Strategic Mission: stepping over the line

Is anything more important?

After a brief interlude I am continuing my series of posts on Strategic Mission.

I hope you have had a chance to read my previous posts because those frameworks are an essential pre-requisite for what we are talking about in the next few days.

Central to any mission is the fundamental transaction between a person and Jesus Christ that begins the Christian journey. However a lot of damage has been done by people with the simplistic view that that is all that matters.

It was John Stott who said:

“No proclamation without identification and no identification without proclamation”.

This simple phrase is a pivotal understanding in sharing the gospel.

The other factors we have already discussed (commitment, prayer, research, legitimate connection, role-modelling and education) are essential “soil preparation” work so that identification can be real and proclamation can be effective. If those things I have written about are in place, however, it will be normal for people to want to know what is going on.

In fact, people are generally much more willing to respond than we are to ask them.

While I have focussed on the need for understanding and relationship so far, it is vitally important that people are actually given the opportunity to welcome Jesus into their lives. There is a line that must be crossed.

C.S. Lewis said:

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.

C.S. Lewis also said:

The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.

When it comes down to it people need to have the real chance to respond to the Gospel. There needs to be a point where someone says “This is what it means to have Jesus in your life, Do you want that?”.

At one point in Fusion’s ministry there was a year when not a single person came to faith. we had got so good at building relationships that we had lost sight of the truth of the Gospel. I am proud to say that every month now sees scores of people beginning the journey of faith through Fusion’s ministry.

I love this quote from J.I. Packer:

Our business is to present the Christian faith clothed in modern terms, not to propagate modern thought clothed in Christian terms. Confusion here is fatal.

We see the disciples in the book of Acts were not backward in drawing the line:

Acts 16: 30-31 He then brought them out and asked, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household.”

So a fundamental question of strategic mission is:

“How will people be given the opportunity to accept Jesus’s life as their own”?

This question, of course, comes in the context of the others we are asking and also the ones that come next, but more of that tomorrow.