Prophets & Priests, Church & Mission

We had opportunity during our recent vacation to visit with a Christian family that is deeply involved with mission outreach to a very particular ethnic/religious group in the Washington D.C. area. They sponsor and lead a special meeting in their house, and seek to involve religiously-observant members of their community in Bible study, seeking to lead them to faith in Jesus Christ.

Their methods are stripped of all local-church trappings. Indeed, they are quite cautious about the use of certain particular words, even Biblical words such as "conversion", because of their target audience's historic psychological aversions. It was very interesting to observe this family's adherence to lifestyle distinctives that would make them seem like true insiders to their target group.

It seems to me that the local EFCA church automatically becomes stagnant when this sort of local mission work is abandoned or neglected. Indeed, many of our EFCA churches dawdle in this very state of mission stagnation, due to the lack of mission work. It's one thing to enthusiastically support world missions, in the sense of financially supporting foreign missionaries, or even going out on short-term trips (all good things, and both of which should be more done than we do). But it is quite another matter to plunge into the colors and sounds of someone else's turf, not just with the Gospel, but with one's self carrying the Gospel.

A church with no local mission work is like Solomon's temple with no synagogues; or like priests with no prophets. The priests rightly concerned themselves with the apparatus of running the tabernacle correctly. Are the poles in good order? Are the walls going up properly? Are there holes in the fabric that need mending? Is the altar grate scrubbed and ready? Is this lamb really blemish-free? And so on. Everyone is expected to come inward to the temple. A fixed geographical location, with stated times of service and an administrative system to keep it running. This is as it should be.

God also thought there needed to be prophets as well. The prophets, for the most part, went forth. They took the Word out to the localities. The prophets traveled by foot, or on horseback. They went to Saul gathering his father's mules, they went to David's throne room, they went (reluctantly) to Nineveh. They stood on the marshy bank of the Jordan, in the open air, or literally in the Jordan. Later, Jesus used the prophet pattern by ordaining seventy workers whom He sent out to every town and village in Israel. He even compared them to the prophets, as far as reward for persecution may apply. These were men on mission projects. They, unlike the priests, were outward bound.

But the prophets were tethered to the temple, even when the temple was in disrepair, because the temple was of divine origin. The outward-bounding prophets called for fidelity to the law of Moses, which taught God's laws about the temple. In theory, the prophets were obliged to return thrice yearly for the mandated festivals. The prophets had their sins ceremonially covered on Yom Kippur by the work of the high priest, in the Holy of Holies.

There are believers involved in mission work who become so focused upon it that they detach themselves altogether from the local church, and this is sin. They value the flexibility of mission work, the lightness of administrative oversight, the quickness of decision-making, the lack of burdensome overhead costs. And these are good things. You can see in the book of Acts how differently Paul's mission teams worked, compared to how the settled churches in Antioch or Ephesus must have worked, with their elder and deacon teams, and their established pastors exercising authority (see 1-2 Timothy, Titus). And yet Paul and his team were commissioned by Antioch (Acts 13). They were accountable, and reported back to Antioch. They still worshiped on the Lord's Day, baptised converts, and partook of the Lord's Table --- both of which are local-church-oriented ordinances.

Herein lies the mistake of the seeker-focused church, in that it tries to turn Sunday church into a mission project. Or of rebellios groups who wreck the local church in their rebellion against local-church rules, pastoral authority, and diaconal oversight, as happened in the case of at least one EFCA church of my own acquaintance. "Mission" became a hypocritical excuse for revolt against a system of pastoral and elder leadership that Christ Himself set up.

Church and mission in the EFCA need to exist symbiotically with each other, with church holding the upper hand. A church without local mission work is in a state of stagnation and unhealthy self-absorption. But a mission team with no anchors down in a specific local church has to be considered renegade, even if they do reach people for Christ, Mission groups like this are vulnerable to the sin of the personality cult, and doctrinal deviations due to their lack of iron sharpening iron. Christ never said that He would build His mission team. He said He would build His church. Paul in Romans 10 said that those who go in mission must be sent. Sent by the local church. Baptism publicly identifies you as a disciple of Christ. The bread and the wine state that we are one bread and one body. We are a temple and a collection of prophets. We are a church and a mission. We are a denomination and a movement -- not just the former, or just the latter.