Driven: What Is Your Mission?

John woke one Sunday morning and sat in his favorite chair. He flipped on the television and started watching some rerun that he had watched at least twice before. His wife, Mary, called from the other room, “Honey, we’re going to be late. You better start getting ready.” He replied, “I’m not going to church today.”

Mary came into the room and said, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear what you said.” So John repeated himself, “I’m not going to church today.” Mary walked over and placed her hand on his forehead as she asked, “Are you feeling sick?” John responded, “No, I just don’t feel like going to church today.”

Mary stood up and looked straight into her husband’s face as she said, “John, listen to me. You are going to church today and I can give you three reasons why. First, I’m going to church and I want you to be there with me. Second, your children are going and they deserve to have their dad with them at church. And third, you’re the pastor and the people are going to expect you to be there.”

Sometimes we are driven by our own passions and desires and other times we are driven by the passions and desires of others. Today we are going to start taking a look at what drives our church.

For the past 5 Sundays we learned all about our purpose on this planet. We discovered that we were made to worship, to fellowship with other followers of Jesus, to become more like Jesus, to tell others about Jesus, and to serve God by serving others.

Now we want to focus on the purpose of our church. Just as we each have our own purpose and God designed each of us to participate in His church, our church also has a purpose and God designed each church to participate in His plan. Let me restate that: you have a purpose and God designed you to be part of His church, and the church has a purpose and God designed us to be part of His plan for the world.

What is our purpose? To understand that, we have to go back to the beginning and get a glimpse of the DNA of Elevate Church. Elevate Church is a church plant, part of the Sending Network of the North American Mission Board.

God’s plan for Elevate Church was being formed before we started meeting as a church. More than 2 years before we started meeting. I was serving as a pastor at a church in Bel Air, Maryland, when I sensed that God was calling me to a different ministry. I did not know what God wanted at the time, but I started to seek out what it could be. I talked with several people that have been mentors to me throughout my more than 30 years of serving in churches.

Each person I talked with kept telling me things I did not want to hear. Several of them mentioned this thing called church planting. My experience and knowledge of church planting had not been positive. I saw church planting as splitting up a church or a group of angry people leaving to begin their own church. So I kept pushing the idea out of my head.

But God kept bringing the thought back to me again and again. I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, so I started reading about church planting. I followed blogs of church planters. I connected with church planters on Facebook and Twitter. I slowly started to see that church planting was not about splitting up a church or beginning a new work because people are upset about something at their old church.

I decided that I needed to talk to the church planting coordinator in Maryland to see what was needed to become a church planter. I learned that church planters were often risk takers as they usually were people that left the comfort of a guaranteed position and salary at a local church so that they could go and start a new work in an area of need. That was scary, but God continued to impress on me the idea of planting a church.

The next thing I did was talk to the church planting missionary for Baltimore region and asked him what areas were in need of a church plant. I discovered that the city of Baltimore was 90% unchurched. 9 out of 10 people in Baltimore have no connection whatsoever with a church. Most of those are people that also have no relationship with Jesus. But Baltimore City just did not feel right for me and my family. So I asked what areas outside of Baltimore had needs.

God started to impress on me a real desire to connect with people that were not part of a church. I had been serving churches for 30+ years, and to be honest, I was a little tired of feeling like I was a spiritual babysitter. Many churches are filled with Christians that come to church every time the door is open so they can participate in worship or learn more about Jesus. They would grab the bottle of spiritual milk that we prepared for them each week, but they never wanted to grow spiritually beyond that. As soon as we started trying to move the church toward reaching the unchurched or sharing about Jesus, they began crying for attention or begging for more spiritual milk.

I realized that I spent 60+ hours a week around people that have been at church most of their life and yet had never once led a friend or family member to Jesus. Parents that grew up in a church would bring their children to one of the pastors to ask us to tell them about Jesus. How was it possible that they could attend church year after year after year and yet never grasp the simplest concept of the Christian life? They were spiritual babies and I was tired of running from one thing to another just to satisfy their desires to be pampered and fed. To entertain them.

God continued to grow that desire to reach the unchurched and that led me to a desire to help reach Annapolis for Jesus. Like Baltimore, Annapolis is mostly unchurched as well. Nearly 70,000 people live in the Annapolis area and less than 40% of those ever attend a church. Most of those that do attend a church are what we call CEO members. They attend Christmas and Easter Only.

