“And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, ‘All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you, and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” -Matthew 28:18-20
The Target of the Great Commission
While the task of the Great Commission demands that we faithfully preach the gospel in order to make new disciples of Jesus Christ, baptize them and teach them to follow his commands, it is not always entirely clear what is the intended goal. Since you generally hit the target at which you actually aim, we need to define the goal to ensure that we do not waste our time, effort, and money being busy doing anything other than fulfilling our divine calling. In For the Sake of His Name, Pastor Dave Doran argues that “the target of the Great Commission is establishing local churches, not merely winning people to Jesus Christ.” This distinction is important since it will determine what methods we will use to reach our goal.
It can be shown from the New Testament that the target of the Great Commission is church planting and not merely evangelism. In the Commission itself, Jesus told his disciples that they were to make other disciples (this is evangelism), to baptize them (incorporating them into the body of believers), and to train them in obedience (this involves ongoing instruction and correction). We see these three elements demonstrated in the very first church in Jerusalem, where Acts 2 records that those who believed were added to the church through baptism and continuing daily to devote themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to fellowship, and to prayer. And we continue to see this pattern repeated throughout the book of Acts, which records the preaching of the gospel “in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” Pastor Doran is correct when he says, “Any view of missions that reduces it to merely evangelizing lost people simply fails to account adequately for the missionary practice of the early church. The work of disciple-making demanded the establishment of local assemblies that provide opportunity for worship, fellowship, edification, and the continuation of evangelistic outreach.” There simply is no way to fulfill the Great Commission without planting churches.
It is not just any kind of church plant that fulfills the Great Commission, but those which are indigenous to the culture of the people among whom they are planted. We should not plant American churches in Asia, nor should we plant African churches in Europe; we should plant new churches that fit naturally into their environment, without adopting unbiblical or ungodly features of the culture. This requires at least three things: churches must be independent of foreign leadership, self-supporting, and able to reproduce themselves.
A new church needs to train its own leaders who will take responsibility for themselves, rather than relying solely on the missionary or other foreign churches for guidance and instruction. Obviously, at the beginning of his ministry, a missionary will be the primary source of evangelism and Biblical teaching, but if he is not careful, he can do much damage to the church. Like a child who never learns to do things for himself as long as his mother continues to do them, so churches may remain weak and dependent on the missionary to do things that they ought to learn to do for themselves. The missionary must seek to identify nationals who may be trained to serve as elders and deacons and so begin to lead the church, preach, and teach others to do the same.
A new church needs to depend on its own people for financial support, rather than on established churches in other regions. This does not mean that an established church cannot give occasional financial help to a church plant, but the regular financial support of the new church should come from the members of that church. This is the pattern that we see in the New Testament. The churches gave gifts to help struggling believers in other places, but it was the local assembly’s responsibility to provide for the needs of their own.
But the church-planting process is not really complete until the new church begins to engage in church planting within their own region. When Jesus told his disciples to teach “them to observe all things that I have commanded you,” he no doubt meant that they should teach the Great Commission as well. And Doran concludes that “A church has not been fully established until it becomes obedient to the missionary command! Therefore, we could technically say that the true missionary target is not just church planting, but also a self-perpetuating church planting movement.” The places we think of as foreign mission fields could become mission senders in the future if we will aim for the target of indigenous, self-sustaining, and reproducing churches today.