Great Ends of the Church:

By Parrish W. Jones, Ph.D.

 

Isaiah 51:4-8

Matthew 28:18-20

 

I am beginning today another series. This one on the 6 Great Ends of the Church. These Great Ends are stated in the Presbyterian Church's Book of Order and I hope these sermons will help us all understand the basic theology and understanding of mission that has been the tradition of the Presbyterian Church.

 The Great Ends are:  "the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind;  the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God;  the maintenance of divine worship;  the preservation of the truth;  the promotion of social righteousness;  and the exhibition of the kingdom of Heaven to the world." (Book of Order: G-1.0200) We will only deal with the first of these today.

No doubt the first of these seems like a no brainer. Yet, it requires considerable discernment because the world is not a simple place. We can certainly affirm that the words of Isaiah that we read earlier are still true. The world yearns for the word of God—a word that is a light to the nations that will bring justice to the earth. The Older Testament speaks of the need for the Jewish people to be a light to the darkness of the world. That mission is the inheritance of the church. It is to that mission Jesus  commissions us in what has come to be known as the Great Commission, our lesson from Matthew.

 The world needs to hear the gospel and it wants to hear the gospel as Isaiah says, "The coastlands wait for me". All you have to do is visit the bookstores and you can see that there is a great spiritual yearning. That is not our question. Our question is, "Why are we not connecting with this spiritual yearning?  Why are the people who are reading all the new age stuff not coming to us?" Those are large questions we cannot answer today.

What I want to reflect on today is the three points of the Great End to proclaim the gospel for the salvation of humankind. The first point is "proclamation". We all know what the word "proclaim" means but  what are some of the media we use to proclaim? We may mention: preaching, teaching, advertising, radio, tv, magazines, books, movies, websites, blogs, e-mail, music, word of mouth among others.

The church has been a bit slow with many of these. Presbyterians have been very slow at making good use of any new technologies for the proclamation of the gospel. We never got hold of or invested enough in radio and tv. Fortunately, we have been using the internet, but many of us are still dinosaurs when it comes to the internet. It is a compliment to the leadership of this church that you have an excellent website. Also, that there is a video projection system like the one we have here and that musical variety is a constant in the life of the church as is the use of various other art forms like drama and dance.

 We may have a message, but if we do not find the methods of proclamation that will reach the people, the message goes unheard. If nobody hears our message, we virtually have no message.

Speaking of which? What is the message?

During a Presbytery debate over some issue a number of years ago, one of the commissioners got up and said, "I just wish we could get back to preaching the simple gospel." To that another responded, "If you can tell us what that is, then we will do it." Of course, the point of the interchange is that it is not so simple. There are some basic notions as are stated in our Great Ends. As is well known, the devil is in the details.

The details are what we need to know. The gospel has been spoken effectively to every age. It has also been spoken quite ineffectively in every age. The question that we must come to understand is:  "What are the root questions of our age and culture and what are the themes of the gospel that speak to them?"

Douglas John Hall, a theologian of the church in Canada, writes in his Theology for an American Context that the great theme of American culture is

 purpose and meaning. While we exude optimism, few really find much purpose or meaning in their lives. We just live with the persistent myth that it will work out for good. The failure of the church is that we have supported American optimism and substituted it for faith, hope, and mission. They are not synonymous.

I think he is right and would like to elaborate in the future. However, he suggests a point I want to work on now. That is there is often a gap between what is and what ought to be, a point the graphic illustrates. Our need as a part of God's realm on earth is to recognize this gap and seek a way to close it. That is what a vision describes as the statement on screen suggests. 

     Percepts:ReVision Guidebook

This idea is not new to you except perhaps as it relates to the church. You create visions for your own life every day. You look in the refrigerator and cabinets and see you lack enough food for the week. Your vision is to provide food for your family. The question is, "What do you have to do to accomplish that?"

It is a more complicated task for a large organization like the church. Yet, vision gives direction to the life of the church as it does to our personal lives. In the life of the church creating a vision  requires two things:  1. knowledge of the congregation and its understanding of faith and  2. knowledge of our context and the spiritual, social, and material needs of our region. With this knowledge we can discover how to get from what is to what ought to be.

 

Percepts:ReVision Guidebook

The next  graphic suggests that our mission is what we are going to do to close that gap. It tells us how we deploy our resources—who we are, what we are and what we have—to get to what ought to be. Understanding that what ought to be is summarized in the Great Commission.

Percepts:ReVision Guidebook

 

What Douglas John Hall and many other theologians are suggesting to us is that we have failed to proclaim the gospel faithfully in the U.S. context because we have been preaching the wrong themes.  What themes of the Gospel speak to hopelessness and meaninglessness?

The judgment of many theologians is that we have focused too much on the  priestly theme of sin, guilt and forgiveness and not enough on the themes that derive from the other grand themes of the Bible:  Exodus which speaks of liberation from oppression and the  Exile which speaks of alienation and homecoming, two themes Jesus addresses far more often than those of penance.

Whether or not the theologians have properly diagnosed the problem, we must take them as a clue. We do not proclaim the gospel in a vacuum.  We proclaim it in a context. We have to ask the question consistently:  "From what do the people of our region of the world need saving?  What aspects of broken human life do we address with the good news of God?" Answering that question will help us faithfully fulfill all of the Great Ends of the Church, and in particular, the first.