Holding these truths in Tension.
Jesus tells us two things. One in Matthew 28, we
must spread the good news and make disciples of people and secondly he tells
Peter, in the Gospel of John, to feed his sheep.
In the fields and on the hills that surround my house
you will see many sheep. They eat the nutrient rich grass, on which they grow
fat. They have their lambs in spring and like all herd animals they bleat. For
the most part they have a rather placid, quiet life.
The sheep dog on the other hand is a working animal.
It has a job to do. At the command of the shepherd, this lean mean working
machine rounds up and directs the fat docile sheep in the direction that the
shepherd wants them to go.
In my mind this is a perfect picture of the church.
The sheep are the congregation. The sheep dogs are the leaders and the shepherd,
as always, is Jesus. While this may be a perfect picture of the church, is it a
true picture of the church?
Let me try
and equate this to many of the churches we see around us. Firstly though let me
say this is not a condemnation of any church, as I said in the past, we are
flawed and imperfect human beings. What I want to do is measure ourselves
against what Christ has asked us to do.
Christ has asked us to make disciples, how do we do
this? We spread the good news, we tell others about what he has done for us. In
other words we multiple, in the same way as sheep have lambs. We then feed the
sheep by teaching, exhorting and edifying them. We give them good grass and
pasture to feed off. Like good sheep dogs we guide and lead the sheep where the
master wants them to go.
So what do we see in the modern church? I see a lot
of fat, over weight obese Christians, ( in the spiritual sense that is). I see
a lot of pastors from small churches to large mega church feeding and feeding
and feeding the flock. I see few churches that have strong outreach programmes,
making disciples of people and telling them the good news.
To rectify this we have to learn to hold the two
truths that Christ has imparted to us, in tension. In other words we have to
learn to successfully provide both outreach and feeding, and not let one
unbalance the other. By doing this we will have sheep that produce lambs, we
will raise up a new generation of leaders and more than anything see the world
has Christ our king sees it, lost undernourished and without a leaders vision
to guide
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