"The Church’s Mission is Fulfilled by Its Vision”

Various Passages

April 2, 2000

Introduction: One of the pioneers in the cellular phone business is a fellow by the name of Craig McCaw. He started his business, McCaw Cellular Communications, in 1976, just three years out of college. Eighteen years later, he sold his company to AT&T for $11.5 billion! Not too shabby for a fellow who is dyslexic and who lost his father while in college.
What do the people who know Craig McCaw say about him? One of his competitors says that Craig’s strength is taking bold risks. “His thinking was visionary,” recalls Jack Roberts. “He was willing to play close to the edge.” A cell phone industry analyst described Craig as “a big risk-taker, but an intelligent risk-taker.” Mr. McCaw hired people he trusted and gave them lots of room to get results. Hershel Shosteck says, “He gave a lot of autonomy to his subordinates, and they took the ball and ran with it.”
McCaw himself would say to the audience at the American Academy of Achievement in 1997, “The greatest burden you can put on someone is trust. If you pass autonomy far down in any group of people, you’ll get extraordinary results if you ask for a lot.”
In all of his ventures, McCaw has demanded that employees be fully committed. He has asked them to buy into his belief that “if I want the wall to fall down and I’m willing to pay the price and push on it long enough, it will fall down.”
Craig McCaw is driven by certain values. He would say, “Consider the long term; short term gratification is just that. Be humble: If you think you’re great, you’re probably not. Respect co-workers. There is absolutely no room in an organization for sarcasm and making fun of others. A team is a group of people that channel themselves toward a clear goal that transcends their personal wishes and egos.”
His biography, titled, Money From Thin Air, will be published next month by Random House.
Craig McCaw’s life story embodies certain values and beliefs that we would identify with. Of course, we have no goal to amass 11.5 billion dollars! But as a church family in pursuit of our mission and our vision as an outpost in the kingdom of God, we hold to particular values. Like Mr. McCaw, we would seek to complement our weaknesses with the strengths of others. Other similar values we would embody are trust, respect for one another, humility, an eye for the long-term, and teamwork toward a clear goal. These kinds of values enable us to accomplish our mission.
We want to finish up our series on vision this morning, and it’s important we understand the differences between vision and mission. We are waiting for a word from the Lord on our vision, but our mission has already been spelled out in the Scriptures. Though our vision may change from season to season, our mission will never change.
If “teamwork toward a clear goal” is a precious core value, we have to ask, “Do we all know what our goal is?” What are the Biblical mandates God has given to us that constitute our mission, a clear goal for us? If we are all on the same page in this regard, then we will be free to trust God for a vision that moves us toward that ‘clear goal’.
Have you ever noticed these two panels on the walls here in the sanctuary? The one on my right reminds us that our mission is to declare to the world there is a Savior. John 3:16--
“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
The one on my left reminds us that our mission is to build up the church. Ephesians 5:25-26 –“Christ also loved the church, and gave Himself for it; that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word.” If we were to add verse 27, the picture becomes even clearer: “That He might present it to Himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.”
In times past we have declared our mission to be one of “Reaching Out and Building Up”. All that we are about here is to achieve this goal—reaching out to a world that badly needs to know there is a Savior, and building up the Body of Christ so that it is mature and complete, holy and without blemish..
We find these mandates in other verses like Mathew 28 and Ephesians 4 and John 4.
Mathew 28 is a very familiar portion: "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." Jesus said, “Reach them and teach them”.
Ephesians 4:11-13: “And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ; until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.” The Lord said through Paul, “Reach out, bring them in, build them up, until we are mature together.”
John 4:23-24: "But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. ‘God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.’” Jesus told the woman at the well, “Reach them, for even God is the Seeker in a cosmic game of Hide and Seek; Build them up in the truth so their worship is acceptable to Him.”
We’ve probably all known churches that emphasized one of these mandates over the other. Some churches have become only evangelism oriented. All their efforts are geared toward proclaiming the Gospel. The Gospel is preached every Sunday. Invitations are given each Sunday to make a decision for Christ.
Other churches are focused on building up the believers in the church. All their efforts are geared toward Bible studies, small groups, etc., and little is done toward reaching out into their communities.
We here at the Upland Community Church want to be a church that is balanced, that is fulfilling BOTH of our Biblical mandates. Our goal is to be a church family that others find to be warm, friendly, and welcoming. And our goal is to move us all forward on the road to spiritual maturity. We want to be a church family that hasn’t forgotten what it’s like to be lost. And our goal is to become people of substance so that Proverbs 24:10 could never describe any of us: “If you fall apart in your day of crisis, there wasn’t much to you in the first place.” Our goal is to be a church family that has a clear testimony in the community. Our aim is to know how to hear God’s voice when He speaks because we’ve become experienced with walking with Him.
Our mission, given to us in the Scriptures, could not be clearer. Reach out to the lost, bring them in, build them up so the church is mature and complete.
