have a committee or a group of what they call mission,
the mission team, the mission committee.
Sometimes we have replaced or that use of the word has become kind of our
primary way of understanding it.
So that mission then only means outreach.
One of the struggles
as we live through this kind of redefinition of mission in a church wide,
really in a global sense,
is to expand that concept.
Yes, we can talk about mission as outreach,
but we need also to talk
about mission as evangelism,
as graciousness, as redemption,
as social justice.
There is a sense
in which everything the church does,
everything the church participates in ought to have a missional aspect to it.
And it’s okay to have a mission committee,
but we need to understand that if we
were being 100% on board with the historic idea,
the entire church is the mission committee.
We are all called to do mission,
not just with helping people and giving money,
but with all of the various ways God calls us to be in the world.
Yeah, I’m really glad that you said that.
And I think we do need to show our cards on this a
little bit because there’s a sense in which being Presbyterian,
being in the reformed line of the
faith, this is a core fundamental assumption that we bear as people of faith as we read the scripture.
And that is that ultimately the ministers are all of those who are called by God.
That’s reflected in even how we talk about our clergy.
It’s reflected in how we think about our task.
You know,
we in the Presbyterian church have for a while at least called our pastors
teaching elders.
The idea is that they would teach the ladies so that they can do their ministry
in the world.
This is essential.
We don’t think of the pastoral role as a priestly role
or standing between the people in God.
We think of that as a role that supports the people as
they’re doing their priestly work in the world.
This royal priesthood of all believers is the
language that came to that.
And this is essential because what that means is when you’re a doctor
or a lawyer or a banker,
or you are a street cleaner,
or you’re a landscaper,
or you go through every vocation that could be a teacher,
you go through every task that one could set your
hands to.
In doing that task, the question is,
are you living out the priesthood of all believers?
Are you reflecting the work that would be done by one who is a follower of Jesus Christ?
And of course we can think of some of the moral attributes of that.
Are you honest?
Are you ethical in your treatment of other people?
Are you compassionate?
Do you have grace even in
difficult circumstances?
Of course,
these animate our work,
and there’s a sense in which then that
that’s a part of our mission.
But some of it is redefining our personal identities.
Remember, this isn’t just about what we do.
It’s about who we are.
So do you consider your life,
in whatever way you are called to live it right now,
to be someone who’s doing God’s work?
And ultimately,
that gets answered when you wake up in the morning.
That gets answered when you set
yourself to the task of the day.
That’s not something that we just happen,
stance, find ourselves wandering into.
That that’s a choice made and a commitment that we continue and seek
to live into.
And so the encouragement here is that really this is somewhat flowing out of the
seedbed of theology that we live in.
That this is partially from our reformed sort of perspective.
But I think more than that,
it’s a reflection of a real biblical thrust,
this sort of end of Matthew,
as we read, but even the book of Acts,
or this outward movement of the gospel.
That’s done not by paid, licensed credentialed Christians.
That’s done by the people of God.
And we need to remember
that that means you,
that that means me.
You know, one of the distinctions that’s sometimes helpful
is the idea maybe between mission and calling.
So mission is that thing that all Christians are
called to do.
We share that in common.
No matter who you are,
no matter who I am,
we have been given a mission to live out the gospel,
to forgive our enemies,
to pray for those who curse us,
to bless those who don’t love us,
and to love those who are hard to love,
to reach out to the poor.
There are some universal things to which every Christian is called to aspire,
and yet we live
that out in very different ways.
Amidst that universal mission that we all have,
we have particular calling.
So Paul can talk about some being teachers and some being apostles and some
being healers.
And if you were with us in some of our previous studies,
some people talking in tongues
and other people doing a thing,
we live that out in different ways,
but we carry this universal call
to participate in God’s mission.
Though specifically,
we may each do it within our
skill set, within our talent, within our region where we live, our relationships.
But there is this
tension,
not even a tension,
there is this relationship between our general call to
mission and our particular call as to how we live out that mission or how we engage in it
in our own circumstances.
And I think it’s important to keep that in mind because sometimes
I’m tempted to let myself off the hook and say, “Well,
I’m not comfortable talking to people about my faith.” Well,
that does not mean you’re not part of the mission to share the good news
of the gospel in the world.
