Sending Equipped Christians

sending equipped christians

Jason Procopio

This is the last week of our series on our church’s vision. As we’ve seen for the last two weeks, we need to be clear about what our goal as a church is, and why. 

Just as a reminder, here is our church’s vision in its entirety. Eglise Connexion exists to:

• Embody the gospel for the residents of Paris;

• Train disciples who make disciples;

• Send out equipped Christians to serve the church of Jesus Christ. 

We’ve seen what it means to embody the gospel in the city; we’ve seen what it means to train disciples who make disciples. This week, we’ll be looking at the last point of our vision, to send out equipped Christians to serve the church of Jesus Christ.

When we planted this church in September 2014, we knew that there would be a good deal of transience. We knew where we were planting—Châtelet-Les Halles is a “lieu de passage,” and attracts mostly people in their twenties and thirties, so we expected to have a lot of folks like that (and here you are!). When you’re dealing with this age group, there’s a huge amount of coming and going: people come in, stay for a few years for their studies or to begin their careers, then after a few years, they leave. They go back home, or they get transferred elsewhere, or they can’t afford to live in the city anymore, so they go somewhere cheaper.

I’ll be honest—for the first few years as pastor here, I felt this transience as kind of an annoying detail: a fact of life in our church that I would have to learn to live with.

Then, in December of last year, the elders granted me a three-week break—not a vacation, but a break to commit myself 100% to think about where we were and where we were going and how we wanted to get there. The elders and I talked almost every day about these questions, and I worked on them the rest of the time.

And out of these discussions, we realized something that would have hit us much earlier, if our noses hadn’t been so close to the grindstone: we had been looking at the transient nature of our church as a burden…while we should be seeing it as an opportunity—an opportunity that, providentially, fits in perfectly with the third point of our church’s vision, which we’ll be talking about today.

So this is going to be a kind of strange message. We’re going to start wide today, looking at the why behind this last point of our vision; and then we’ll get specific, and I’ll actually close by presenting you some of the things that came out of this three-week period in December. 

And good news: to see this third point, we’ll essentially be looking at one text. It’s a text most of you probably know well; we talk about it a lot in the church, but I’d like to take it apart and show you why this text pushes us in this particular direction, and what that looks like for us. 

The Mission of the Church (Matthew 28.18-20)

If you have your Bibles, turn with me to the gospel of Matthew, chapter 28; we’ll be reading v. 18-20.

If you remember, this is after Jesus has died and been raised from the dead. He has appeared to the disciples, and now at the end of the gospel, Jesus is giving them a mission, which they then transmit to the churches they plant in the years to come. This is still the mission of all churches today—this is Christ’s holy mandate to us.

18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” 

There are essentially four commands in these three verses. They are all necessary; each command depends on all the others. 

Before we get into them, though, it is extremely important to not forget v. 18 and the end of v. 20. Jesus says in v. 18: All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me… And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. ALL authority—over everything in the spiritual world and in the physical creation—belongs to Christ…and he is with us always. 

In these verses, Christ gives us a mission, and we do not go alone to fulfill it. It is a frankly terrifying task Christ has given us, if it is up to us to make sure it’s done well. 

But it’s not up to us. The King who has all authority in the spiritual and the physical world, whom every element in the universe must obey, this King goes with us when he sends us to fulfill our mission.

So when we look at these commands Jesus gives his church, we should see them as assured. The work’s not done yet, but the work is definitely assured, because Christ has all authority, and he is with us. No obstacle can stand in front of him—nothing will stop God’s plan from going forward.

Now we need to do it.

So what are the commands which together make up the mission Christ gives us?

The first is really simple: it is to GO (v. 19). Go where? Go everywhere—to all the nations. 

As clear as this command is in this verse to go—and I don’t see how Christ could have said it any more clearly—isn’t it surprising how often we forget, and expect people to come? Isn’t it surprising how often we wait for people to come to us, how often we passively sit back and wait for the perfect moment to present itself…when all this time Christ has commanded us to go?

