Church Planting and Discipleship in the Great Commission
Matthew 28:18-20
The local church is God's ordained instrument to reach the world for Jesus Christ (cf. 1 Th. 1:8). It is the church that is the "pillar and buttress of the truth" (1 Tim. 3:15). It is the church that, against which, the gates of Hell will never prevail (Mat. 16:18). Yet many today are seeking to fulfill the Great Commission apart from the church, especially when it comes to missionaries.
While there is certainly a need for and a place for the itinerant evangelist and the itinerant teacher in God's plan (such as Philip and Apollos to name a couple biblical examples), the church has a special place and certainly the most prominent role in God's plan for evangelizing the world (after all, Philip and Apollos both worked closely with the local churches to add to their number and strengthen them in the faith). The greatest task that the people of God can focus their giftings, labors, prayers, money, and resources into is the establishment of biblical churches around the world.
The fact that church planting is central to the Great Commission jumped out to me recently as I was meditating on the Great Commission passage found in Matthew 28. Let's take a look at this passage and try to break it down and draw out some important truths, especially the fact that church planting is strongly implied and expected in these verses:
Literally, the implication of the Greek verbal construction of "Go" in this text carries the connotation of "having gone". The force of the command is not on the word, "go" but rather on the word "make disciples". That is, as we are going, the imperative is that we are to "make disciples" of all peoples. Young's Literal Translation brings this out:
...having gone, then, disciple all the nations, (baptizing them--to the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all, whatever I did command you,) and lo, I am with you all the days--till the full end of the age.'It is implied in the text that it is an expected duty of Christ for His disciples that they are already in the process of going, that they actually have already went and are still in the continual process of actively going. This implication of an expected duty of "going" as seen by the verbal construction of the Greek carries with it a force and a weight in the sense that it seems to suggest that "going" is so obvious a duty that it doesn't here require a specific imperative to be demanded of them but is rather, in a sense, taken for granted that they already are "having gone".
The implication in "having gone" seems to be similar to the expectation in the mind of Christ as to secret duties of prayer, fasting, and giving that He expects of His disciples as can be seen in the linguistic construction of the applicable verses in the Sermon on the Mount. Instead of giving imperative orders telling them to pray, fast and give, it is as if it is such an obvious expected duty that no such imperative is required. "When you give..." "When you pray..." "When you fast..." (Mat. 6) In the same way, it is as if Christ is expecting them to already be going.
This is the only logical reaction of a person who has submitted themselves to the yoke of Christ as their Master, who has heard the marvelous wisdom which proceeds forth from His mouth, who has seen His glory and His goodness, and who has tasted of His grace in saving faith. This is the only appropriate reaction of knowing that He bore your sin on the cross and died under the fierce stroke of God's mighty wrath as your Substitute in order to satisfy divine justice and rose again from the grave in victory and power over the second death and that through Him and Him alone salvation is offered freely to all who repent and believe His Gospel. The implication of "having went" is that Christ knows that once someone has truly understood and received the Gospel, it is such a glorious thing, such a life transforming thing, that they "cannot but speak of what (they) have seen and heard" (Acts 4:20). The Samaritan woman didn't need a command to tell the whole town about Christ, she was overflowing from a living, personal encounter with the Son of God (see John 4:29).
We are commanded to "make disciples" -not disciples of ourselves, not disciples of some denomination, but disciples of Jesus Christ. A disciple is a disciplined follower, a pupil, a student, a learner, and an imitator. The goal of the Great Commission is to make followers of Jesus Christ who believe on Him as their Savior, submit to Him as their Lord and live their lives under the authority of Christ. A disciple is a disciplined one who is to discipline himself rigorously, willingly, and joyfully to obey the teachings of his Rabbi.
The apostle Paul summed up his method of fulfilling the Great Commission:
Him (Christ) we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me. (Colossians 1:28-29)Paul proclaimed, announced, and preached Jesus Christ continually with passion and urgency, warning everyone of the fatal consequences of rejecting Christ and teaching everyone patiently and perseveringly to obey the commands of Christ. Paul's goal was to present all the converts that resulted from his preaching "mature", complete, and entire in Christ, lacking nothing when it came to serving and glorifying their risen Lord. He wanted to raise them up as fully committed, obedient, and fruitful disciples of Christ and did not cease to pour himself out tirelessly until such a goal was accomplished.
