The Heresy that is killing the church

It’s not about ideas

I had a realisation tonight.

I am in Canberra for the annual Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast which starts tomorrow. Tonight I was at a meeting of Christian Leaders, and as one of them was speaking I saw something.

The person who was speaking was a leader of a very fine organisation that is doing great work around the world, but he said something that didn’t feel right. He said:

As Jesus said “Go into all the world and preach the gospel”.

As regular readers would know, I have come back a few times to the great commission at the end of the gospel of Matthew 28:18-20

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

What stands out to me about the great commission is the word disciples.

Disciple comes from the same root word we get discipline from. A disciple is someone who follows wholeheartedly in every aspect of their life, not someone who simply gives intellectual assent to something.

The other thing I love about the great commission is that it’s not about us. We are invited into God’s activity on earth, in partnership with him, a fact that is reinforced by the very last statement.

This is a very different approach to going and simply preaching the gospel. Sure it’s telling people about Jesus, but it’s also living Jesus and inviting others to do the same.

There is a piece of the bible which even the bible raises questions about. It is that part of the bible that the speaker was referring to.

At the end of the book of Mark, most translations have a little rider like the one from the NIV that says:

The earliest manuscripts and some other ancient witnesses do not have verses 9-20

It is some of these verses (verses 15 to 18) that were quoted tonight:

He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.”

I think these verses change the nature of the great commission in two ways:

Firstly, the emphasis on preaching rather than discipling is the difference between propagating an ideology and living faith. It puts the emphasis on the sales pitch rather than the product. It also makes it too easy. Trying to convince people about ideas is easy, living those ideas is much more difficult.

I wonder whether the church has bought the heresy that our job is to preach rather than disciple. It seems that we waste a lot of time and energy on theological arguments or arguments with people who don’t believe what we believe.

I wonder what difference it would make if we lived it rather than simply talked about it?

I wonder what it would mean to really love the atheists, gays and Moslems? How many would feel loved by us do you think? Jesus seemed to be able to disagree, and yet still love. I have a sense that love has taken a back seat to ideological debate.

The second thing I don’t like about these verses is that it makes us the main actors rather than God. The emphasis is on performance and spiritual experience rather than living faith in the ordinary, everyday.

I wonder whether, despite the fact our bibles tell us these verses are a bit dodgy, we have in practice replaced the great commission with the great con?

I wonder whether we found the idea of discipleship a little too challenging, so we went just for ideas?

I wonder whether most people who reject Christianity, may in fact be rejecting an insipid, pale grey excuse for faith that Jesus too would have rejected?

Its time to rediscover the kind of faith that actually changes the world and doesn’t just argue with it.