The mission of the church is a necessarily centrifugal mission. When you put something in a centrifuge, what happens? Everything gets pushed out, away from the center. 

That is the mission of the church. That is the direction the church is meant to point—not toward Jerusalem, not toward Rome, but out, to all the nations. We are called to go, not to get everybody else to come.

Now of course, that doesn’t mean that no attention should be paid to what goes on in here—on the contrary. That’s what we’ve been talking about the last two weeks: the more attention we pay to what goes on in here, the better equipped we’ll be to fulfill our mission out there. The Bible is full of commands concerning how we are to behave and interact when we come together; and one of the most powerful tools we have to show people the gospel is the life of the church, living out the gospel together. 

But very often, churches will be so focused on what happens in here that at some point we just kind of forget to leave. We forget that there’s a whole world outside, to which we are meant to go. 

Here’s the second command: make disciples. 

This is what we talked about last week. We discussed where and how disciples of Christ are made—they are made in the local church, through Christians being trained and matured to perform the work of ministry. 

So I’ll say it again, in case you weren’t here. According to Ephesians 4, building up the church and doing the work of ministry is not my job as the pastor; it is our job as Christians. The task God has given us within the church is the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ. 

This is how we grow in maturity. This is how we become more like Christ. We come alongside one another, and we help one another to understand the Scriptures, to see how to live out the Scriptures. We call each other to accounts when we sin, and we humbly repent of that sin and help one another overcome it. We observe one another, and encourage one another, and exhort one another—all the parts of the body, working together to build up the whole of the body. Not spiritual orphans, but brothers and sisters, members of the same family, following the same Master.

But there was a question we didn’t discuss last week, and that is, How do we get people to the point where they’re willing to enter into this family? How do we get people to change from being hostile toward God, to becoming brothers and sisters?

At some point, they will need to hear the gospel—the good news of the life, death and resurrection of Christ—because the gospel is how the Spirit of God works in our hearts to change us. The gospel is the means he uses to give us faith, to make us aware of our sin and our need for a Savior, to put our faith in Christ for our salvation, and to desire to walk with him.

People need to hear the gospel. And the wonderful news is that we have an unbelievable amount of freedom concerning how that can happen. 

We can have conversations with our neighbors over dinner. 

We can talk about Christ with the lady sitting next to us on the bus.

We can stop at the homeless guy asking for money, and rather than just tossing him a coin, we can stay with him and talk to him about Christ.

We can invite our unbelieving friends to hang out with us when we’re together, so that they can see what the gospel looks like when it’s lived out.

And if we don’t know how to do any of these things, we can go out with the evangelism team—even if we’ve never done it and are terrified of it—and simply watch them and listen, learning how to share the gospel. 

At some point, it’s not enough to simply stay amongst ourselves: the gospel has to go out, has to be shared, because it is through the gospel that God draws people to himself, and changes their heart, and makes them disciples of Christ through the witness and life of the church.

So these first two commands are seen as almost exclusively “evangelistic” commands. What I mean by that is, they give us the task of going out and sharing the gospel with others. 

And while it’s true that that’s what they do, the problem is that a lot of Christians content themselves with these first two tasks. 

I knew a guy a long time ago who was a born evangelist. He will talk to anyone about Jesus, in any context. It’s amazing to watch him, and I’m humbled by him every time I see him do it. But I asked him at one point what happens next—if someone actually prays to receive Christ, what happens then? He said, “I give them a Bible, and tell them to read the gospel of John.” So I said, “That’s great…but do you, like, take down their contact info? Do you have any way of following up with them to see how they’re doing?” And he admitted that no, he didn’t really do that, because he talks to so many people there’s just no way to follow up with all of them.

