What Exactly is the Mission of the Church?

jimmyjimmy said:

With detail, and biblical references, please explain what the mission of Christ's Church is. What is her main goal, and how is she to arrive at that goal? What are the strategy and tactics she is to employ?

And. . . just as importantly, what is the Church doing today that it should NOT be doing. In other words, has there been any mission drift, and what has that looked like?

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The main ingredient of the Church as a group today should be busy with proclaiming the message which was delivered to us through the events that took place in history John 17:20. At its' core is the absolute certainty that Jesus rose from the dead Matthew 12:39-40. To further explain why this is important 1 Corinthians 15:1-8 to individuals, that without knowing who and what Jesus is (Jude 1:5 John 20:28), mankind has no other hope for an eternal life Acts 4:12. Such a thing should not be hidden as the reason and motivation for what a church should be representing in this world Matthew 5:14-16.

What a mission drift looks like is when there's a complete absence of teaching what I mentioned above. Certainly there are a lot of other problems within Christianity as a whole, however I believe none of which don't have solutions Revelation 2:1--3:22.

Norbert L said:

The main ingredient of the Church as a group today should be busy with proclaiming the message which was delivered to us through the events that took place in history John 17:20. At its' core is the absolute certainty that Jesus rose from the dead Matthew 12:39-40. To further explain why this is important 1 Corinthians 15:1-8 to individuals, that without knowing who and what Jesus is (Jude 1:5 John 20:28), mankind has no other hope for an eternal life Acts 4:12. Such a thing should not be hidden as the reason and motivation for what a church should be representing in this world Matthew 5:14-16.

What a mission drift looks like is when there's a complete absence of teaching what I mentioned above. Certainly there are a lot of other problems within Christianity as a whole, however I believe none of which don't have solutions Revelation 2:1--3:22.

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You are asking someone to leave a certain, dependable, tried source of temporal survival, inferior though it is, for an untested, risky, source of spiritual life. Why should he believe you?

Exodus 4:1-9
1Then Moses said, “What if they will not believe me or listen to what I say? For they may say, ‘The LORD has not appeared to you.’” 2The LORD said to him, “What is that in your hand?” And he said, “A staff.” 3Then He said, “Throw it on the ground.” So he threw it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from it. 4But the LORD said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand and grasp it by its tail”—so he stretched out his hand and caught it, and it became a staff in his hand— 5“that they may believe that the LORD, the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has appeared to you.”

6The LORD furthermore said to him, “Now put your hand into your bosom.” So he put his hand into his bosom, and when he took it out, behold, his hand was leprous like snow. 7Then He said, “Put your hand into your bosom again.” So he put his hand into his bosom again, and when he took it out of his bosom, behold, it was restored like the rest of his flesh. 8“If they will not believe you or heed the witness of the first sign, they may believe the witness of the last sign. 9“But if they will not believe even these two signs or heed what you say, then you shall take some water from the Nile and pour it on the dry ground; and the water which you take from the Nile will become blood on the dry ground.”

2 Corinthians 12:11-13
11I have become foolish; you yourselves compelled me. Actually I should have been commended by you, for in no respect was I inferior to the most eminent apostles, even though I am a nobody. 12The signs of a true apostle were performed among you with all perseverance, by signs and wonders and miracles. 13For in what respect were you treated as inferior to the rest of the churches, except that I myself did not become a burden to you? Forgive me this wrong!

jimmyjimmy said:

With detail, and biblical references, please explain what the mission of Christ's Church is. What is her main goal, and how is she to arrive at that goal? What are the strategy and tactics she is to employ?

And. . . just as importantly, what is the Church doing today that it should NOT be doing. In other words, has there been any mission drift, and what has that looked like?

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Matthew 28:19 is the Great Commission.

What are we Christians doing today that we should not? Persisting in schism, capitulating to secularism and moral relativism, abandoning the Biblical doctrine on marriage and sexuality, discarding traditional worship, using praise and worship music instead of beautiful hymns and chant, engaging in syncretic and occult worship services with other religions, persisting in doctrines anathematized by the Ecumemical Councils ranging from non-Trinitarianism to Iconoclasm, neglecting the mission field, and resorting to methods of proselytization which discredit us, among other things.

Now, in Eastern Orthodoxy, we know we are the Church, but we don't know where the Church is not, hence the hope for ecumenical renewal. On that basis, I think Eastern Orthodoxy is engaged in the following grave wrongs:

• Neglecting the mission field
• The bishops who correctly support ecumenical reconciliation with the Oriental churches, the Roman Catholics, and sacramental Protestants, in due course, are failing to properly explain how this reconciliation will be implemented in practice, and are failing to reassure the laity that, for instance, the Eastern Orthodox will not, if we restore communion with Rome, subordinate ourselves to the Pope. The result is a large anti-ecumenical movement, which is the dominant force in the churches of Georgia, Serbia, parts of Greece, and in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.
• We have failed to restore full communion with the Oriental Orthodox despite agreeing over 50 years ago that we share a common faith and a common Christology based on the Council of Ephesus, our schism being derived from a misunderstanding at Chalcedon and certain evil bishops who were anathematized at the Fifth Ecumenical Council.
• We have failed to use our resources to influence the Protestant churches, while allowing Protestant and Evangelical churches to influence us (for example, there is no readily available Orthodox Bible translation in print in Arabic; our churches in the Middle East are giving the laity Bibles that are published by evangelical missions and which lack the Apocrypha and the Septuagint version of Psalms, which is the one we use in worship). We could be distributing Bibles to Protestants in Russia, Serbia and elsewhere; we could be publishing hymnals and service books for traditional Protestants, the Emergent Church movement and the Ancient Future movement, that would be compatible with our theology.
• We have neglected the mission field until recently and allowed many of our parishes in the diaspora to be social clubs for emigrants from Greece, Romania, Syria, etc, from the "Old Country;" some jurisdictions are worse at this than others. We did nothing to counter the impression made by Seinfeld and mY Big Fat Greek Wedding that the main reason for converting to Orthodoxy is because you want to marry someone who is Orthodox, and that otherwise, our rituals are bizarre, incomprehensible, conducted in entirely in foreign languages, and completely and utterly different from the traditional worship of Protestants and Catholics.
• To this end, some people think that to join, for instance, the Greek or Russian Orthodox Church, you have to be Greek or Russian; most people don't realize the Eastern Orthodox Churches are one united communion, and so if they join the Greek Orthodox Church and then move to another city where the nearest Orthodox Church is Antiochian or Bulgarian, its still the same church with the same sacraments, the same liturgy, the same traditions.
• We have not been aggressive enough in internally distributing the Orthodox Study Bible, or especially, study bibles in the Old Country which explain the Scriptures from our doctrinal perspective. This has resulted in Biblical illiteracy among the Cradle Orthodox, even among some priests, and this in turn has lead to our church members being vulnerable to proselytization and exploitation by non-Christian cults like the Jehovah's Witnesses.
• We have likewise neglected catechism, mainly in the Old Country and in the Ethnic Club parishes.
• We have tolerated morally corrupt bishops, some of whom may have originally been planted by the secret police of the communist regimes which used to rule most of our ancestral homelands.
• We have failed to heal the schism with the Old Calendarists and the Russian Old Believers.
• We have neglected the development of Western Rite Orthodoxy (which uses services based on the traditional Anglican Book of Common Prayer and the various Western rites of the Roman Catholic Church), which if developed, could ease the process of ecumenical recomciliation in the same way the Eastern Catholics ease it, and which could offer Western Christians a potentially more familiar and accessible mode of worship.
• We have tolerated crypto-Nestorianism among some polemicists in our membership who specialize in attacking the Oriental Orthodox.
• We have allowed modernist influences from Vatican II in, albeit slightly, leading to ugly new Orthodox churches with missing or minimal iconostases, abbreviated worship services in some jurisdictions, and the highly divergent liturgy of the New Skete Monastery.
• We have in some cases made the process of conversion needlessly long and scarry, although we have not made the mistake Rome made with the RCIA. Catechism cant be done on a cookie-cutter basis.
• We wasted decades and millions of dollars on the Great and Holy Council of Crete in 2016, a Council which was boycotted by one third (or nearly one third) of the autocephalous Orthodox churches, and to which the autocephalous Orthodox Church in America, the second largest jurisdiction in the United States, was not even invited (because the Ecumenical Patriarchate does not recognize the OCA as autocephalous; presumably they consider it an autonomous part of the Russian Orthodox Church, despite the Moscow Patriarchate granting it full autocephaly around 1970).
• We have not adequetely rebuked the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople for attempting to claim that it alone can grant or revoke autocephaly, for refusing to recognize the autocephaly of the OCA, and for threatening to revoke the autocephaly, and meddling in the internal affairs, of the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia.
• We have not adequetely rebuked the Church of Jerusalem for intruding on the canonical territory of the Church of Antioch in Qatar, which has interfered with pan-Orthodox functions and dialogues.
• We have failed to address the issues posed by the schismatic national churches of Macedonia and the Ukraine. A substantial number of Ukrainains want to remain under the Moscow Patriarchate, whereas others do not. In Macedonia, the government finds the idea of the local church being subordinate to the Serbian Orthodox Church intolerable, and has committed human rights violations against the Serbian Orthodox Archbishop of Ochrid, imprisoning him for several years on trumped-up charges. Realpolitik however demands that we work with the Macedonian Government, and the schismatic Ukrainian Orthodox Patriarchates (there are two of them), so as to achieve a situation where the entire population of Macedonia, and many Ukrainians, resume being members of the canonical Orthodox Church.

jimmyjimmy said:

Wow! That's quite a list!

Which is the most troubling to you?

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Probably the lack of communion with the Oriental Orthodox.