Paul said that to this end he would "toil", that is, spend himself continually even to the point of exhaustion. Then he adds a word which modifies his use of "toil", saying that he toils in such a way as to be "struggling" according to the power of God. This word "struggling" is 'agōnizomai' from where there is somewhat of a relation to our English word, 'agonize'. It is translated as "fight" twice in the KJV (John 18:36, 1 Tim. 6:12). This is no weak, pathetic or lazy word. This word means to strive with intense zeal, and was often used to describe Olympic athletes training vigorously to compete. When it came to making disciples and presenting them to Christ as mature, the apostle Paul was a man on a mission who utterly spent himself in the task of seeing those who were converted raised up into trained and equipped soldiers of Jesus Christ.
This is far from the shallow methodologies of modern evangelism which permeate professing Christianity today. Such methods are soundly refuted by Matthew 28's account of the Great Commission. We are not called merely to preach and make converts, nor are we called to get decisions or have people repeat a prayer. Doing such is not difficult by any means since such "converts" can be almost effortlessly mass produced by the mechanisms of modern inventions and smooth speeches which play on the emotions without any need whatsoever of genuine Holy Spirit power and conviction. If all we're doing is preaching abroad but we're not discipling anybody, we are not truly fulfilling the Great Commission. Mark 16:15 cannot and must not be divorced from Matthew 28:18-20. We can even boast about supposed "converts" and numbers and decisions supposedly won to Christ, but it is entirely a different thing to plant a beachhead for the Gospel in a location and labor exhaustively in order to see a work raised up and real disciples of Christ made who will continually bear fruit even in the absence of the initial preacher.
It's so easy to just preach and move on, never to see the same people again. Yet try to stay in the same place and confront the strongholds of Hades face to face in the name of Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit until either they collapse or youcollapse. It's so painless to blast through an area preaching the Gospel. But try to stay there, try to raise up a biblical church, try dealing with real sinners, pouring over them and weeping over them and praying and preaching over them until God saves them. And then when they're saved, the battle has just begun. Then it's time to deal with not just faces in a crowd during a sermon, but it's time to deal with real people who have real problems, real struggles, real pain, real needs, real character flaws, real growing pains as spiritual babes, and real sins. Live your life in front of them and minister to their hurts, heal their wounds, pour into them the great truths and doctrines of Scripture, and impart to them the divine life of the Spirit of God. Spend yourself and be spent in their service. Let your life be an open book to them. Then, see if you still have enough sanctification left in your soul that you can truly say as they know you and your whole life is open and transparent to them, "follow me as I follow Christ" (1 Cor. 11:1).
The Great Commission is not about numbers and converts. It's about making disciples -disciples of real people. We are dealing with people in the real world.Making disciples is not giving them a little Bible study once or twice a week. It's pouring yourself out into them, training them, mentoring them, and being there for them when they need you with a word in season from the Word of God. It's not about establishing an institution, calling that silly little institution a church, and running as many people through the program as your charismatic personality can manage to draw and cause to wonder after your preaching abilities. It's about the little lambs of Jesus Christ who need men and woman of God to tend to them and nurture them into maturity. It's not hit and run with striking sermon illustrations. It's ministry (diakonia); service. It's being the servant of all.
Jesus said to make disciples, "baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit". This means that He expected real converts to be made from the ministry of His preachers. To preach and preach and yet to see absolutely no fruit is not the New Testament norm. Such may have well been the case with the order of the Old Testament prophets who gave their lives as oracles of God to an apostate people. Yet now, we have the Holy Spirit in His fullness working with us to convict and convert the lost to Christ. If Jesus expected baptisms to be performed then He certainly expected converts to be made and souls to get saved. While there can certainly be some exceptions in God's great sovereign will and divine providence, if we are not seeing any converts from our ministry then we may very well want to re-examine our methods, our prayer life, our preaching, and our goals. Part of the Great Commission is seeing souls saved and baptized.
Then the Lord tells us, "teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you."Now, this is what I want to draw attention to. This is the process of discipleship. This includes all that was said above about spending ourselves in order to raise up disciples of Christ. Yet notice the commands here. We are to baptize and then to teach them all the Word of Christ. Yet how was this to play out in the practical outworking of the establishment of the church of Jesus Christ on earth starting at the Day of Pentecost? This is an important question and finding the correct answer is vital to our understanding of what the Great Commission truly calls for.
No doubt, the apostles of Christ who were then present understood the Great Commission better than anybody else. So the question is: how did the apostles obey and put the Great Commission into practice according to Scripture? As they obeyed Matthew 28:18-20, what did they do? How did they do it?
