Sully Notes Special | 13 Marks of a Faithful Missional Church – Mark 2 of 13

Mark 2 – A Church Empowered by the Preaching of the Gospel – of 13 Marks of a Faithful Missional Church in the 21st Century American West  

Sully Notes are meant to provide you with direct quotes from some books I've read in the last year, so you can get a taste of the overall theme of the book and then begin to chew on what your life might look like if you applied what you read.

This series of special Notes are touching on a subject growing in recognition and discussion within the 21st century American church. What is the missional church? Is it something we do or who we are? What does a church look like that is living out the mission of God in their cultural context? How does a church remain faithful to the good news of Jesus, the Spirit of God, the Scriptures, the church throughout human history and around the world, and the mission of God that the church is called to join, while also meeting the questions, needs, and desires of the people God is sending us to in the cultures and contexts we live in today? I have found no better book to answer these questions than in Michael Goheen's A Light to the Nations: The Missional Church and the Biblical Story. 

For these 13 posts, my goal is to share the final chapter of the book – Chapter 9: What Might This Look Like Today – with you. In this chapter, Goheen shares from his pastoral and professional experience in answering the question, "Ten Things I'd Do Differently if I Pastored Again." The list grew from ten to a lucky thirteen. I think all thirteen are essential for considering how Emmaus City will be a faithful church for our city – Worcester, MA. 

Each blog post will feature one mark that will take about 5 minutes to read. Here is the full list featuring links to the previous posts:

• Mark 1: A Church with Worship That Nurtures Our Missional Identity
• Mark 2: A Church Empowered by the Preaching of the Gospel
• Mark 3: A Church Devoted to Communal Prayer
• Mark 4: A Church Striving to Live as a Contrast Community
• Mark 5: A Church That Understands Its Cultural Context
• Mark 6: A Church Trained for a Missionary Encounter in Its Callings in the World
• Mark 7: A Church Trained to Evangelism in an Organic Way
• Mark 8: A Church Deeply Involved in the Needs of Its Neighborhood and World
• Mark 9: A Church Committed to Missions
• Mark 10: A Church with Well-Trained Leaders
• Mark 11: A Church with Parents Trained to Take Up the Task of Nurturing Children in Faith
• Mark 12: A Church with Small Groups That Nurture for Mission in the World
• Mark 13: A Church That Seeks and Expresses the Unity of the Body of Christ

Mark 2: A Church Empowered by the Preaching of the Gospel 

"Preaching is one element of worship that deserves special attention. In Acts the apostles appoint seven men to care for the neglected widows so they can give attention to the Word of God and prayer (Acts 6:4; cf. Acts 2:42). Paul highlights the gifts of ministry of the Word that will enable God's people to grow into the full measure of the fullness of Christ (Ephesians 4:1-16). Preaching is a powerful means by which God's people may be nurtured and empowered for their missional calling. But much preaching is held hostage by various idolatrous currents of Western culture, and sadly, this channel of God's powerful grace often becomes clogged.

Preaching that nurtures a missional identity will be narrative, centered in Christ, and missional – all three in all sermons. Preaching that is narrative recognizes that the Bible tells one unfolding story that is the true story of the world and that the people of God must live more and more in this story. Lesslie Newbigin correctly states, 'I do not believe that we can speak effectively of the Gospel as a word addressed to our culture unless we recover a sense of the Scriptures as a canonical whole, as the story which provides the true context for our understanding of the meaning of our lives – both personal and public.' Thus he can say about preaching: 'Preaching is the announcing of news; the telling of a narrative. In a society that has a different story to tell about itself, preaching has to be firmly and unapologetically rooted in the real story.' Preaching that does not invite God's people to embody a different story of the world than the one offered by the dominant culture will leave them vulnerable to the idolatrous story of the culture.

Our preaching will also be both centered in Jesus Christ and missional. N.T. Wright offers a helpful model of scriptural authority that highlights both. Wright provocatively suggests that biblical authority is a 'sub-branch ... of the mission of the church.' To understand biblical authority the question that must be asked is 'What role  does scripture play within God's accomplishment of His goal to renew His creation?' To this question Wright unfolds a four-layered answer. First, the Old Testament Scriptures were written to 'equip' God's people for their missional calling to be a distinctive people. Equipping is shorthand for the multiple tasks that various genres of Scripture accomplished to sculpt a missional people. 