Now the question for us that demands an answer is this, “How do we go about accomplishing this mission?” Well, that’s where vision comes into play. For there are literally thousands of ways of reaching out to the lost and building up the saved. Evangelism can take hundreds of approaches. For example, what Philip did with the Ethiopian eunuch was quite a bit different from what Paul did with the intellectuals on Mars Hill. Two different situations with two different contexts with two different kinds of people required two different approaches for sharing the Gospel. As another example, thinking about Philip’s Ethiopian contact, when the Italians occupied Ethiopia in 1935, all of the Protestant missionaries were expelled from the country. When the missionaries left, there were 60 believers in 3 congregations. For seven years there was no word out of Ethiopia as to what was happening with the church. When missionaries were able to return to Ethiopia in 1942, they found 18,000 church members in 155 congregations. What had happened? During the early days of mission work, one of the national believers was a helper to one of the missionaries; he was a ‘suitcase man’. He traveled with the minister wherever he went. So when the foreigners were kicked out, this believer decided to do what he had watched the missionary do. He got himself a ‘suitcase man’ and duplicated the efforts of his former mentor. He went from city to city declaring the Gospel! Others did the same, the lost were reached, and the church grew in great numbers!
Like the matter of evangelism, edification of the people of the church can take many different avenues. The way Paul addressed Philemon in calling him to a greater maturity was worlds apart from how Paul instructed the Corinthians on their road to spiritual development. The ways in which the Hebrews were warned was far different from the approach Paul took with the Philippians. But the goal was the same in both cases: the building up of the body of saints known as the church.
So what roads shall we take in fulfilling our mission? If we reflect back into the 30 years of our past as a church family, we can see we’ve traveled many different roads. In fulfilling our evangelism mandate, we’ve a long history with the people of this community through Helping Hand. A number of years ago we purchased the Explorer bus and many unbelievers have sat in its seats and slept on its beds in trips to ball fields and amusement parks. When the AWANA leadership changed the requirements to participate in this ministry to youth, we modified the AWANA program into our own unique BASSYCS ministry. Nothing we’ve done has reached so far into the families of this community! We sent 20 individuals over a two year period to Russia with the CoMission project, and the evangelistic impact of those efforts may only be known fully in heaven!
We’ve done many other ministries over the years in our attempts to proclaim the Gospel in relevant ways. VBS and Fun-In-The-Sun. We’ve started home groups with the intent of sharing the Gospel in our neighborhoods. We’ve taken people to the Billy Graham crusade in Indy and we’ve taken youth to see the Power Team in Marion.
Our efforts at evangelism in the future will take even different paths as we trust God to give us new visions for how to be His ambassadors in an increasingly corrupt, purposeless, post-Christian world.
In seeking to edify the believers of our church family, we’ve offered the Equipping Center and we’ve trained people how to share their faith in friendship evangelism. We’ve had seminars on stewardship and we’ve had week-long training sessions on prayer. We offer Sunday School classes for all ages and all interests, and we preach the Word each Sunday in the context of worship services. We have church-wide pot luck dinners, women’s fellowship ministries, and prayer walks in Ireland.
More and more of us are reading the Bible through in a year, seeking to become people of the Book. We’ve invested in technologies like the video projector that makes learning easier in our audio/visual age. We built a gym that is used often through the week, and we make scholarships available for young people to spend a week at Miracle Camp. And the lists could go on and on in the ways that we have sought to bring the body of Christ in this place to maturity.
Well, enough of the past! What does the future hold? We are looking to God for His direction for us. We of the church leadership are convinced He will lead us. We are praying and fasting to that end. In the meantime, we plan to be faithful. We plan to continue doing those core things He has lead us into in the past.
I’m reminded of a Persian legend that tells us of a certain king who needed a faithful servant and had to choose between two candidates for the office. He took both at fixed wages and told them to fill a basket with water from a nearby well, saying that he would come in the evening to inspect their work. After dumping two or three buckets of water into the basket, one of the men said, “What is the good of doing this useless work? As soon as we pour the water in, it runs out the sides.”
The other servant answered, “But we have our wages, haven’t we? The use is the master’s business, not ours.”
“I’m not going to do such fool’s work,” replied the complainer. Throwing down his bucket, he went away.
The other man continued until he had drained the well. Looking down into it, he saw something shining at the bottom that proved to be a diamond ring. “Now I see the use of pouring water into the basket!” he exclaimed. “If the bucket had brought up the ring before the well was dry, it would have been found in the basket. Our work was not useless.”
It is easy to think that the routine things we are about in our ministries sometimes appear to be fruitless. Sometimes we DO wonder whether those 5th grade boys will ever begin to come around. At times we waver in our commitment to serving in the nursery, forgetting that new families with little ones evaluate us most severely on the conditions we ask them to place their babies and toddlers in. These ministries sometimes feel like taking water out of a well with a bucket and trying to fill a woven basket!
But there are diamonds to be found in the faithful execution of those things the Master has called us to!
Before we move into our service of communion this morning, it is worth a reminder to all of us that Mission and Vision are different. Our mission comes straight out of the Scriptures and it is unchanging. It will be our task and clear goal until that day the Lord Jesus calls and we rise to meet Him in the air. We are called to faithfully reach out to the lost and to persevere in the labor of building up the body of Christ to maturity.
But our vision for fulfilling our mission can find expression in untold ways. Our vision, both personal and corporate, will come from hearing the voice of God, from assessing our culture and our community. Our vision will come from evaluating our competition and formulating a plan to draw others away from their interests in other priorities.
Our vision will make us effective in our mission. Pray for us in leadership positions in the church. Ask God for a personal word for how you can exercise the gifts He’s given you for the sake of our mission here together. Share with me what God seems to be saying, and let’s make a plan together!


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