The Church Answers Podcast

The Six Purposes of the Church: How They Really Play Out in a Local Congregation. Part 4 of 9: The Purpose of Evangelism

The purposes of the church originate with the early churches in the New Testament. When Rick Warren wrote "The Purpose Driven Church" in 1995, the purposes became commonplace in conversations in churches around the world. Thom takes a detailed journey about the purposes of the church through nine episodes. Keep all of them together to share with your church leaders and members.

Duration:: 11m
Broadcast on:: 24 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Welcome to the Church Answers Podcast, presented by Chaney & Associates. Chaney & Associates are the accounting firm for the church. Now get ready for fast-paced insights on key issues affecting the local church today. We release three episodes each week, so make sure you've seen or heard them all. And now, here's the CEO of Church Answers, Tom Rayner. - If you did not view or listen, that would mean YouTube or podcasting up, if you did not view or listen to the podcast, last week we had three that introduced us to the purpose-driven church. And I'm referring to this book that was originally, well, it was written by Rick Warren, came out in 1995. I saw the manuscript at a request for an endorsement in 1994, talked to Rick about it, got really excited about it and have been ever since. This book that I think has shaped the church as much as almost any other book. I do love the fact that my book that came out, I am a church member, was not like the purpose-driven church, but it certainly complements it. And those two, individually or one and two, the best-selling books on the local church. And it's kind of an honor to be right aside purpose-driven church because when I saw this, it influenced me significantly. What did we talk about? We talked about the six purposes of the church in the last episode. What else did we talk about? We talked about Chaney and Associates, the accounting firm far the church. Love my friends, Steve Chaney, love his team in California, and love what they're doing for the local church. That's all they do is church-counting church finance, church bookkeeping, take that load off yourself and give it to Chaney. If you ask me to recommend to you someone to do the church's books, I'm only gonna recommend one. That's Chaney and Associates. Wherever you are, the cloud base, so you don't have to worry about, okay, they're in California and I am in Maine. Well, that work, yeah, work. They're cloud based, they can do it for anyone. They know the church. Chaney and Associates, go to chaneyassociates.com today. Set up an appointment and talk to them. You will not regret it. Okay, we're going to look at each of the six purposes. Let me review those six. Those are evangelism, discipleship, ministry, worship, fellowship, and evangelism and prayer. I may have said seven there, but the six are in there. I may have duplicated one and prayer. So we're going to talk about the purpose of evangelism. And I'm going to go back to what Rick said about this and talk about how he commented on it as an introduction. He certainly expanded upon it, but in the first 100 pages, he says purpose number three is evangelism, go and make disciples. The church exists to communicate God's word. I'm reading from his book. We're ambassadors for Christ. And our mission is to evangelize the world. The task of evangelism is so important. Christ actually gave us five great commissions. One in each of the gospels and one in the book of Acts, Matthew 28, 19 through 20, Mark 16, 15, Luke 24, 47, 49, John 20 to 21 and Acts 1, 8. He said of angelism is more than our responsibility. It is our great privilege. We are invited to be a part of bringing people into God's family. I don't know of a more significant cause to give one's life to. I love what Rick said about evangelism. We at church answers would later design a church health survey that is now called Know Your Church. Put that in our notes. But if you go to churchanswers.com and look under tools, you can look up Know Your Church. And we use the six purposes of the church. Rick's five and our one, which is prayer. And we have church members answer questions according to how they perceive the church is doing, the way we ask the questions. Inevitably, evangelism out of six purposes ends up at five or six in terms of importance. Usually six, usually it is the least emphasized. And by definition, the least important purpose as exercised or not exercised by the church. I love the fact that Rick talks about evangelism so explicitly, so clearly and so powerfully. He's always been an evangelist in the biblical sense of the word, not necessarily in the stereotypical sense of the word, but in the biblical sense of the word. He's always loved to share what Christ has done for him and through his own personal life and through the tragedies he's had to go through, including the death suicide of his son and many other things that have affected him and his wife Kay, he has stood firm upon the rock of salvation Christ and the mandate to share Christ with others. And so you shouldn't be surprised that