In Acts 2, after Peter preached and 3,000 were converted, the command contained in Matthew 28 was immediately put into practice. We read:
So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. -Acts 2:41
They were baptized just as Christ commanded (after they received the Word it says, that is, after having believed. There's no such thing as baptizing unbelievers and infants in the New Testament.). Then it says that 3,000 souls were "added" that day. Added to what? Obviously, to the number of the apostles and the other disciples who formed the first church that was born right in the heart of Jerusalem. There had to be a certain number that they could count and "add" to. These new converts were immediately added to and assimilated into the ministry of the local church. This is especially evident by the next verse:
And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. -Acts 2:42
After being baptized, they were expected to submit themselves to the Word of God, to being taught all that Jesus had commanded. This is exactly what happened. They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, which wasn't their own but was Christ's. That's the preaching and teaching of the Word of God. There were leaders in the church who devoted themselves to preaching and teaching and the rest absorbed the doctrine that was taught and put it into practice. It also says they devoted themselves to the fellowship. That is the local church.
Jesus Christ expected His Great Commission which included the command to make disciples to be fulfilled in the context of the local church. These disciples would be matured and taught in the context of the local church. Matthew 28 is a command to plant churches!
All throughout the book of Acts, we read about how it was the priority of the apostles to establish local churches. This is especially evident in the missionary journeys of Paul who planted churches by the grace and power of God wherever he went. Paul didn't just preach abroad and move on from place to place without seeing any fruit. Instead, he entered a place and stayed there until either a church (or numerous churches) was raised up or he was forced to flee because of persecution. Just like Peter's and the other apostles present at Pentecost, Paul's understanding of fulfilling the Great Commission included planting local churches. It was from those local churches that the Word of God was then to sound out to the whole areas around them (1 Th. 1:8, 2 Th. 3:1). Those churches were a constant witness, a light, and a testimony to the communities around them. The regions were reached with the Gospel, the land was evangelized, and the Gospel of Christ made inroads into society by saturating regions with local churches of disciples who obeyed Jesus Christ.
Can we really say we're fulfilling the Great Commission if we're not working to plant churches? At the very least, we should be working with already established churches in order to add to their number and to strengthen them in the faith. But in the case that no such biblical churches are within the reach of the community that is in need of evangelizing, then the only thing we have left to do is to plant one. How can we say, as ministers of Christ, that we're really fulfilling the Great Commission if we're not laboring to this end?
Again, I realize the Lord may have His exceptions. He's the Lord. He can burst out of the mold any time He pleases. However, the Lord also works in harmony with His Word, which is His revealed will. The normal, Scriptural, New Testament pattern of fulfilling the Great Commission in the true work of evangelism and missions is the planting of biblical local churches.
While there is certainly a need for and a place for the itinerant evangelist and the itinerant teacher in God's plan (such as Philip and Apollos to name a couple biblical examples), the church has a special place and certainly the most prominent role in God's plan for evangelizing the world (after all, Philip and Apollos both worked closely with the local churches to add to their number and strengthen them in the faith). The greatest task that the people of God can focus their giftings, labors, prayers, money, and resources into is the establishment of biblical churches around the world.
The fact that church planting is central to the Great Commission jumped out to me recently as I was meditating on the Great Commission passage found in Matthew 28. Let's take a look at this passage and try to break it down and draw out some important truths, especially the fact that church planting is strongly implied and expected in these verses:
- And Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 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. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age." (Matthew 28:18-20)
Literally, the implication of the Greek verbal construction of "Go" in this text carries the connotation of "having gone". The force of the command is not on the word, "go" but rather on the word "make disciples". That is, as we are going, the imperative is that we are to "make disciples" of all peoples. Young's Literal Translation brings this out:
...having gone, then, disciple all the nations, (baptizing them--to the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all, whatever I did command you,) and lo, I am with you all the days--till the full end of the age.'It is implied in the text that it is an expected duty of Christ for His disciples that they are already in the process of going, that they actually have already went and are still in the continual process of actively going. This implication of an expected duty of "going" as seen by the verbal construction of the Greek carries with it a force and a weight in the sense that it seems to suggest that "going" is so obvious a duty that it doesn't here require a specific imperative to be demanded of them but is rather, in a sense, taken for granted that they already are "having gone".
The implication in "having gone" seems to be similar to the expectation in the mind of Christ as to secret duties of prayer, fasting, and giving that He expects of His disciples as can be seen in the linguistic construction of the applicable verses in the Sermon on the Mount. Instead of giving imperative orders telling them to pray, fast and give, it is as if it is such an obvious expected duty that no such imperative is required. "When you give..." "When you pray..." "When you fast..." (Mat. 6) In the same way, it is as if Christ is expecting them to already be going.
