Lords Supper and Four Pillars of the Church Worship Community Discipleship Mission
I have been one of those who have joined in the plea for a ‘mission shaped church’. I have done so because too often ‘mission’ seems to be an optional extra or even when it is a stated value it is still lacking in practice.
The plea for a mission-shaped church is not saying that that is the only thing a church does but prioritising it does help to make sure it happens!
In reality to be church, there are other vital things. It’s just not possible to be church if there isn’t worship, it would be hard to think of church without a communal life, and a church that doesn’t engage in discipleship and disciple making is not a church. Here are four functions that are integral to the purpose of the church as Jesus designed it to be. In fact, all these purposes are deeply interconnected, reliant upon, and stimulated by each other.
You could think of them as the Four Pillars of the church. worship, community, discipleship, and mission.
Let’s look at them briefly:
Worship
Worship is a core, indispensable, and nonnegotiable function of the church. Worship is an irreplaceable reality of the Christian experience. The church should worship because our God is worthy to be worshiped. It is our response to the one holy God, who is above all. The church needs to worship. Worship isn’t necessary for God; it is, however, very necessary for us. And it is, like all four, a command of God.
“If you don’t worship, you’ll shrink.” (the psychologist says in Peter Shaffer’s play Equus)
“Worship is an offering, a sacrifice, an economy of grace that interrupts and critiques the feverish cycles of production and consumption” (Alan Hirsch)
Worship acts to recondition our hearts and reshape our disordered characters. We have been learning through lockdown that Worship isn’t just a corporate activity. We should have known that before of course.
Worship must be understood as being far more than a gathered worship service. Worship involves offering our world back to God. It means bringing all aspects of life under the lordship of God as our central act of worship. It is our natural response to who he is and what he has done. All of life belongs to God, and true holiness and true worship means bringing all the spheres of our life under His supreme lordship.
We will be ‘Gathered’ again next week! It will be different! Gathered worship meetings are a profound expression of submission to Jesus’s lordship, as well as a wonderful expression of our adoration and praise for God collectively. But we must continue to remind ourselves that such worship services don’t make God present. They should presuppose his presence. He is present everywhere. Our acknowledgment of that in all that we do is our worship.
Community
Another irreplaceable function of the church is the painstaking and lifelong fashioning of a genuine Jesus community (or fellowship in a previous parlance). This is the idea expressed by the Greek New Testament term, koinonia. To put it crudely, if worship describes a vertical relationship between God and his people, then community is the horizontal dimension: the relationship between God’s people. This would include all the communal aspects of church life: the deepening of relational bonds, the exercise of spiritual gifts, mutual encouragement and accountability, the sharing of resources, and so forth.
This indissoluble link between fellowship with God and fellowship with his people is a key concern in John’s first epistle.
Again, we cannot deny that Lockdown has effected this. We have had to learn to fellowship over Zoom and WhatsApp. We still need to keep a distance. We have to learn to express our community, our acceptance and love for one another in some new ways.
In Christ, we have fellowship with the family of God and with God himself. Koinonia is used in the New Testament to denote several aspects of our fellowship together. It can imply the sharing of the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 10:16), the sharing of our time and energy (Heb. 13:16), and the contribution of our material possessions (Rom. 15:26). All these uses of the word suggest a commonality of purpose, partnership, and interest. More important, Christian community is not something about which we can arbitrarily make decisions—it is not an optional extra. One does not decide to “fellowship” with one person or another. Fellowship with other Christians is a by-product of our fellowship with God. Just as worship shows a reordering of the habits of our hearts toward God, community is the demonstration that our disordered characters have been reshaped.
Discipleship
Discipleship is clearly a core function of the church, it’s in the Great Commission itself (Matt. 28:18–20). The essential task of discipleship is to equip believers to embody the message of Jesus. Others have referred to this as formation: that is, the formation of individuals and the church as a whole more into the likeness of Christ.
C S Lewis said, “If the church is not doing this, then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible, are a waste of time.”
Discipleship requires the ministries of teaching, admonishment, correction, rebuke, encouragement, etc. But the primary motivation for discipleship should come from our devotion to Jesus as Lord. In other words, submitting oneself to the process of discipleship is in itself an act of worship. It too involves offering my world back to God. Being discipled is in fact a communal activity, because no one person can be ultimately or totally responsible for the mature development of another. This was behind Paul’s idea of the church as a body (see 1 Cor. 12). The gifts of the Spirit are given for the common good (1 Cor.12:7) and different people with different giftings will contribute to each person’s spiritual development as a Christian. Discipleship is an activity of Christian community as well as an expression of personal worship.
This of course means teaching but more importantly, learning. This isn’t playing with words. We must be a learning community where all are on the journey of becoming mature followers of Christ.
Mission
And so we come to mission. Some prefer to be more explicit about the aspects of mission, such as evangelism or witness, or service or social justice. It is all mission. Mission is the best term for describing both the announcement of the lordship of Jesus (evangelism, witness) and its demonstration (social concern, service).
“Mission is more and different from recruitment to our brand of religion; it is the alerting people to the universal reign of God through Christ.” Bosch, Transforming Mission, 519.
Mission is the practical demonstration, whether by speech or by action, of the glorious lordship of Jesus. It is where we get to create little foretastes of the kingdom of Jesus, which has come and is still yet to fully come. If in that kingdom-to-come there will be no unbelief, then the church’s mission is to create such a foretaste by commending, persuading belief to all. If in the kingdom-to-come there will be no injustice, the church’s mission will be to work to eliminate injustice here and now. If in the kingdom-to-come there is no grief, no mourning, no suffering, the church’s mission is to overcome such things today. Mission, then, is an expression of worship, for it too involves offering our world back to God.
The interconnections are obvious when you start looking for them. Jesus told his disciples, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:34–35). When we experience the unconditional love of Jesus, it will be expressed as love for others. Here is oneness of worship and community. But when unbelievers observe this love, it becomes missional. Thus the Christian community witnesses to the reign of God. You just cannot unravel worship, community, discipleship, and mission from each other.
Consider the practice of sharing the Lord’s Supper. Is it an act of worship? Christians have placed its practice in the centre of their worship services. It is seen, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the denomination, as a central rite, or act of worship, for the Christian community. But is it not also an expression of community?
On Sunday via Zoom we will again share this together, but you can do it now. Pause this video and go and get yourself some bread or a biscuit or something and something to drink. Bread and wine are symbols. Just get something……
Paul is at pains to express, not only the devotional or worshipful aspect of the feast, but the communality revealed in it as well – one loaf, one body
(1 Cor. 10:17). Indeed, in his teaching on the Lord’s Supper, he moves back and forth between addressing it as an expression of the lordship of Jesus (worship) and an expression of the oneness of the Christian family (community).
But the practice of the communion feast could quite legitimately be seen as a missional activity. Again, Paul tells us, “For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26).
The feast has an evangelistic aspect. It is a physical, enacted proclamation of the gospel.
But we hasten to add, Paul also saw it as an expression of personal and corporate discipleship. When partaking of the communion meal, we are encouraged to reflect on our journey of faith and to seek to respond to the grace of God in Jesus in a manner worthy of his sacrifice. Paul again: Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself. (1 Cor. 11:27–29)
This process of “examining oneself” puts personal piety and discipleship at the centre of the feast. By simply taking a central biblical Christian activity as an example, we can see how all four broader functions of the church are inherently involved.