Faithful Mission Keeps the Bride Central

A friend of mine said, “Non-Christians don’t read the Bible. They read Christians.” I think he’s right. Missionaries talk every day with believers and non-believers who have zero experience in biblical thinking or church practice. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to walk into your Sunday church gathering as a blank slate? How would you understand the things you see there? How would you train new believers to understand the Bible, church, and God’s mission—especially if they were an oral or non-literate people?

I think the Bible teaches us that the local church itself is a beautiful and simple way to help believers and non-believers understand the gospel and the Kingdom of God.

This is why faithful mission work must keep Christ’s bride central.

As missionaries, we have often attended many different churches in our home countries and we have church experiences that have shaped us in positive and negative ways. Church is simply a part of our lives back home. But somehow when we move overseas, we can get really confused about churches in the countries where we serve. We don’t quite know what to do with them. Though we claim the title “church planter,” we aren’t sure how to interact with local churches where we live, or even the ones we plant. In fact, most missionaries aren’t even trained to work with, in, and through local churches.

As a result, some of the best missionaries ask, “When can I leave this church so I can get on with planting more?” Or they lament, “It takes too long to create health in a new church. My job as church planter is to get churches going and let someone else (like a pastor) develop healthy habits so that I can move on and plant more churches among this people.”

In other words, it often seems that missionaries aren’t primarily concerned with planting healthy local churches. But when I look at the Bible, it seems different—it seems that the local church is a big deal!

In the Bible, the local church is the subject, object, and means of mission.

The Church is the “subject” of mission.

When I say the local church is the “subject” of mission, I mean that the church is the primary actor in mission. I see this throughout the New Testament: whenever there was no church, the apostles would start one and then encourage that church to own the further advancement of the gospel in that place and the surrounding region. Sometimes Paul’s ministry was starting churches, but often his ministry was “strengthening the churches” (Acts 14:22, 15:32, 15:41, 16:5, 18:23).

Yet in missionary work today, we often speak as if the missionary—not the church—is the primary actor in mission. However, when we see healthy churches multiplying overseas, we see that most churches aren’t primarily started by lone missionaries, they are started by churches. And it makes sense: only a community of Christians has the diversity of gifts needed to overcome the obstacles to gospel advance faced by missionaries today.

The Church is the “object” of mission.

When I say the local church is the “object” of mission, I mean that it is the primary goal of missions. The book of Acts shows us how the first disciples of Jesus went about fulfilling His commission. With rare exception, all gospel advance in Acts lead directly and explicitly to the establishment of local churches (exceptions being Acts 8:26-39 and maybe 17:32-34). Too often, missionaries today see the local church as a nice result of missions, but not necessarily the primary—or even necessary—result of missionary work.

One reason is simple: object follows subject. If a well meaning missionary believes the primary actor in the spread of the gospel from nation to nation, people to people, to the ends of the earth is missionaries, then she is going to be looking for missionaries in the harvest. Perhaps for this reason, I’ve seen evangelical missionaries perfectly content to make disciples without ever forming them into churches. By adopting such an attitude, these precious new disciples are doomed to fight difficult spiritual battles alone, contrary to New Testament design (Eph 4:11–16). Instead, new disciples must be gathered into biblically sound, healthy, loving families together with fellow believers. “Church as object” has as its goal a complex community of sinners becoming a complex community of the redeemed.

The Church is the “means” of mission.

When I say the local church is the “means” of mission, I mean it is the primary object lesson, the primary training ground for the advance of the gospel. It is the tool for gospel advancement. The New Testament consistently says the church and relational dynamics within the church are models for teaching important truths like how God loves us or how he forgives (see John 13:34-35, 17:21, Acts 4:13, Eph 4:11-16, 2 Cor 3:18, 1 Pet 4:11; for a fuller treatment of Christian community as message, see “Church in the Dead Zone,” pp. 101-111).

Even so, it is very rare to see a missionary point to the local church as the object lesson when teaching new believers: whether it’s how to walk with Christ, how to proclaim the gospel, or how to make disciples and form churches. Somehow, we have failed to train “church as means” into missionaries. Instead, missionaries develop overly simplistic tools, diagrams, programs, and methods and reproduce those from group to group. I appreciate tools, diagrams, and methods—much like I appreciate photos of my wife. They are helpful, but they are no substitute for her. I prefer my living, breathing bride to images of her. Similarly, I’d like to see our primary method be a living, breathing community of Christians.

There is a well-known law of communication and systems that can help us here. Complex systems need complex examples. Children need parents to learn how to become adults. Church members have marriage to understand the Christ/Church relationship. Christ in the flesh shows us what invisible God is like. And the church models everything a Kingdom community should be and do. The church is designed to teach us what a Christian is and what the gospel looks like when it’s lived out.

It kind of makes sense, doesn’t it? With Bible in hand and the local church to use as an example, missionaries don’t need as many models, methods, and guidelines for new believers as much as they need to double-down on ensuring lasting churches become beacons for the gospel to every corner of their area. A church is irreducibly simple: it’s even a great strategy to teach Kingdom principles to non-literate people.

Fortunately, the missionaries I know love the church. That’s good. So does the Lord Jesus, and he has promised to build his church. Let’s train missionaries to focus on starting Bible-based local churches and then to constantly point to the activities, relationships, and biblical structures of those local churches to explain their own ministries and gospel advance to all nations.

Recovering the idea of the local church as subject, object, and means in mission may require rethinking some of our contemporary missionary strategies. As missionaries we may need to adjust our goals and decrease our independence from local churches. I think it’s worth it: healthy local churches have all the resources needed to advance the gospel and teach new believers . . . and Christ loves His bride! She just so happens to be a God-sent strategy for gospel advance.