Do you see the problem? We have this incredible evangelist, who loves people so much, who is so passionate about Jesus, and who obeys the first two parts of Jesus’s mission to his disciples better than perhaps anyone I’ve ever met. But for all of that admirable obedience, he neglected the second two commands.

And there’s a reason why Jesus didn’t stop with, “Go and make disciples.” Because there’s no point in going and making disciples if those new disciples have no way of learning to live as disciples. The Bible is clear that if we don’t grow in our faith, we probably don’t have it.

And as we saw the last two Sundays, the place God gives us, in which and by which our faith grows, is the church. Which is why Jesus continues. 

We are to go. We are to make disciples. And next, we are to baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. 

This sounds like an odd, sort of unnecessary addition, but it’s anything but. A disciple of Christ cannot grow without his fellow disciples; and baptism is the visible sign that we now belong to this community of disciples. 

The fact that this command comes here, in Jesus’s great evangelistic campaign, should break a lot of false ideas about what baptism is. 

A lot of people see baptism as something like a high school diploma. You go to school for twelve years, you learn a lot of things, you grow as a human being and as a student, and at the end of your high school education, you get a diploma to show that you’ve been properly educated, and that you’re ready to tackle going off to university.

For a lot of people, baptism is like the entry exam to next-level Christianity—the thing you do only once you have passed a certain number of spiritual milestones. They see baptism as something for mature Christians, to show the world that now, they’re “arrived”—they’re not baby Christians anymore, now they’re grown-ups.

There are two huge problems with this way of thinking. The first is that no one seems to agree about what these spiritual milestones are supposed to be. And most churches couldn’t even tell you what they are if you asked them. It often depends on a subjective feeling the leaders of the church have about one believer or another. 

The second problem is a lot simpler: that’s not what the Bible says baptism should be. Baptism is the visible sign that shows that a person has been brought in to the family of God through faith in Christ. And the Bible tells us that this integration into the family of God happens right away—the moment we place our faith in Christ, we are members of his body, we are adopted by God, and become brothers and sisters in the faith. 

That’s why, in the book of Acts, profession of faith and baptism happen almost simultaneously. The gospel is preached, people believe, they repent of their sins, and they’re baptized—right then and there.

I said all that to say this: the marching orders Jesus gives us to go and make disciples of all nations make no sense if those disciples aren’t then brought into the local church, in which they learn to grow in their faith with the help of other Christians. Baptism is the first step in that process.

The second step, we’ve already touched on a bit. We’re to go and make disciples, baptize them to bring them into the church, and then, lastly, we are called to teach them to observe all that Christ has commanded us. 

This was essentially the entire message last week, so I won’t go over it all again. But to put it simply, the church is meant to spread the gospel, not just in order to get people into heaven, but in order to equip the church to teach new believers how to obey Christ. The goal of evangelism isn’t just to get people saved, but to teach them to live as Christ lived. 

We talk a lot about sharing the gospel, and we should. But I’m sure some of you have had this experience: you heard the gospel preached thousands of times when you were a kid. But eventually, you met someone who actually lived in obedience to Christ’s commands. And when you saw that person’s life—their joy in God and the choices they made and the effect those choices had on their own happiness and on others—finally, the gospel made sense. We finally saw the effect the gospel has on us, because we saw what life looks like when we obey the God who saved us, who gave us these commands because he loves us.

That is our call: Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

Sending Equipped Christians

That’s the foundation. That’s the call of every church. But in order for us to fulfill our call, Christians need to be trained and equipped to fulfill it.

There are two ways this going, making, baptizing and teaching happens. 

The first way is that the church commissions and sends specialized ministers to do specialized work somewhere else. 

The classic example of this would be missionaries and missionary teams. We have a lot of missionaries in our church—this is what they do. They have been trained, often in specific, focused areas, and sent out to another town or another country, to do something specific there.

Another example would be church planters and church planting teams. That was the case for me—after getting some general theological training, I spent two years with Loanne being trained to plant churches in France, and then we were sent out to plant this church. 

