Why did Christ leave us here on Earth? Given that we are all in constant spiritual danger from the world, the flesh, and the devil, and given that he will someday rescue us from the present evil age (Gal. 1:4), why doesn’t he do it now? We know that, just as Christ created (Isa. 43:7) and redeemed (Eph. 1:12) us for his glory, he also left us in this world for his glory. But how can we glorify God? Jesus showed us that, just as he glorified God on Earth by finishing the work God gave him to do (John 17:4), so must we.
And what is that? Well, all four of the Gospels record some version of what has become known as “The Great Commission.” The most famous of these is in Matthew 28:19–20: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” Making disciples to the ends of the world and to the end of time is the work he left us to do. A disciple is a whole-life learner, someone who is conformed to both the doctrine and lifestyle of the master. The Great Commission involves not only bringing people to that initial moment of saving faith but also teaching them wholehearted obedience to everything Christ has commanded us.
This is how every Christian and every local church can glorify God. But churches in need of revitalization almost inevitably have turned away from this commission to follow worldly pursuits. Every revitalization effort must culminate in the church being transformed to embrace the vision of growing as disciples and making other developing disciples. Unless this happens, the church will most certainly die.
The Two Journeys
The work of disciple-making is taught in the New Testament in the language of two journeys: the internal journey of growth into full maturity in Christ and the external journey of evangelism and missions.1 The idea of the “two journeys” of evangelism and discipleship is taught throughout the New Testament, but it first became clear for me as I was preaching through the book of Philippians. In Philippians 1, Paul was writing to the Philippian church to encourage them that his imprisonment had “turned out for the greater progress of the gospel” (v. 12 NASB; emphasis mine) through his own evangelism of the praetorian guard and the increased boldness of watching Christians, who had lost their fear of punishment as a result of Paul’s courageous example. He was also wrestling with his own future, whether he thought he would be executed or released. He became convinced that he would be released to continue his ministry of teaching and discipleship: “I will remain and continue with you all for your progress and joy in the faith” (Phil. 1:25; emphasis mine). Paul uses the same Greek word progress in Philippians 1:12 and 1:25, and the word implies a journey: (1) the progress of the gospel (evangelism and missions); and (2) progress in the gospel (discipleship toward full maturity in Christ).
These two journeys are absolutely intertwined. No healthy church can pick and choose between them, though sadly, most good churches tend to be imbalanced toward one or the other. Dying churches do neither. Perfect churches (of which there are none!) do each with perfect balance. Every revitalization effort must tend toward balanced progress in both of these journeys. If we turn away from either or both, we have taken steps toward the death of the church. Church leaders must understand these two journeys and effectively mobilize the members of the church to get up out of their pews and off their couches to begin running these twin journeys with faith and perseverance.
Missional Means Embracing Both Journeys
In Sebastian Junger’s powerful book, The Perfect Storm, based on a true story, Billy Tyne captains the swordship Andrea Gail, manned by a team of fishermen who are desperate for a big catch. So Tyne decides to push out further east to the Flemish Cap, a fertile fishing ground thirteen hundred miles from their home port of Gloucester, Massachusetts. There they land a stunning bonanza of swordfish, much to the joy of everyone on board. Their financial success seems guaranteed as they process the huge fish and begin packing them with ice for the voyage back home. But two problems doom the ship. First, the ice machine breaks, meaning the fish they have caught will go bad if they do not get back immediately. Second, a monster hurricane—the largest of the century—stands between them and their home. To save the fish from rotting, they decide to steam through the storm and end up being destroyed by waves in excess of one hundred feet.2
The failure of the ice machine is my point of connection here. Jesus sent us out to be “fishers of men” (Matt. 4:19), bringing lost souls to salvation in Christ. But if the fish “go bad” after being hauled into the boat, what is the point? Jesus did not send us merely to “land fish.” He taught us to shepherd the flock all the way home. The essence of the external journey is setting people on their own internal journey. We are to make disciples and teach them to obey everything he has commanded—from justification, through sanctification, to glorification.
Many recent books on church revitalization do indeed embrace these two aspects of healthy church life somewhat. Nevertheless, I have noticed a tendency some of these writers and leaders have to place a strong emphasis on the external journey of evangelism and missions. They cannot seem to help saying things like, “The church exists to win the lost.”3 To be truly “missional” means to combine a missionary mind-set with the two journeys, not preferring either one or the other.