You are.
That is your mission as a Christian.
That is the mission of every Christian.
Now, how you do it?
Okay, it doesn’t have to be like someone else might,
but none of us get to simply opt out of some of the parts that we might not be comfortable with.
The idea is rather that we explore how those callings come out in our own individual lives.
That does lead us to a conversation you’ve got to have at the introduction of a series like this.
How are we to consider that sort of formal idea of missionary that I think most of us have?
We’ve, on some level,
had engagement with someone who’s gone into what we often call the mission field.
And we have this idea that we train,
we equip, we send some people out.
We generally think of that as going out of our place,
if not even our nation or our culture.
And we think of
the good news to other people.
And sometimes we think of that as a humanitarian task.
Sometimes we think of that as a purely gospel kind of task where we proclaim the good news of Christ.
We invite others to follow Jesus.
You know,
when we think of mission as one of the products of the
church, and I don’t mean product in a negative way,
but when we think of it as a thing that flows
out of being church,
then it’s easy to conceive of that as being sort of a sideline part of church.
Maybe we know it’s important,
but we think, you know, that’s part of what the church does.
We have to trouble that in our conversation here today because we’re not thinking that mission is done by missionaries.
Now they are doing mission.
They’re a part of the task,
but it’s a very
specific part of the task that they’re doing as they’re taking that to different peoples or languages or cultures.
They’re doing God’s work,
but that’s only a sliver of the entire mission
that we’re trying to reference.
And if we think of those missionaries as being the parabolic
missionary,
then we tend to not see ourselves as being in that group.
And Clint, I just think that’s dangerous because ultimately we find ourselves sending other people out to do this work,
and we find ourselves not involved or not committed to the task that we’re called to do as Christians.
I would say, Michael,
in a larger sense,
even those people we call missionaries
are only doing a slice of their own mission.
What I mean is when someone comes to the church and
says, “I work in this place.
I’m overseas, and I’m translating the gospel,” we’re impressed
by that.
We’re moved by that.
But to the person who donates to that cause,
to the person who helps
fund that missionary’s work,
to the person who undertakes to pray for that missionary,
they are also engaging in the mission.
Not in the same way,
but they are engaged.
They are moving into that call to spread the good news.
If you do nothing more than hold up in prayer those you know
who are someplace doing that explicitly,
you are being involved
in the mission of evangelism.
And this is what the church,
I think, is trying to rediscover in the early 21st century,
is that we are all missionaries in that sense.
We use that language a lot.
People say that.
But there is a truth to the fact that in the early church they all understood that they were
called into these ministries,
called into this mission that God was doing in the world.
Now, some of them in big ways,
some of them in small ways,
but they were all engaged in it.
They didn’t think of the church as a product they consumed.
They thought of it as a movement they joined.
And we have lost some of that.
And as we go through our struggles of the early 21st century,
one of the opportunities we find in it is to kind of remember that and maybe re-engage that lost
idea that every person of faith is given a mission.
We all inherit the mission of Jesus Christ,
and all of us in various and different ways are called to live it out in our day-to-day lives,
whether we go to China or Afghanistan or anywhere,
or whether we live here and teach our children
and volunteer in Sunday school and be gracious to people who frustrate us.
As we seek to be
faithful to Jesus Christ,
we engage in Jesus Christ’s mission for the world.
And I think
we will do well to continue to work on remembering that and learn what it means to live it out in
congregations.
Yeah, and a word of caution to offer here.
We want to be clear,
and I don’t want to
speak for you, Clint, here, but I want to say I think we’re on the same page in saying that we
have the farthest from mind in this conversation,
the idea of marketing or salesmanship of the
these are difficult times,
especially for mainline churches,
the Presbyterians, of course, the Methodists, the Lutherans.
It’s a season in which lots of congregations know something very
real about congregational decline,
but to decline membership,
maybe they’re even struggling for finances.
And the temptation is to think that the mission is an opportunity to get more people to fix the problem,
to sort of turn the ship and get things going in the right way.
And if that should happen,
it would all be thanks
and glory to God.
It would be God’s work in the midst of the
church.
We don’t do what we do as the people of God for the outcome.
