Transcript
What Is Our Mission?
First Baptist Richmond, August 30, 2026
Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Matthew 6:10
May your kingdom come. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
“Why are we here?”
That’s the question I asked our staff on my first planning retreat, eighteen years ago. And I didn’t mean, “Why are we here on retreat?” I meant, “Why is our church here, in Richmond?”
They knew the answer. We were here to make disciples. That was our mission. It was on the front of the bulletin. It was in all our printed materials. And it came straight out of the Bible: Matthew 28:18-20, where the risen Lord says to his followers: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Through the years that passage has become known as, “The Great Commission,” but that’s not what Matthew called it, and that’s not what Jesus called it. Search through the Gospels and you will find several places where Jesus tells his disciples what he wants them to do after he’s gone.
§ The longer ending of Mark’s Gospel, for instance, where Jesus is reported to have said: “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation. The one who believes and is baptized will be saved; but the one who
does not believe will be condemned” (Mark 16:15-16). I probably need to point out that those words didn’t show up until at least the Second Century A. D. and Jesus probably didn’t say them (this is the same passage that claims his followers will be able to pick up poisonous snakes without being harmed).
§ But then there’s the Gospel of Luke, where the risen Lord says: “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem” (Luke 24:46-47). And maybe what Jesus had in mind was the parable of the Prodigal Son, found only in this Gospel, where the son repented, came home, and found his sins forgiven. That’s good news.
§ And then there’s the commission in John’s Gospel, where Jesus appears to his disciples on Easter evening and says, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And then he breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 20:21-23). Connect those verses to John 3:16 and it may mean that we have been sent as Christ was sent to love the world God loves, even if that means forgiving sinners.
§ And finally (or maybe not so finally), the commission found in Acts 1:8, where Jesus says: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” We have used that verse here at First Baptist to develop our own mission strategy. It’s a good one.
Each of those is a commission, but only one of them is known as the Great Commission. Why is that? And when did it happen? Apparently, the terminology began to emerge in the 17th century, when a German Lutheran advocate for overseas mission,
pointed to Matthew 28:18-20 as a kind of Christian mandate. But it really gained traction in the 19th-century Protestant missionary movement, when Hudson Taylor and others made it the definitive biblical “mission text.” By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “the Great Commission” had become standard Protestant vocabulary, so that now, if you ask almost any church staff what the Christian mission is, they will say,
“To make disciples.”
But somewhere along the way, the mission of teaching those new disciples to obey everything Jesus commanded was replaced by the mission of getting people to believe in Jesus so that when they died they could go to heaven instead of hell. When did that happen, and how? I did some research, and this is what I found:
First, the center of gravity shifted from the kingdom of God to the fate of the individual soul. In the Gospels (particularly in Matthew, Mark, and Luke), Jesus’ characteristic announcement is that “the kingdom of God has come near.” His teaching is full of God’s reign arriving among ordinary people: forgiveness, reconciliation, healing, justice, tables with unlikely guests, good news for the poor. Eternal life is certainly there, judgment is there, and resurrection is definitely there—but Jesus’ message is bigger than “where will you go when you die?” As Christianity moved out of Israel and into the rest of the Roman Empire, however, it encountered the concept of an immortal soul that had developed in Greek philosophy. In Jewish thought the body and soul were bound up together; when you died everything died, and when you were resurrected—if you were—everything was raised up. That’s the biblical view. It’s what Paul believed, and it’s what he preached. But over the centuries the immortality of the soul crept into Christian preaching, and the language about salvation increasingly became language about what happens to the soul after we die.
Second, the Christian understanding of things like judgment, heaven, hell, and salvation became increasingly systematized. Augustine may have gotten things started, but Medieval Christianity (often without reference to scripture), developed elaborate theologies of sin, judgment, heaven, hell, purgatory, merit, grace, and the sacraments. And an epic poem called the Divine Comedy, written by Dante in the fourteenth century, is probably still more responsible for the popular understanding of heaven and hell than anything in the Bible.
Then, in the sixteenth century, the Reformation changed the question without necessarily changing its focus. Martin Luther (who had seen paintings of the Last Judgment when he was a boy that terrified him) began to ask: How can sinful human beings be justified before a holy God? As he was translating Paul’s epistles from Greek into German, Luther was able to apprehend—as if for the first time—the miracle of justification by grace through faith. It became his gospel. But as a result Christianity became more a matter of getting right with God than doing what Jesus commanded.
And then, fourth, revivalism and the modern missionary movement put all this together. In much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evangelicalism, the stakes became intensely personal and urgent: preachers reminded their audiences that every person is a sinner; death may come at any moment; after death comes judgment; salvation comes through faith in Christ; therefore the most loving thing Christians can do is persuade as many people as possible to believe the gospel before they die. And somewhere along the line we decided that’s what Jesus meant when he asked his followers to, “Go, make disciples.”
