The Centrality of the Local Church to Mission

The Apostle Paul’s conviction was that it is through the local church that God’s glory, gospel, and wisdom were to be manifest in the world according to God's eternal purpose.

“To me, the very least of all saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unfathomable riches of Christ, ⁹ and to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery which for ages has been hidden in God, who created all things;  ¹⁰ in order that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places.  ¹¹ This was in accordance with the eternal purpose which He carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord,  ¹² in whom we have boldness and confident access through faith in Him.” (Ephesians 3:8-12)  

Did Paul practice what he preached? Yes. Paul, Barnabas, and others, who were Apostles, prophets, and teachers, although called by Jesus and set apart and sent personally by the Holy Spirit, still submitted to the authority of the local church of Antioch under whom to be sent out on their missionary journeys rather than going it alone according to the authority of the calling they received from God.

"Now there were at Antioch, in the church that was there, prophets and teachers: Barnabas, and Simeon who was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch, and Saul.  ² And while they were ministering to the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, "Set apart for Me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them."  ³ Then, when they had fasted and prayed and laid their hands on them, they sent them away." (Acts 13:1-3)

Although Paul had been individually converted through a direct experience with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, it was in the context of the local church at Antioch that the Holy Spirit issued the call to missionary activity to Paul and Barnabas. The local church, as the Body of Christ and the first catalyst of God’s glory and magnificent wisdom to the world is the center, sender, and goal of the missionary enterprise. 

Let me give you an example of the importance of the church’s centrality to the work of Kingdom expansion from my own experience. In the predominantly Shiite southern suburb of Beirut, Haret Harayk, there is a community of Sufi (mystic) Shiite Muslims who call themselves the Transcendental Theosophical Institute. It is a close-knit group of serious-minded Muslims who value ongoing education, dialogue, and teach the Sufi path to enlightenment. Several years ago the adviser of my masters program at the Near East School of Theology at the time, had struck up a friendship with the Imam who leads this Sufi-Shiite community. Our Islamic Theology class that semester was invited to join a “dialogue” at the Sufi institute. Our class was made up of three Evangelicals (my professor, an auditing Lebanese doctoral student, and myself), a Catholic student from Germany, two Austrian agnostics, and a few students from various European theologically liberal Protestant backgrounds. Most of us had very different ideas about what it meant to be a Christian and what the central message of the Bible is. The Transcendental Theosophical Institute constituency at the dialogue that night, however, were all well versed and united in the very same system of belief and practice. Needless to say, when it came to our turn to talk and answer questions the discourse was embarrassing. Every single one of the Muslims from the greatest to the least at the dialogue could articulate a ready defense of their faith convictions and their mystic path with passion, sincerity, and clarity. Whereas our group was all over the map theologically in our answers to their questions. Even our professor (for whom I have a great amount of respect) admitted in the meeting to being much better equipped for articulating the tenants of the Islamic faith than his own. I think he justifiably felt uncomfortable expressing his own views as representative of those held by the students in the class. He simply was not a pastor and we simply were not his flock.

The circumstances and the nature of our group, the fact that our class did not represent a constituency from a local church body, lent to so many missed opportunities to powerfully articulate the gospel that night, that I came away from that meeting convinced that if our group had all been from the same church with the same commitment to the gospel and had our leader not only been well versed in the tenants of Islamic Theology but had also been a man called as a pastor with a burden to preach “Jesus Christ and him crucified” we would have seen a powerful demonstration of the kind of bold yet loving witness the local church has been called to uphold among Muslims. But, alas, we were not a local church. Rather we were a hodge-podge of disunity on display before a pagan community with a strong passion for their faith convictions and a united testimony. The gospel had remained veiled from their view that night because the gospel and the wisdom of God was meant to be displayed and made manifest through the church and we were not truly a united local expression of Christ’s church.