Second, Jesus fulfills the purpose of the Old Testament Scriptures, which were unable to form a missional people because the people were weakened by the power of sin (Romans 8:3-4). Wright says that 'Jesus thus does, climactically and decisively, what Old Testament scripture had in a sense been trying to do: bring God's fresh Kingdom order to God's people and thence to the world.'

Third, the apostolic proclamation of the good news that Jesus has fulfilled Israel's story now makes present Christ and his saving power to its hearers. The apostolic message 'is the story of Jesus (particularly his death and resurrection), told as the climax of the story of God and Israel and thus offering itself as both the true story of the world and the foundation and energizing force for the church's mission.' As it is proclaimed and taught, the apostolic gospel is God's powerful word that calls into existence a missional community, shapes that community to be a faithful people, and works through it to draw others to faith.

  

Fourth, this verbal proclamation and teaching of the apostles takes literary form in the canon of the New Testament. As such the written word of God continues to function the way the living word of the apostles had. The New Testament authors believed themselves to be authorized teachers empowered by the power of the Spirit, who opened up the gospel for particular churches to sustain, energize, shape, judge, and renew them for their missional calling. Thus these books carried the same equipping power and authority that had marked the verbal preaching of the word.

This brief summary highlights what it means to preach Christ. Three things are worthy of note. First, wherever we are in the canon our preaching will be oriented to and from Christ. The goal of preaching is to make Jesus Christ present. Second, Christ himself comes clothed in the gospel, and so the message is more than words; it is the power of God unto salvation. This is not simply new religious doctrine to be affirmed and understood. It is an announcement about what God is doing in Jesus and by the Spirit. The message itself thus becomes the power of God to transform lives (Romans 1:16; 1 Corinthians 1:18, 24; 2:4). 

A third implication of preaching Christ is the recognition of the comprehensive scope of the gospel. 'The business of the sermon is to bring the hearers face to face with Jesus Christ as he really is.' Some sermons center in Christ but do not portray him 'as he really is.' Jesus is not simply a personal savior. He is Creator, Lord of history, Redeemer of all things, and final Judge. In his earthly ministry Jesus has proclaimed a gospel of the kingdom. The gospel is not a message that can be slotted into some small, private religious, ethical, or theological realm of life. It is not about a future, otherworldly salvation. Preaching a gospel that diminishes the person of Jesus Christ or the all-embracing claims of the gospel of the kingdom will cut the root that nourishes a missionary encounter between the comprehensive claims of the gospel and the dominant cultural story.

So the business of preaching is to bring listeners face-to-face with Jesus Christ and all his saving power to equip us for our comprehensive mission in the world. Thus pastors must be themselves people who are in the grip of this message. C. John Miller drives this home in a forceful way. In the John Updike novel Rabbit, Run, an angry Lutheran pastor rebukes a meddling Episcopal priest who has forgotten his pastoral calling: 'When on Sunday morning then, when we go before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ, hot' – he clenches his fairy fists – 'with Christ, on fire: burn them with the force of our belief. This is why they come. Why else would they pay us?' Miller comments further that 'nothing must go into the pastor except that which will build his faith in Christ. When he is a man 'hot with Christ,' then he is ready to preach by faith. Nothing less will do.'

N.T. Wright's model also indicates that our preaching will be missional. The various books of the Bible were written to form a missional people. To overlook the original intention of Scripture is to miss the aim of the text. Scripture is first of all not about delivering individual salvific benefits to individuals (as important as this is) but rather concerns forming a people that embodies the good news of the kingdom for the sake of the world. Thus preaching should always orient us outward. Faithful preaching will always move from Christ to mission because 'there is no participation in Christ without participation in his mission.' Thankfully, there is a growing movement to develop a missional hermeneutic that sees the centrality of mission to the biblical story." – pgs. 204-207 

Tomorrow's post: 13 Marks of a Faithful Missional Church – Mark 3 of 13: A Church Devoted to Communal Prayer 

– Sully

 
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