During our church’s Long Range Study Committee meeting a few days ago, I asked the group to name the main purpose for a church to exist.  They cited several worthy possibilities—celebration of faith, community, service and mission, growth in faith, helping to meet one another’s needs.  Then I asked them if they could identify the top priority for a church, any church but especially ours.  They named, with apparent enthusiasm, the one primary purpose for the church—to make disciples.  It was spine tingling how the group seemed to have some innate sense of why we are here—they arrived at the phrase without any help from me.  It was as if they were moving toward that statement the whole time.  It was a Holy Spirit thing.
 

At first, “make disciples” seems harmless enough—it’s only two little words and it’s a mandate that we’ve heard so often that we’ve come to think of it, really, as more of a suggestion.  Still, it remains a mandate from Jesus, himself.  Making disciples is an evangelical challenge—a challenge to bring in new Christians and train them in the Way.  This means bringing new people to church and raising our children in church, but also including those new people and those children in the life of the church.  Evangelism is both sharing the Good News of God’s love and nurturing spiritual growth.  A church is only a church when it is making disciples, bringing to Christ the old and young, sane and crazy, churched and unchurched, farmer and businessperson, working and retired, sober and high, wealthy and poor—in short, anybody who’ll come!!  None of us would be Christian if it wasn’t for faithful disciples going out to make more disciples throughout the ages.
 

Every congregation has its culture and its own atmosphere.  Over the years, our congregation has established a culture of disciple making.  Our tradition includes new buildings, moving from a part time to full time pastor, more new buildings, conscientious decisions to welcome all of the new people to the area, conscientious decisions to welcome children and young people, a decision to start a child care center, conscientious decisions to do different, even non-traditional, things in order to make disciples, and, most recently, the decision to request a clergy-couple as your pastors.  More than any style of worship or any one group of people, this church’s traditions are rooted in 98 years of seeking to follow Jesus and bringing others along for the journey.  The people who were here when the decision was made to seek a full-time pastor saw that if Etowah UMC was to grow then they needed a full-time pastor.  They had never done it that way before, but they moved ahead anyway because they passionately wanted to share what God was doing here—they wanted to make disciples.  Our child care center began the same way—disciples of Jesus who wanted to make more disciples by offering them the love of Jesus in child care. 
 

I don’t know what lies beyond the next horizons of faithfulness for us, but I know the tradition we inherit.  Making disciples is the tradition of this church.  That answer came so easily to our Long Range Study Committee because they are disciples of this tradition.  Our church’s tradition involves all of us—if we believe the Bible and this church’s tradition, then being disciples means making disciples.  May we hold fast to the most basic tradition of Christianity and the Church—making disciples.  Thank God for tradition!!
 

Grace,     Jonathan 

September 2005