Rick Warren said this is a purpose of the church, but simply to tell you that this is clearly the most neglected purpose of the church. Now you could argue maybe prayer, maybe the discipleship, but according to the information we have, this is the most neglected purpose of the church. We actually offer a resource to help kickstart churches back in evangelism called the Hope Initiative and God is just blessing that one, that particular resource in many ways. But evangelism is something that most churches don't do. Some talk about it, and not many even talk about it. And you try to think about why don't churches do evangelism and why don't Christians do evangelism at a pace that would just be the normal Christian life? Well, I think one of the primary things, reasons that we don't is the enemy. Think about the strategic plan of Satan. What is one of the things that he would have to do in order to fight this battle of spiritual warfare and have any modicum of at least temporal success? One of the things that he would have to do is to stop people from talking about Jesus. Because every time someone becomes a follower of Christ, he or she has an eternal life with Christ. Now and when they die. He does not want to, the enemy, Satan does not want to lose a soul that goes to the kingdom of God. It only makes sense that evangelism is spiritual warfare and that Satan is gonna do everything for us personally and for the church corporately to stop us from doing that, from doing evangelism. The most common way that churches neglect evangelism is busyness. We are doing a lot of good things, but we're not doing the greatest. It is a sin to be good when God has called us to be great. There is not a good commission. There is a great commission. There is not a good commandment. There is a great commandment. And when Paul talks about the pinnacle of it all love, he doesn't say that love is just one of these good things in first Corinthians 13. He says in first Corinthians 13, 13, and the greatest of these is love. We often use a superlative greatest to talk about those things and the greatest thing that we can do, one of the greatest things that we can do for sure is to be telling the good news of Jesus Christ. I have mentioned on a couple of occasions already in the series that our resource called Know Your Church. We send that out for church members to basically give their insights, opinions, and perspectives on how their churches are doing. And again and again and again, we see either the lowest score or definitely one of the lowest scores is in evangelism. So I'm leading off on the six purposes of the church by leading off with evangelism. And evangelism is the priority that is not being prioritized in many churches. And Rick Warren, when he gave us the five purposes, six, when we added prayer to this, when he gave us the five purposes, he was reminded that if we are not doing the work of evangelism, we are an incomplete biblical church. We are a church that is not fulfilling what Christ has commanded us to do, and we need to get about our business. I would encourage you as a church leader, not just to remember a book called The Purpose Driven Church that talks about evangelism as one of his core purposes for the church, but also remands us of a church settle back that started with the heart of evangelism and continued for decades to come. Well, I love talking about the Purpose Driven Church because this has such a paradigmatic effect upon churches today. It's such an incredible resource then, and even though so much of what we read in this book now is it seems like kind of all news, the reason it's all news is because Rick wrote it in such a way that we've adopted it and grained it in our thinking. I just wish we would do more, especially in the area of evangelism. Well, we're going to continue talking about the six purposes of the church, Rick's five, and then we added prayer to it, and we're going to go to another often neglected purpose, and that's the purpose of discipleship. Well, once again, thank you for being a part of the Church Answers Podcast. For those of you who are watching on YouTube, give us a thumbs up. Hey, subscribe to our channel. Get more people coming here because we've got this nine part series, for example, on the Purpose Driven Church. I hope that there will be many who will watch it or view it, or listen to it on the podcast app, all together. So wherever you are, thank you. If you're listening on a podcast app, give us a rating and review a good one at that. And we're going to continue to unpack the different purposes of the church. In the next episode, part five of the nine part series, we'll talk about discipleship. Thank you, Chaney and Associates. Thank you, audience, for being a part of this podcast. We'll see you later. - You have been listening to the Church Answers Podcast presented by Chaney and Associates. Chaney and Associates are the accounting firm for the church. You need to focus on ministry. Chaney will focus on finances. Also, please subscribe and give a review to the Church Answers Podcast on YouTube and on your favorite podcasting app. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)