Though the risen Jesus Christ's the Great Commission was known as the Mission Mandate, this is God's plan for the growth and prospering of local churches as well as spiritual development of Christians. From this new perspective, seilluminating this Ma...
Though the risen Jesus Christ's the Great Commission was known as the Mission Mandate, this is God's plan for the growth and prospering of local churches as well as spiritual development of Christians. From this new perspective, seilluminating this Mandate has an important meaning for contemporary church ministers and members.
When our ministry has the fitting biblical basis, we can apply it to our context of ministry and do rightly our ministry with the conviction that like the early church remarkable church growth and spiritual development can be accomplished.
Even though a spirituality theologian, Dallas Willard suggested that Jesus' the Great Commission is God's plan for the growth and prospering of local churches as well as spiritual fornation in the local congregation, it seemed that he did not present sufficient anakyses and applications of the content. Considering this point, this paper reexamines five elements, that is, worship, practice of love, fellowship, nurture, evangelism, and deals with the right understandings and applications.
Among the five elements, the basic core elements can be practice of love, fellowship and nurture. These three elements should be done through the larger circle of worship and ultimately reached to the stage of sound worship. In the process of doing these elements, church members can be mature disciples of Jesus Christ. Accordingly, they can bear fruits of evangelism and the ministry of making disciples can be achieved continually until the coming og the Lord.
Rick Warren extracted two elements of worship and practice of love from the Great Commandment (Mt. 22:36-40) and the other elements of fellowship, nurture and practice of love from the Great Commission(Mt. 28:19-20). Thus he combined them. However, this paper shows that all these five elements are in the Great Commission (Mt. 28:16-20). So it is an important conclusion of this paper that these five elements are the essential ones for the spiritual development of Christians and church growth have an indispensible relationship to each other. When the spiritual development of a Christian can be properly achieved, the true church growth can be possible and the ministry of making disciples of all nations can be occurred continually.
According to the master plan of the Lord for the spiritual development of Christians and church growth, the apostles of Jesus and the early Christians worked effectively. The history of the Book of Acts proves this concretely. Also it is amazing things that the texts of Acts 2:40-47 which describe the characteristics of the Jerusalem church show these five elements.
In conclusion, today's Christians and church ministers should remember that the Lord as the head of His church requires this ministry from us. Thus contemporary Christians and church ministers should become ones who work according to the Lord's plan and witness the work of the blessings of Immanuel, that is, being with us always to the very end of the age.