Ecclesiology matters.
If everything is the mission, nothing is the mission.
We mustn’t mistake a potential byproduct for the immediate objective, when it comes to the mission of Christ’s Church.
The great theologian J. Gresham Machen wrote,
“For Christians to influence the world with the truth of God’s Word requires the recovery of the great Reformation doctrine of vocation. Christians are called to God’s service not only in church professions but also in every secular calling. The task of restoring truth to the culture depends largely on our laypeople.
To bring back truth, on a practical level, the church must encourage Christians to be not merely consumers of culture but makers of culture. The church needs to cultivate Christian artists, musicians, novelists, filmmakers, journalists, attorneys, teachers, scientists, business executives, and the like, teaching its laypeople the sense in which every secular vocation-including, above all, the callings of husband, wife, and parent is a sphere of Christian ministry, a way of serving God and neighbor that is grounded in God’s truth. Christian laypeople must be encouraged to be leaders in their fields, rather than eager-to-please followers, working from the assumptions of their biblical worldview, not the vapid clichés of pop culture.”
Commenting on Ephesians 4, John MacArthur states,
“God not only gave gifts, but in order to see those gifts fully realized He had to do something else. He had to give men, ‘And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastor-teachers for the perfecting of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ.’
Even with those spiritual gifts, which we all receive at our salvation, the body of Christ is not going to be what it should be, demonstrating Christ in the world, unless there are some preachers who perfect the saints for the work of ministry for the building up of the body of Christ. That word ‘perfecting’ – it may in your translation say ‘equipping’ – is the role of those men mentioned in verse 11, the perfecting of the saints, the equipping of the saints, katartizō is the Greek verb. It basically means to be restored, to be complete, to be full, to be mature, full-grown, perfect. Not sinless perfection, but a kind of maturity, a kind of grown-up spiritual character.”
The purpose of the Church is to evangelize the lost and sanctify the saints, to maturity where Christlikeness will permeate all facets of their individual lives. Not to corporately weaponize and reorganize/prioritize the Church to address the societal ills of the moment, and thereby deviate from the Church’s primary calling.
We must not make a potential long-term outcome (collective cultural transformation) the immediate objective (individual justification/sanctification and Divine glorification.)
By all means, leverage teachable moments to bring the timeless truths of Scripture to bear on surrounding societal events, but beware succumbing to Satan’s scheme of chasing cultural relevancy at the expense of sound ecclesiology.
