What Is the Purpose of the Church?

Is it personal salvation? Is it maintaining a certain structure? Is it Sunday morning worship? Let's explore where the Church finds its true meaning, purpose and value system.

I hear this question from Christians all the time: What is the purpose of the Church? Sometimes people intuit that Christian spirituality only concerns personal salvation. Others think of the Church primarily in institutional terms. Some people imagine Church as a worshiping community on a Sunday morning. 

There is some truth to those perspectives, but each one suffers from having lost the overall story of the Bible—that the One, True Creator God is restoring his whole creation in and through Jesus. The Church arises from within this story and is meant to find its meaning, purpose and value system within it.

Photo by Edward Cisneros on Unsplash

The Church is forgiven and saved—let the hallelujahs ring! The Church is organized. The Church does gather for word, worship and Holy Communion. But the Church is primarily defined by being part of a movement, a revolution started by Jesus. Jesus described the essence of his movement with the phrase the Kingdom of God. 

The Gospel of the Kingdom was central to Jesus’ teaching. It informed the way he lived and interacted with others. The miracles he performed were signs of the presence of the Kingdom, a foretaste of the consummated Kingdom which is to come. The person and work of Jesus revealed God’s primary goal: Find, save and form a people, a people who, standing in the paradigmatic story of Abraham/Israel (Genesis 12:1-3) and ending in Revelation 22:5 (in which the Church is pictured as reigning with God forever), are to be ambassadors of the Kingdom of God. 

Love is a prerequisite to being an ambassador of the Kingdom. To participate well in the Jesus-Kingdom movement, we must love God, love our neighbors and love our enemies. This triad of love is what makes all our human interactions, our engagement with culture, sacred. Jesus said these three things sum up and fulfill the whole story of God (Matthew 22:36-40; Luke 6:27-28). Fundamentally, the energy of our will must be directed to “what God is up to in the world”—which is a simple definition of “rule and reign.” 

As ambassadors, we are also called to join God in the focus of his reign: For God so loved the world…

In John 3:16, world translates the Greek term kosmos. It commonly refers to the order or arrangement of things, as in our use of cosmos to refer to the ordered universe. In the Bible, kosmos can also refer to the sphere or place of human life and all the inhabitants of that place. 

Now, consider God’s undying, always-inviting love against the tragic backdrop of the hate-fueled brutality and the cold injustices of today’s world. God wills the world’s good, its healing, its transformation into his creative, pre-fall intention for it. God loves saints and sinners alike, inviting each and every kind of human being to find meaning and virtue in his realm, so that we can be practical agents of his loving, wise good in our realm.

To make our cooperation with God’s purposes for the Church normal and routine, we need a basic rule of life, or an intentional, conscious plan to keep God at the center. My rule of life is rooted in Romans 12:1,2 (MSG):

Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.

Using the notion of everyday-ness, I hold this imagination for living as an ambassador of the Kingdom of God:

I am the cooperative friend of Jesus.
I am seeking to live in creative goodness
For the good of others
By the power of the Holy Spirit.

Let’s break that down.

I am the cooperative friend of Jesus.

Here, I imagine living into Jesus’ words:

You are my friends when you do the things I command you. I'm no longer calling you servant because servants don't understand what their master is thinking and planning. No, I've named you friends because I've let you in on everything I've heard from the Father.

John 15:15

I am seeking to live in creative goodness.

Over decades, John Wesley’s articulation of this element of Christian spirituality has fed my vision for doing good:

Do all the good you can,

by all the means you can,

in all the ways you can,

in all the places you can,

at all the times you can,

to all the people you can,

as long as ever you can.

For the good of others.

Paul’s words are meaningful to me, shaping this focus of my life as an ambassador of the Kingdom of God:

Christ has set us free to live a free life...use your freedom to serve one another in love…

Galatians 5:1 (MSG)

Use your heads as you live and work among outsiders.
Don’t miss a trick.
Make the most of every opportunity.

Colossians 4:5 (MSG)

By the power of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus said to his disciples, “Even as the Father sent me, in the very same manner I now send you.” He then breathed on them, filling them with the Holy Spirit (John 20:21-22). This filling was meant to animate and energize his cooperative friends as they were sent to live lives of creative goodness. Jesus was giving them power/capacity and authority/authorization to work in his name. The Spirit also worked in them to produce the fruit, the character, the inner virtue necessary to a life of sentness in Jesus’ name.

If the Church is to be aligned with the purposes of God, we—individually, in our everyday ordinary lives— must live as ambassadors of the Kingdom of God. I am thrilled to join you in a life of participation, finding life’s meaning and purpose within God’s great story.