Annapolis has many small churches scattered all over the city, but very few churches that are working to reach people that are unchurched. Like the churches I had served at in the past, most Annapolis churches seem to be satisfied with the way things are and they do not want to rock the boat by bringing in new people. Besides, they know all of the people that attend the church now and they might not get along well with those new people.

The DNA of many churches has become more like a country club. Members attend meetings, pay monthly dues, and get to vote on what they are going to do in the future. They hire staff to take care of them and when any of the staff fail to take care of them they fire them and bring in someone new.  75 pastors are fired each month in the United States, and many of these are not for any moral or spiritual failure, but simply because the church does not believe they fit with their needs. Is it any wonder that so many people choose not to attend church? The modern church has become weak and  often useless to the communities around them.

That was never God’s design for the church. So from the beginning we planned to build the DNA of Elevate Church based on God’s design. In order to do that we had to get rid of all of our own ideas about what church should be. I started reading the Bible to determine exactly how God intended the church to function. To figure out what was the purpose of the church and how to create a passion among others for that purpose.

Thankfully I am not the first to do this. There is an abundance of information on planting a church that models God’s plans. I started with one purpose found in Romans 15:20:

“It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation.”

I knew that God did not want me to go into a new city and just take church members from another church. This new church would be one that would reach people not going to church and invite them to join us as part of a new church start. That is why you are here.

As I continued to study God’s Word and focus on this purpose that God had given to me, I began to develop a vision for what would become Elevate Church. The first vision for the church was that we would elevate the name of Jesus. That led to the decision for our name: Elevate Church. The second vision was that we would be a church determined to equip others to be followers of Jesus. This meant that we would tell others about Jesus, baptize them, and teach them what we have learned. The third vision was that we would engage our community with acts of love.

Too many churches are built of walls that house the members of the church throughout the week. They seclude themselves from the world in those buildings. They gather week after week so they can see old faces on old friends and they close themselves off from the community around them.

“Today's maintenance-centered Church ministers primarily to the faithful... It is not particularly attentive to the unchurched except philosophically, paying lip service to the idea of evangelism. In the maintenance church, both clergy and laity lose sight of their obligation to make disciples.” Milfred Minatrea

I knew that God did not want Elevate Church to become one of those churches. God wants us to be a church that tells others about Jesus. He wants us to be a church that gets out into our community so that we can show them the love of Jesus. It is not about us. It is all about Jesus.

I am certain that God wants us to be a Driven church. A church that is driven by our purpose and our passions. In order to do this, we must know our purpose. We must know what makes us passionate about loving Jesus and serving others.

Most of the time we don’t just decide to hop in a car and take off with no idea where we are going or what we plan to do when we get there. We typically have a destination in mind and a purpose for our trip. Most business owners did not just wake up one day and discover they owned a business. They had a plan in mind, they worked to acquire the money necessary, they learned what was needed in order to start that particular business, and they were driven to succeed.

What drives Elevate Church? What is our purpose? Our purpose is found in our mission statement: Love God, Love Others. Every successful business has a mission statement. When a business fails to follow their mission statement, they usually fail. Most businesses had a mission statement before they even started. Mission BBQ’s mission statement was so important to them that it was the basis for their name.

So where did we get our mission statement? From Mark 12:30,31:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other command greater than these.”

We are to love God with all that we are. We do this by elevating Jesus above everything else in our lives. We also do this by being equipped to know more about Jesus so that we can become more like Jesus. We are also to love others, our neighbors, our enemies, our family, our co-workers, everyone. We love them because God first loved us and showed His love to us by sending Jesus to take our sins away.

Our purpose is to Love God and Love Others. That should be the thing that drives us. That should be what we are passionate about doing. John 3:16 says: 

“For God loved the world in this way: He gave His One and Only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.”

We love others because God loves others. We must learn to love others the way that Jesus loves them. Why? Because we want others to know Jesus. That is the reason why we follow God’s command to go, teach, and baptize.

Love God, Love Others. Elevate Jesus. Equip Disciples. Engage our community. This is our DNA and it is something you will over and over and over. We must be passionate about this. We must stay focused on this. Why? Because God so love the world.