I remember asking Steve Booth about that, shortly after I got to Richmond. Steve was our minister of Christian Formation; in some ways he was the staff member most directly responsible for disciple-making. I said, “Let me ask it this way: What if we were
successful? What if fully formed, fully functioning disciples were rolling out the front door of Richmond’s First Baptist Church like cars off an assembly line. What would they do?” And that’s a harder question. It even took Steve a minute or two to come up with a good answer. But eventually we settled on that thing that is at the heart of the Great Commission itself, the thing that much of evangelical Christianity seems to have ignored: that disciples would learn to obey everything Jesus commanded. And that’s how we got to our current mission statement.
I know you’ve heard this story before, but at that first retreat I asked the staff to sit down with some of those red-letter editions of the Bible, and write down all the clear commands of Christ. One group took Matthew, another took Mark, another took Luke, and the last group took John. They worked for about an hour and when they were finished we wrote down five commands from each Gospel and taped the results to the wall on four big sheets of paper. The results won’t surprise you: “Love God, love your neighbor, love your enemies, don’t judge, don’t be afraid, bear one another’s burdens, wash one another’s feet…” you know.
I asked, “Which one of these should we do?” And they recognized immediately that we couldn’t do just one; that we had to find some way to do them all. But we couldn’t come up with a mission statement that incorporated all those commands. It was during the break that it came to me, and I wrote across the bottom of those four sheets, “Is this what life in the Kingdom looks like?” Is it that place where we love our neighbors without judging them, where we make disciples and turn the other cheek? Were all those parables Jesus told, and all those commands he gave, an attempt to show us what life in the Kingdom looks like, so we would know it when we saw it, and know how to bring it in?
In our staff meetings we began praying that God’s kingdom would come, and God’s will would be done, in Richmond as it is in heaven. It was Billy Burford, our church administrator, who first said something in an offertory prayer about our gifts helping to bring “the Kingdom of Heaven to Richmond, Virginia.” I loved the rhythmic way it rolled off his tongue. We began to talk about what it would take to bring heaven to earth, and eventually restructured the staff around the top five of those clear commands: Love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength; love your neighbor just as much as you love yourself; love one another as I have loved you; make disciples by baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit; but also by teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. We posted one of those commands over each of five ministry areas and called them the ministries of Worship, Compassion, Community, Invitation, and Formation. I asked some of our senior staff to head them up and that’s the way we’ve been operating ever since.
And somewhere along the line the Lord’s Prayer became a kind of mission statement, which is appropriate, because it’s the perfect reminder of why we’re here. It’s the kind of prayer a soldier might pray before going onto the battlefield, the kind of prayer a missionary might pray before going onto the mission field. “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,” it says. “Thy kingdom come! Thy will be done!” But then (don’t miss this part), “on earth as it is in heaven.” And then we ask God to give us our daily bread, because we’re going to need our strength. We ask him to forgive us our sins, because they would only drag us down. We ask him to lead us not into temptation because we can’t afford to be distracted: this mission is too important. And then, just in case we begin to have some success and think it’s because of our efforts, the prayer reminds us that the kingdom, and the power, and the glory belong to God forever and ever.
Amen.
Several years ago I found a sentence in a book by Walter Brueggemann that has given shape to my ministry ever since. You’ve probably heard me quote it before. On page 99 of a book called The Hopeful Imagination he wrote: “The central task of ministry is the formation of a community with an alternative, liberated imagination that has the courage and the freedom to act in a different vision and a different perception of reality.” I love that, not only because it has given shape to my own ministry, but because it reminds me so much of Jesus’ ministry.
Do you remember how he started? He called some disciples, or, to put it another way, he formed a community. And then he started teaching them about the Kingdom of God, saying, “the Kingdom is like a mustard seed, it’s like a treasure, a pearl.” He did his best to inspire in them an alternative, liberated imagination. And then, through his own example, he showed them the courage and freedom to act—to preach the gospel, heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons—even to turn over tables in the temple if necessary. He did it to bring in the Kingdom, because when he looked at the world around him he saw not only what was, but what could be. He had a different vision, and a different perception of reality.
That’s the kind of work he calls us to: not the fire-and-brimstone preaching that is aimed only at saving souls, and not the anxious preservation of this earthly institution we call the church, where it always seems to be about getting more members and more money. No, the work Jesus calls us to is the fearless, faithful, joyful work of bringing heaven to earth. I think that’s why he spent his time forming a community with an alternative, liberated imagination that had the courage and freedom to act in a different vision and a different perception of reality. And that’s why, at the end of every staff meeting at Richmond’s First Baptist Church, we stand, join hands, and say the Lord’s
prayer, but instead of saying, “Thy kingdom come thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” we say, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in Richmond as it is in heaven.”
That’s our mission.
How do we do it? We look around for anything that doesn’t look like heaven, and then we roll up our sleeves and get to work. Today we’re going to do exactly that, and there will be moments when it happens, when heaven comes to earth so visibly that you will be able to take a picture of it. I hope you will, and that those pictures will end up in the hallway, on social media, and on the church website. And if you’re watching from some place other than Richmond—from Judea, Samaria, or the ends of the earth—get out into your own neighborhood, look around for anything that doesn’t look like heaven, and then roll up your sleeves and get to work. And when you see it happen—when you see heaven come to earth—snap a picture and send it to us. Because this is how God’s kingdom comes, friends, and this is how God’s will is done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
–Jim Somerville, 2026