But note, all pf these are problems of church governance. I do not believe that there are any doctrinal errors in the Eastern Orthodox faith; I also believe our worship along with that of the Oriental Orthodox and the Assyrians and Eastern Catholics (excepting the Maronites and Melkites) is the most consistent in Christendom, and extremely beautiful. The traditional Latin rites of the Roman Catholic Church are also extremely beautiful, but they are not consistently available, whereas nearly every Eastern Orthodox parish, even tiny rural ones, serve the same liturgy with an equal amount of splendour.

jimmyjimmy said:

With detail, and biblical references, please explain what the mission of Christ's Church is. What is her main goal, and how is she to arrive at that goal? What are the strategy and tactics she is to employ?

And. . . just as importantly, what is the Church doing today that it should NOT be doing. In other words, has there been any mission drift, and what has that looked like?

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this

jimmyjimmy said:

Is that a propaganda film?

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yes, in that it propagates the great commission

jimmyjimmy said:

It's not the Great Commission.

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i didn't say it was the great commission I said it propagated the great commission.

DamianWarS said:

this

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But how?

jimmyjimmy said:

In either case, you are incorrect.

That video distorts the GC and adds to it. It's a kum by ya fest.

to the 11, the leaders of the Church, He firstly passed on His authority to them for the work they were about to being. That work included three things:

1) Make disciples (students/learners/followers of The Way)

2) Baptize

3) Teach​

The GC:

Matthew 28:16-20

The Great Commission

[16] Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. [17] And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted. [18] And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. [19] Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, [20] teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (ESV)

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the video is not meant to be exhaustive nor is it a kumbaya fest; it's point is about exposing the institutionalized church as misfocused with a greater emphasis on the GC. It doesn't go through every point of the GC it merely highlights it saying the mission of the church is the GC. The characteristics of the GC, since it is named, should be assumed in this presentation, which include as you rightly point out, disciple making, baptising and teaching.

Wordkeeper said:

You are asking someone to leave a certain, dependable, tried source of temporal survival, inferior though it is, for an untested, risky, source of spiritual life. Why should he believe you?

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Do you mean, why should anyone believe in the resurrection of the body? Or do you mean why should anyone believe that proclaiming the resurrection of the body is something that Christianity should be promoting as a priority? That message doesn't stop at 1 Corinthians 15:3, it has some very important connotations that permeates numerous other doctrines.

jimmyjimmy said:

It distorts the GC. That sticks out like a sore thumb to me.

Thanks for posting it because it gives an excellent example of one way in which the Church has suffered from mission creep.

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it may be a little on the romantic side but mission creep is a poorly chosen word. Regardless, its an impasse of opinion from a piece of media trying to stimulate thought of the GC and not worth this back and forth. what's more productive is gauging the OP rather than a digressed topic.

true or false
the mission of the church is the gc or embodies the gc within it

Norbert L said:

Do you mean, why should anyone believe in the resurrection of the body? Or do you mean why should anyone believe that proclaiming the resurrection of the body is something that Christianity should be promoting as a priority? That message doesn't stop at 1 Corinthians 15:3, it has some very important connotations that permeates numerous other doctrines.

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The Christian life is a life of sacrifice. Just as Moses had problems getting Israel to leave the safety of Egypt to cross a dangerous desert, you are going to have trouble asking people to leave an unspiritual life to venture into a life of depending on God, like the lilies of the field and the ravens of the air do. That's why God empowered Moses with signs, that's why Jesus empowered the 72 with demon submission power: to convince people to turn away from the world to God.

If your pastor told you to gather (not scatter) God's sheep, you should ask him how you could convince the sheep to follow you. I did.

I know I'm framing the role of the apostle in an unconventional way, but what if that was the way the role was understood in New Testament times?

Wordkeeper said:

If your pastor told you to gather (not scatter) God's sheep, you should ask him how you could convince the sheep to follow you. I did.

I know I'm framing the role of the apostle in an unconventional way, but what if that was the way the role was understood in New Testament times?

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Here's how a real apostle of Jesus Christ concretely understood and distinguishes between himself and some other types of apostles. "From Paul, an apostle (not from men, nor by human agency, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead)" Galatians 1:1 NET.

My general advice to is don't believe anything that doesn't know and understand that basic difference.

jimmyjimmy said:

With detail, and biblical references, please explain what the mission of Christ's Church is. What is her main goal, and how is she to arrive at that goal? What are the strategy and tactics she is to employ?

And. . . just as importantly, what is the Church doing today that it should NOT be doing. In other words, has there been any mission drift, and what has that looked like?

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Leading man to salvation through reconciliation with God. "Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." John 17:3

Norbert L said:

Here's how a real apostle of Jesus Christ concretely understood and distinguishes between himself and some other types of apostles. "From Paul, an apostle (not from men, nor by human agency, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead)" Galatians 1:1 NET.

My general advice to is don't believe anything that doesn't know and understand that basic difference.

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OK, this isn't difficult.

Is the Great Commission like a parallel to God telling Moses to rescue Israel from Egypt?