Another example would be church denominations sending out ministers to work in specific contexts or places. 

So that’s the first way this happens: the church commissions and sends specialized ministers to do specialized work in a specific place.

The second way is a good deal simpler, and more organic. People move. You come into the city for your studies, and when you’re finished with your studies, you move back home. Or you live in one place to work, then you get transferred elsewhere. And if you’re a Christian, you take your mission with you wherever you go—so in this new place where you live, you carry with you the mission to go and make disciples of all nations. We firmly believe that the church is called to train Christians to do this well, so that when they go somewhere else, they can land in their new church and be ready and equipped to serve that church well, to know how to train others to be disciple-makers in their context.

Now I want to be clear: we want to be involved in both of these areas.

We want to send out church planters, to participate in church plants, to support missionaries. We want to be involved in these initiatives, to pray for them and support them. And we have.

Our church, from the beginning, has been a frequent hub for missionaries over the last seven years or so; and we have “sent” several missionaries out to the mission God has given them. We are a church plant ourselves, and have supported other church plants within our network (for example, the church in Saint-Lazare, where we sent some of our most faithful and reliable members). We can always do better at this, of course—there’s still a lot of growth we want to see, churches we want to plant—but we’ve been blessed to already participate in this first way of going and making disciples.

Where we’ve been lacking is the second way.

Last week we spoke about being disciples who make disciples of Christ. We talked about the biblical reasons why this should happen, and at least a little about how it should happen. And we felt very strongly about this because in reality, when Christians want to learn what it means to be disciples of Christ, far too often the church sends them out, to somewhere outside the church, to get this training. 

The church, more often than not, outsources the training needs of the church, rather than taking them on herself.

This reality is what led us to the discussions we had during the three-week break in December. 

I mentioned this at the beginning. In our context, we have a lot of people who come into our church for 2-3 years (during their studies, or at the beginning of their careers), then leave to go elsewhere—back home, or to where their new job will be.

At first, this felt like a burden…but we should see it as an opportunity. 

In our talks with the elders in December, one question burdened us more than any other: how can we make the most of our two-to-three years with these people to train them as disciples of Christ, then send them off to wherever they are going, equipped and ready to make disciples of Christ and be faithful pillars in their new church communities? 

So for the last several months we have been planning a fairly ambitious project, to launch in September of this year. I’m going to read to you part of a vision document which we’ll be sharing with you all on Slack this evening.

Nous avons la conviction que la formation des disciples de Jésus-Christ est le domaine et la responsabilité de chaque église locale. Chaque chrétien qui vit la vie chrétienne au sein d’une église locale devrait, après quelque temps, être habilité pour servir l’église de Christ là où il se trouve.

Notre souhait est qu’après quelques années de vie chrétienne à Connexion, chaque chrétien soit affermi et mûr dans sa foi—un chrétien qui servira fidèlement son église locale, que ce soit à Connexion ou ailleurs. 

Par conséquent, nous souhaiterons voir l’Église Connexion non seulement comme une église locale classique, mais comme un centre de formation spirituelle : un lieu où les chrétiens sont formés dans la vie de la Parole de Dieu de façon à servir comme modèles pour d’autres à Connexion, ou comme membres fidèles aux églises dans lesquelles ils se retrouveront après leur temps à Connexion—dans tous les cas, comme des dons précieux à l’église de Dieu.

Pour arriver à cette fin, nous souhaitons mettre en place des cours dans des domaines clés de la vie chrétienne, afin que l’église ne “sous-traite” plus la formation des disciples à des entités extérieures, mais qu’elle endosse de manière responsable le rôle de formateur de disciples de Jésus-Christ qui font des disciples de Jésus-Christ.

Ce parcours de formation n’aura pas pour but de remplacer une formation classique “académique” des écoles bibliques qui existent déjà. Il s’agit d’une formation qui visera plutôt le vécu : l’application de la doctrine chrétienne à la vie de disciple et au service dans l’église.

