What is the Church’s Mission, Anyway?

What is the Church’s Mission, Anyway?

Our summer series in Acts brings us to Philippi this week, in a story that keeps redefining itself as it moves, and raises a question some are wary to ask, what is mission, and why does it define why the church exists at all?

The chapter opens with Paul's plans being overruled. Strangely, the Spirit forbids the disciples from visiting certain regions, which itself raises all sorts of questions as to how they even knew that, and finally sends a vision of a person in Macedonia pleading for help. Paul goes, not because he strategized his way there, but because he was redirected until only one door remained open. That door leads to a riverside prayer gathering and to Lydia, a merchant woman whose heart the Lord opens, and whose household becomes the seed of the first established church.

But mission in Philippi doesn't stay gentle for long. Paul frees an enslaved girl from a spirit her owners have been profiting from, and the response isn't gratitude, it’s violence, a beating, and prison. The same Spirit that opened Lydia's heart has just cost Paul his freedom, because it collided with a system built on exploiting a vulnerable girl.

And then, at midnight, an earthquake, an unlocked door, and a jailer about to take his own life until Paul stops him. By morning, his whole household is baptized too.

A merchant woman, an exploited girl, a terrified jailer, none of them as pre-planned strategies, or did Paul set ahead of time to find. Maybe there’s some clues as to why the Holy Spirit creates churches. Not to center themselves, for churches are not the stars of their own stories. Mission isn't a program the church runs, it’s a joining in the Spirit’s already-on-the-move. The Spirit gathers people, not for their own, individualized spiritual edification, nor for a self-help improvement program. Rather the Spirit gathers and sends a community for encounters they did not anticipate, what they didn't plan ahead of time for, but a purpose of coming alongside those being pushed out of the world, and to relate to them, and announce, their human dignity as persons.

See you Sunday.
 
Peace, David