No True Church Just Preaches the Gospel

People get in debates about the mission of the church and talk about it in really abstract ways. Sometimes this leads to people saying or thinking, “The church should just preach the gospel.” Well, should it?

Defining the Mission

Commissioned by Jesus, for a church to be the church it must be in the business of “making disciples.” The church goes about making disciples by “baptizing” and “teaching all that I commanded,” says Jesus (Matthew 28). In other words, preaching the whole counsel of God and administering the two sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper are central to what the church should be doing. Each local church should also be gathering together publicly to worship and pray together too (Acts 2:42).

The theological tradition that my church belongs to would frame it like this: the local church is called to preach the gospel, administer the sacraments, and exercise church discipline (See the Belgic Confession, Article 29 and Westminster Confession of Faith, 25.3).

As a bare minimum, for the local church to be the church it must have these things happening regularly. The proclamation of the gospel itself creates the community of the church, so we can say, for example, wherever the gospel is preached and the sacraments are administered—there is the church.

The thing is though, in order for us to be doing this faithfully in a local community, there has to be actual participation in the local community by the local church beyond the Sunday gathering. Otherwise, there’s no way of bringing other people into the social environment by which people can actually be made into disciples of Jesus. So discipleship itself has to go outside of the walls of the local church in order for disciples to be invited, gathered and made into disciples inside of the church. Read More