Ed Stetzer’s Comeback Churches has a solid chapter on discipleship4 that touches on most of the main areas of the internal journey. But even in that chapter, the goal always seems to be growth for the purpose of evangelism. Some churches go so far in their leaning toward the external journey that they neglect the internal journey and end up with massive problems among those who are “reached” with a shallow message of initial response to Christ. Bill Hybels, the leader of Willow Creek, acknowledged in an interview with Christianity Today in 2008 that this approach to ministry was woefully inadequate when it came to healthy discipleship of the many people who made professions of faith in Christ.5
I want to advocate a goal of pursuing a revitalized church with true balance between the internal journey of discipleship and the external journey of evangelism and missions.
Moving People on the Internal Journey of Discipleship
When a new pastor comes to a dying church, one of the first goals he should pray about and focus on is moving people toward a vibrant walk with Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. Many of the people in that church may well be unregenerate, despite years of faithfully attending church. The pastor should teach people the “marks of regeneration,”6 ways by which people can know they’re born again. He should also deliberately seek out conversations with each member to be certain that they are regenerate.
Beyond this, the revitalizing leader needs to have a clear vision of what a mature disciple is and how to move people toward that goal. I would recommend using my book An Infinite Journey as a road map toward spiritual maturity.7 In it I argue that Christian maturity consists of Christlikeness in four major headings: knowledge, faith, character, and action (K-F-C-A).
I believe Scripture shows that biblical knowledge feeds faith, faith transforms character, and out of a transformed character, we walk in newness of life. This active lifestyle of obedience in turn feeds knowledge, resulting in a K-F-C-A cycle that drives individuals forward to make progress in the internal journey. All true revitalization efforts must be based on a similar comprehensive definition of discipleship toward mature Christlikeness.
These growing disciples will be the very ones who will use their spiritual gifts to build up the body of Christ, “When each part is working properly” (Eph. 4:16). They will be the very ones who will be sacrificially active in evangelizing their neighbors and bringing lost people to initial faith in Christ. Thus, the internal journey feeds the external journey. Jesus commanded that we “pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Matt. 9:38). The ones who will obey and go are the ones who are following the internal journey path I just laid out.
Moving People on the External Journey of Mission
True church revitalization will inevitably result in the members rising up to embrace their responsibility to be witnesses to lost neighbors, co-workers, family members, and even total strangers. They will seek creative ways to serve the community’s felt needs as a vehicle for displaying the love of God and for winning lost people to Christ.
Some key concepts all revitalizing leaders should communicate:
(1) Root all evangelism in the glory of God. Teach that God’s glory is supreme (1 Cor. 10:31)—more important than even the value of a human soul—but show that the greatest display of God’s glory in the universe is the salvation of sinners through faith in Christ.
(2) Teach Christ’s mission to save the lost. Speak often of the verses in which Christ lays out his evangelistic mission: “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10; see also Matt. 20:28; John 4:34; 6:39–40). Then connect them with our mission: “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you” (John 20:21). Let the Word of God do its convicting work!
(3) Establish plainly the spiritual condition of the lost. Demonstrate biblically that, apart from the saving grace of God in Christ, all people are lost, “Having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12).
(4) Show that the gospel of Christ is the only answer. The exclusivity of Christ is central to the saving message of the Bible: “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
(5) Connect the two great commandments to evangelism. All God’s law is summed up in “love God, and love your neighbor” (see Matt. 22:37–39). Regularly teaching the law will both reveal the sinfulness of all humanity (for no one keeps this law) and give us suitable motive for evangelism. We must be compelled by the love of Christ and love for our neighbor (2 Cor. 5:14–15).
(6) Train people in the gospel message. In a dying church, the people have almost certainly never been carefully trained in evangelism—either in the gospel message itself or in practical approaches to holding gospel conversations with people. Revitalizing leaders must do this careful work of training the people of the church to reach their mission fields.
(7) Give people a vision for practical ministry that leads to evangelism. The church must follow Jesus in meeting present needs but always point to eternal, spiritual needs, for “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” (Matt. 16:26). Missional churches find ways to connect with the surrounding community in which ministry to the body and soul are well-harmonized and properly proportioned. These ministries become a fruitful matrix of relationships in which the gospel can easily be shared.