We do it because we are,
as people of God,
called to do this task.
And there’s a kind of potential falseness that lives
in the middle of this conversation where we make it really about us.
So we want our church to grow
or we want other people to find the gospel compelling.
So we, we sort of insert ourself
in it.
That’s the farthest from what we mean.
We mean that God really does have a task that we’re
not really up to it,
but we’re not called to be perfect in it.
We’re called to respond and to do
the best that we can do.
And every from everything from that point on is really is God’s leading and
guiding and it’s to God’s credit.
And so we have to be careful to not turn this in some insidious
way and make it into a thing that it’s not because it might maybe tempting to do in the world we live.
Yeah, the idea is not what we get out of pursuing mission or being missional.
The idea is this is
our calling in Jesus Christ.
This is who we are called to be and what we are called to do.
And I find that language I mentioned earlier of major things and minor things helpful.
I’ve been doing this pastoring business for almost three decades now and I have yet to have someone come in and say,
pastor, I’m upset.
We don’t do enough for the poor.
When someone comes in and is upset,
it is nearly always about an us thing,
a local thing, a thing that’s changed in the building
or the church or the practices of the faith community.
And we forget sometimes that those
are secondary things because they’re primary in our experience.
We experience them all the time.
We come to church every Sunday.
So when something changes in the sanctuary,
it strikes us as a major thing.
But in the reality of the kingdom,
it is often not that important.
And so part of this
is just the church constantly wrestling not to put ourselves in the middle,
not to use our own
perspective as the framework by which we make judgments about what is mission.
Yes,
we have a way of doing things here.
And yes, we need to do them well and we all have different
opinions and it matters,
but it’s not primary.
And if we can understand that,
if we can remember
that, and if we can continue to wrestle with that,
we have a better chance of understanding than
what is primary and how it drives the ship and how it is the thing that we’re called to do,
which is to keep Jesus Christ,
not anything else,
but keep Jesus Christ at the center of our
experiment and attempt to be the church.
What you say that raises for me really,
I think, an important point is we have to remember that mission is not just when you get to go do those
things that feel like mission,
things like you go to the food bank,
you go on that mission trip,
maybe even to our country,
and you serve people who have far less public goods and services than
we have.
And you feel in that moment like you’re connected to this deeper mission.
That is mission.
Don’t hear me wrong,
but it’s also an important part of mission.
When you see something,
even maybe that thing is exactly what the church needs to do or we need to be realigned with.
We need to have more mission in this place or this thing.
Part of being a missional people is learning to
love one another in the midst of that difficulty.
Sometimes churches are slow to change and
sometimes it takes some perseverance
and it takes working towards a thing that is good,
but we still are called as Christians to do that in a way that’s faithful,
that lifts others up,
that encourages them, that’s filled with grace.
Even in some of those conflicts that happen at this busy intersection,
mission requires of us a kind of self-giving,
even to those that we think
we are trying to help see a way further into the mission of the church.
So it’s important that we
recognize that mission lives both outside our walls,
but even more importantly,
and sometimes we forget inside our walls,
that we need to be attuned to the mission of being the people of God
in our own time,
in our own place.
And as we do that,
then we’ll form as the people who will go
forth and do God’s work.
Yeah, and confession right out of the gate,
we hope in this series
to challenge you to think about both the mission of this church,
or maybe the congregation that you’re in,
and your personal mission,
because they are going to have similar content but different practices.
And so we very much want to challenge each of us to think not only what is the big
mission of the church and the place that I serve Christ,
but how am I personally to be involved in
those missions, both at the congregational level and at a personal level?
I think it’s a really
helpful place to end here today.
We want this series to at its best include both of these things,
to find ourselves in it,
to also find our place in the larger mission of Christ,
this larger community that’s responding to this identity that we’ve given.
So you’ll find in it, I hope,
challenge,
but you’ll also find in it encouragement and maybe even inspiration to live your life in
such a way that others can see the work of Christ,
the hands and feet of Christ in what you do and
say.
So we hope that you will stick with us on this journey.
And we certainly are excited to get to
engage lots of different voices and paths as we do it.
It’s really good to be back with you,
and thanks for joining us.