This is the only logical reaction of a person who has submitted themselves to the yoke of Christ as their Master, who has heard the marvelous wisdom which proceeds forth from His mouth, who has seen His glory and His goodness, and who has tasted of His grace in saving faith. This is the only appropriate reaction of knowing that He bore your sin on the cross and died under the fierce stroke of God's mighty wrath as your Substitute in order to satisfy divine justice and rose again from the grave in victory and power over the second death and that through Him and Him alone salvation is offered freely to all who repent and believe His Gospel. The implication of "having went" is that Christ knows that once someone has truly understood and received the Gospel, it is such a glorious thing, such a life transforming thing, that they "cannot but speak of what (they) have seen and heard" (Acts 4:20). The Samaritan woman didn't need a command to tell the whole town about Christ, she was overflowing from a living, personal encounter with the Son of God (see John 4:29).
We are commanded to "make disciples" -not disciples of ourselves, not disciples of some denomination, but disciples of Jesus Christ. A disciple is a disciplined follower, a pupil, a student, a learner, and an imitator. The goal of the Great Commission is to make followers of Jesus Christ who believe on Him as their Savior, submit to Him as their Lord and live their lives under the authority of Christ. A disciple is a disciplined one who is to discipline himself rigorously, willingly, and joyfully to obey the teachings of his Rabbi.
The apostle Paul summed up his method of fulfilling the Great Commission:
Him (Christ) we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me. (Colossians 1:28-29)Paul proclaimed, announced, and preached Jesus Christ continually with passion and urgency, warning everyone of the fatal consequences of rejecting Christ and teaching everyone patiently and perseveringly to obey the commands of Christ. Paul's goal was to present all the converts that resulted from his preaching "mature", complete, and entire in Christ, lacking nothing when it came to serving and glorifying their risen Lord. He wanted to raise them up as fully committed, obedient, and fruitful disciples of Christ and did not cease to pour himself out tirelessly until such a goal was accomplished.
Paul said that to this end he would "toil", that is, spend himself continually even to the point of exhaustion. Then he adds a word which modifies his use of "toil", saying that he toils in such a way as to be "struggling" according to the power of God. This word "struggling" is 'agōnizomai' from where there is somewhat of a relation to our English word, 'agonize'. It is translated as "fight" twice in the KJV (John 18:36, 1 Tim. 6:12). This is no weak, pathetic or lazy word. This word means to strive with intense zeal, and was often used to describe Olympic athletes training vigorously to compete. When it came to making disciples and presenting them to Christ as mature, the apostle Paul was a man on a mission who utterly spent himself in the task of seeing those who were converted raised up into trained and equipped soldiers of Jesus Christ.
This is far from the shallow methodologies of modern evangelism which permeate professing Christianity today. Such methods are soundly refuted by Matthew 28's account of the Great Commission. We are not called merely to preach and make converts, nor are we called to get decisions or have people repeat a prayer. Doing such is not difficult by any means since such "converts" can be almost effortlessly mass produced by the mechanisms of modern inventions and smooth speeches which play on the emotions without any need whatsoever of genuine Holy Spirit power and conviction. If all we're doing is preaching abroad but we're not discipling anybody, we are not truly fulfilling the Great Commission. Mark 16:15 cannot and must not be divorced from Matthew 28:18-20. We can even boast about supposed "converts" and numbers and decisions supposedly won to Christ, but it is entirely a different thing to plant a beachhead for the Gospel in a location and labor exhaustively in order to see a work raised up and real disciples of Christ made who will continually bear fruit even in the absence of the initial preacher.
It's so easy to just preach and move on, never to see the same people again. Yet try to stay in the same place and confront the strongholds of Hades face to face in the name of Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit until either they collapse or youcollapse. It's so painless to blast through an area preaching the Gospel. But try to stay there, try to raise up a biblical church, try dealing with real sinners, pouring over them and weeping over them and praying and preaching over them until God saves them. And then when they're saved, the battle has just begun. Then it's time to deal with not just faces in a crowd during a sermon, but it's time to deal with real people who have real problems, real struggles, real pain, real needs, real character flaws, real growing pains as spiritual babes, and real sins. Live your life in front of them and minister to their hurts, heal their wounds, pour into them the great truths and doctrines of Scripture, and impart to them the divine life of the Spirit of God. Spend yourself and be spent in their service. Let your life be an open book to them. Then, see if you still have enough sanctification left in your soul that you can truly say as they know you and your whole life is open and transparent to them, "follow me as I follow Christ" (1 Cor. 11:1).
