As we wrap up our series, Nuts and Bolts, today, we are zooming back out from the little nuts and bolts of making the church work to reflect one more time on the big thing that it is we are doing together. What is the church’s mission. Sometimes we confuse that with our mission as individual followers of Jesus. That’s an understandable error, but one that can set us off the track of what we should be doing as a group. Let’s talk about that today through the lens of Jesus’ great commissioning of the disciples at the end of Matthew’s Gospel.
Do Your Job
Do you remember getting a syllabus when you were in school? In college and seminary, that document was like the Bible in all my various classes. A really well-written syllabus told you not only what to expect to learn throughout the semester, but also what the assignments were going to be. A really industrious student could technically go ahead and get all the work done for the semester in the first few weeks with that help. But there’s even more. A really, really good syllabus told you not only what the various assignments were going to be, but also what the big projects were for the semester along with the grading rubrics by which they were going to be evaluated. In other words, they laid out all the parameters for success for you right at the beginning. You had the ability to know at any given point during the year just what you were supposed to be doing along with how to do it in such a way as to meet with the teacher’s expectations for success. You knew out of the gate that if you did this much work, you’d get this many points, but if you did this much more work, you’d get this many more points. A good syllabus like this serves as a kind of set of mission parameters for the course. If you pay attention to it, you’ll always know where you stand when it comes to the line between success and failure.
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The Nexus 