C’est pour cela que, dans le cadre de ce parcours, nous inclurons des formations spécifiques pour ceux qui resterons à l’Église Connexion sur le long terme, afin qu’ils soient habilités pour servir de diverses manières : en tant que leaders de groupe de communauté, moteurs des groupe de disciples, présidents de culte ou même diacres ou anciens de l’église.

Certains chrétiens, après avoir passé par ce processus de formation, feront une transition vers une responsabilité concrète dans l’église ; d’autres feront une transition vers un rôle de formateurs d’autres chrétiens. Quoi qu’il en soit, notre souhait est que tous les chrétiens—qu’ils restent à Connexion sur le long-terme ou qu’ils partent vers une nouvelle église locale dans l’avenir—aient les connaissances et les compétences nécessaires pour édifier l’église dans laquelle ils se trouvent, et pour enseigner à d’autres à quoi ressemble suivre Jésus-Christ en obéissance à la Parole de Dieu.

Des cours de théologie excellents existent déjà, et nous ne prétendons pas pouvoir améliorer ce qui a été fait ailleurs. Nous devrons étudier de la théologie, mais la visée des formations au sein de Connexion ne sera pas uniquement ou essentiellement intellectuelle. 

Nous aimerions plutôt aider les chrétiens à explorer quelles différences ces domaines de théologie font dans la vie du chrétien. Nous ne viserons donc pas seulement une compréhension de la Bible dans son contenu, mais aussi et surtout l’expérience vécue : une formation de disciples qui vivent la Parole de Dieu jour après jour, et ensemble.

So as you can see, this is not a program only for people who want to be pastors, or who want to take on responsibilities in the church. We saw this last week—we all have responsibility in the church, and we should all be trained to serve and grow our brothers and sisters well.

Now this is a substantial challenge we’ve set for ourselves—it’s going to take a lot of work, and a lot of time; and we’re still putting together a plan of exactly what it will look like. (A lot of questions, we couldn’t begin answering until quite recently, because of COVID restrictions: questions like where will we do these things, and when.) The good news is, we’re not doing it alone. 

Most of you probably know that in August we’ll be welcoming Joe and Anne-Sophie Tandy into the church. Joe is currently an elder in the church at Saint-Lazare, and he and Anne-Sophie will be joining us part-time (while Joe finishes his Master’s degree) specifically to help us with building out this training program. 

So we’ll be giving you more specific information about this over the next few months, but we wanted to let everyone know right now, so that you can get ready for it. 

Our prayer is that when people move on from Connexion after their time with us, we might send them out ready to serve the church where they land. I can’t tell you what a gift it is as a pastor to have people come into the church who have been well equipped in the past, and who come in ready and able to serve faithfully—people whom you know you can count on, to love others well, to live in obedience to Christ, and to teach others to do the same. 

This is what we want to do with each one of you, and that’s where we hope to be heading over the next several years.

And the reason is simple: because all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Christ. Our neighborhoods, our city, our country, the entire world, have long since been living in active rebellion against our King Jesus. If he were a dictator, a cruel ruler, that rebellion would make sense. But that is not our God. That is not our King. 

The prophet Isaiah worships in Isaiah 64.4:  

From of old no one has heard 

or perceived by the ear, 

no eye has seen a God besides you, 

who acts for those who wait for him.

All of our efforts to proclaim the gospel, to embody the gospel, to train one another in the gospel, to send out Christians to serve the gospel… All of these efforts are not merely so that people might go to heaven one day. These efforts are fueled by love for them, so that they might know this God who loves his people—that they might know God our Father, Christ our Brother, and the Spirit our Comforter. 

And because all authority has been given to Christ, and because he is with us always, we can do it. Our efforts are not in vain. We can fulfill the mission he has given us, for our joy and for his glory.