The Mission Statement
I’m going to start using this blog again to post the thoughts I’m thinking at the minute, so there will be a lot more appearing over the next few months. I’ve got about a year of a backlog to work through.
The first thought is a simple one.
Any organisation, business, charity, or group of purposeful people has a mission statement, and end goal that they are working towards.
The Church is no different. We have an end goal. A purpose. A calling. Something we are working towards. Something we all agree on. Something we can build upon. Something we work out in action.
But I’ve never come across a mission statement, nobody gave me one when I became a Christian! Is part of the reason we seem so disorganised because we don’t have a common goal?
So what should it be?
To get to heaven?
To become more like Jesus?
To do good things in the world?
To tell others about him?
All those things are true, but they aren’t the mission - they miss something of the dream that God has for His church; they don’t capture the whole story.
I came across this in 1 John 3:8: “For this purpose the Son of God became man - to destroy the works of the devil”.
That sounds good to me. We’re supposed to be like Jesus, this what He was about so it makes sense that its also what I’m about - I’m almost sold on it. So much so, that it made it onto my wall (real wall, not Facebook).
But then I came across this in a book recently and it just sealed the deal for me. Inspired by 1st Corinthians 15, with a bit of the verse above thrown in; the purpose of Christianity is:
“To defeat sin and death, and liberate the whole cosmos”.
Wow.
Now thats a movement I want to be part of. Thats something I would gladly sign my life up to.
To defeat sin and death? To liberate the whole cosmos? Thats sounds more like the Church I read about in the Bible, that sounds more like the people God was wanting.
So there you have it, a mission statement for the Church.
Now - lets start to figure out how that looks.