The Great Commission is not about numbers and converts. It's about making disciples -disciples of real people. We are dealing with people in the real world.Making disciples is not giving them a little Bible study once or twice a week. It's pouring yourself out into them, training them, mentoring them, and being there for them when they need you with a word in season from the Word of God. It's not about establishing an institution, calling that silly little institution a church, and running as many people through the program as your charismatic personality can manage to draw and cause to wonder after your preaching abilities. It's about the little lambs of Jesus Christ who need men and woman of God to tend to them and nurture them into maturity. It's not hit and run with striking sermon illustrations. It's ministry (diakonia); service. It's being the servant of all.
Jesus said to make disciples, "baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit". This means that He expected real converts to be made from the ministry of His preachers. To preach and preach and yet to see absolutely no fruit is not the New Testament norm. Such may have well been the case with the order of the Old Testament prophets who gave their lives as oracles of God to an apostate people. Yet now, we have the Holy Spirit in His fullness working with us to convict and convert the lost to Christ. If Jesus expected baptisms to be performed then He certainly expected converts to be made and souls to get saved. While there can certainly be some exceptions in God's great sovereign will and divine providence, if we are not seeing any converts from our ministry then we may very well want to re-examine our methods, our prayer life, our preaching, and our goals. Part of the Great Commission is seeing souls saved and baptized.
Then the Lord tells us, "teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you."Now, this is what I want to draw attention to. This is the process of discipleship. This includes all that was said above about spending ourselves in order to raise up disciples of Christ. Yet notice the commands here. We are to baptize and then to teach them all the Word of Christ. Yet how was this to play out in the practical outworking of the establishment of the church of Jesus Christ on earth starting at the Day of Pentecost? This is an important question and finding the correct answer is vital to our understanding of what the Great Commission truly calls for.
No doubt, the apostles of Christ who were then present understood the Great Commission better than anybody else. So the question is: how did the apostles obey and put the Great Commission into practice according to Scripture? As they obeyed Matthew 28:18-20, what did they do? How did they do it?
In Acts 2, after Peter preached and 3,000 were converted, the command contained in Matthew 28 was immediately put into practice. We read:
So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. -Acts 2:41
They were baptized just as Christ commanded (after they received the Word it says, that is, after having believed. There's no such thing as baptizing unbelievers and infants in the New Testament.). Then it says that 3,000 souls were "added" that day. Added to what? Obviously, to the number of the apostles and the other disciples who formed the first church that was born right in the heart of Jerusalem. There had to be a certain number that they could count and "add" to. These new converts were immediately added to and assimilated into the ministry of the local church. This is especially evident by the next verse:
And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. -Acts 2:42
After being baptized, they were expected to submit themselves to the Word of God, to being taught all that Jesus had commanded. This is exactly what happened. They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, which wasn't their own but was Christ's. That's the preaching and teaching of the Word of God. There were leaders in the church who devoted themselves to preaching and teaching and the rest absorbed the doctrine that was taught and put it into practice. It also says they devoted themselves to the fellowship. That is the local church.
Jesus Christ expected His Great Commission which included the command to make disciples to be fulfilled in the context of the local church. These disciples would be matured and taught in the context of the local church. Matthew 28 is a command to plant churches!
All throughout the book of Acts, we read about how it was the priority of the apostles to establish local churches. This is especially evident in the missionary journeys of Paul who planted churches by the grace and power of God wherever he went. Paul didn't just preach abroad and move on from place to place without seeing any fruit. Instead, he entered a place and stayed there until either a church (or numerous churches) was raised up or he was forced to flee because of persecution. Just like Peter's and the other apostles present at Pentecost, Paul's understanding of fulfilling the Great Commission included planting local churches. It was from those local churches that the Word of God was then to sound out to the whole areas around them (1 Th. 1:8, 2 Th. 3:1). Those churches were a constant witness, a light, and a testimony to the communities around them. The regions were reached with the Gospel, the land was evangelized, and the Gospel of Christ made inroads into society by saturating regions with local churches of disciples who obeyed Jesus Christ.
Can we really say we're fulfilling the Great Commission if we're not working to plant churches? At the very least, we should be working with already established churches in order to add to their number and to strengthen them in the faith. But in the case that no such biblical churches are within the reach of the community that is in need of evangelizing, then the only thing we have left to do is to plant one. How can we say, as ministers of Christ, that we're really fulfilling the Great Commission if we're not laboring to this end?
Again, I realize the Lord may have His exceptions. He's the Lord. He can burst out of the mold any time He pleases. However, the Lord also works in harmony with His Word, which is His revealed will. The normal, Scriptural, New Testament pattern of fulfilling the Great Commission in the true work of evangelism and missions is the planting of biblical local churches.