(8) Prepare the church for visitors. As this training is going on, it is likely that more and more people will want to come to visit your church on a Sunday morning. Be ready to show them hospitality. Be ready to draw them into the life of the church.
(9) Follow up with visitors. If visitors willingly give contact information, it is their way of saying, “Please reach out to me.” Such permission is like gold, so follow up with them.
(10) Seek a “culture of evangelism” rather than programs. Old patterns of program-based, “come and see” evangelism (tent revivals, events at the church, etc.) are not as effective as “go and tell” ministries in which people use their existing contacts with the lost to share the gospel.
(11) Have people get specific about their own mission field. To that end, the members of the church need to embrace their own mission field: workplace, neighborhood, children’s activities (sports teams, music lessons, etc.). They need to be trained to think about lost people in their lives by name, and to begin praying for them and asking God how he wants them to reach out. They can use hospitality, inviting lost people to their homes. They can use mercy ministry, if the coworker or fellow student or neighbor has some medical emergency.
(12) Cover all of this in prayer. Regular and extraordinary prayer for evangelistic fruit should characterize the revitalization effort from the beginning and all the way through.
From a Dying Church to a Church Willing to Die for Christ
Making progress in the internal journey of spiritual growth in Christ is painful, constantly opposed by the world, the flesh, and the devil; even more painful is making progress in the external journey of evangelism and missions. There will be opposition, and there will be suffering. Dying churches have gotten to the sad state they are in because they selfishly loved their lives in this world and refused to take up their cross daily and follow Christ. They have become inwardly focused; they spend their money on themselves and their own comforts; they rarely invite people to church; they stopped looking for ways to engage the community and to serve its needs for the sake of the gospel. They have forgotten what Jesus taught: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). As German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, “When Jesus calls a man, he bids him, ‘Come and die!’”8
We are part of a royal lineage of brothers and sisters who “loved not their lives even unto death” (Rev. 12:11). The early church spiritually conquered the Roman Empire in under three centuries because, as we said earlier, they were willing for their blood to be seed for the church. A revitalizing leader has to be effective in calling a dying church to start dying the right way: dying to selfishness, to sin, to earthly pleasures, to thinking that the church should serve them. The church has to die especially to caring what people will think if it shares the true gospel of Jesus Christ. As George Müller, the great evangelist, pastor, and coordinator of Christian orphanages in England put it: “There was a day when I died, utterly died—died to George Müller, his opinions, preferences, tastes, and will; died to the world, its approval or its censure; died to the approval or blame even of my brethren and friends—and since then I have only sought to show myself approved unto God.”9
If the leaders can mobilize more and more members of the church to this level of self-denial, of dying daily for the cause of Christ, there will be more and more people from the community visiting the church, and more and more individuals brought to salvation in Christ. The church will no longer be dying shamefully but gloriously! For Jesus says, “Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John 12:25). The same is true of local churches.
Leading by Example
This burning zeal for the glory of God and for the plight of the lost must be clearly displayed in the evangelistic example of every revitalizing leader. You need to be regularly sharing the gospel with people in everyday life. You need to be personally strategizing how to meet and interact with more lost people, especially if you are in vocational ministry. You need to be able to say, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1).
Embracing Responsibility for the Unreached, Unengaged
Jesus made it clear that he will not return until the gospel is preached to the ends of the earth: “This gospel of the Kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come” (Matt. 24:14). Every healthy local church must embrace its responsibility in the external journey to the ends of the earth and to the end of time. William Carey was a missionary pioneer for the English Baptists. He organized a mission-sending agency to help him with his work reaching the lost in India. He said to his friends, “I will go down into the dark mine of heathenism, but you must hold the ropes.”10 We “hold the ropes” for missionaries by teaching every Christian’s responsibility toward this global spread of the gospel. Even once dying churches can be revitalized to give sacrificially to the spread of the gospel to unreached, unengaged people groups (UUPGs) in other parts of the world. The essence of the disease that was leading toward the death of the church was a myopic selfishness that has forgotten God’s purpose in the world. The leaders should speak often of missions, challenge the church to give, organize the church to pray for the UUPGs as various mission agencies report their needs.11 For a church that was once nearing the grave to rise up covered with zeal for the lost to the ends of the world will greatly please and glorify our heavenly Father!
PRACTICAL ADVICE