The GCM Collective, (Gospel Communities on Mission Collective), desires to promote just that: Communities of people, motivated by the gospel to living as sent ones in places God has called them to.  These communities desire to love God and love neighbor with the goal of making disciples of Jesus who then go out and make more disciples.   We believe that the three components of: gospel, community and mission, are crucial for the life and health of both the universal and local church today. Our experience has shown us when one of these components is missing, it topples as a three legged stool would if a leg was missing.

Here is what we mean.

Gospel + Community - Mission

If we have a Gospel Community, without the mission, or sent, aspect of its DNA, then it becomes a church that is all about itself.  They love the gospel, they love that the good news has impacted their minds and they desire to live that out with other people like them.  But living as sent ones to their neighborhood seems too difficult.  What happens is that a Christian ghetto surrounds them and they create an “us vs them” mentality and miss the entire point of the “go” in Christ’s great commission found in Matthew 28:17-21. 

These communities of believers are usually very good at living as gospel families.  They take care of each other well, they provide for one another’s needs and they draw very close to one another, but their lack of multiplication and engagement with the world is self-evident.  Sometimes this inward focus is even worn as a badge of honor since they believe they’re not being polluted by the world.

These communities usually have a heavy emphasis on bible studies, men’s groups, women’s groups and children programs. The groups will usually have an “open” invitation to those on the outside, but because they don’t believe they are “sent ones” to their community, they rarely see disciples made of the non-Christ following people around them.   Their growth typically comes from like-minded people moving into their area or through having children.  Most of their baptisms will happen when one of their children comes of age and professes Jesus, but rarely are they faced with the general public pushing into the Kingdom, because they never engage general public with the gospel message outside the walls of their church building. 

The overall goal is usually to prompt a great understanding of the Word and theology, but is often intellectually gluttonous and missionally starved.  Meaning, the reason for the word and theology is to drive us to glorify God and show us our role in God’s redemptive drama.  If it’s not being used towards that end then it’s being misused.

Gospel + Mission – Community

When a group has a firm grasp of the gospel and believes that they are the sent ones of God but doesn’t prioritize community, that group will end up making disciples of themselves instead of Jesus.   While their zeal for God’s glory and His mission are obvious, they don’t understand that by starving themselves, and others of community, they wind up distorting people’s view of Jesus and His gospel message.

Churches that don’t understand the importance of community love online services, video church or may not even gather as a church at all.   They like to ride solo because they have been so disappointed in the past with the church and her wrinkles.   They speak very highly of their personal relationship with Christ, but end up ignoring the Biblical understanding of church leadership and structure.  They miss out on the understanding that the church family is not here to be perfect, but to make us more like Jesus.   In our struggles, sin, victories and triumphs, we learn much about ourselves, our communities and our God.   If we decide to pursue mission without a community, we can mutate from a sheep without a shepherd into shepherds that neglect the flock of God, leaving our communities open for wolves to devour.     

Without a community around us, who will call us out on our sin? Who will walk alongside us? Who will aid us in our struggles as fallen humans?  All these things are not to pursue perfection, but to pursue Jesus, who is our perfection.  Through our experience of triumphs, struggles, sin and faults we are made more like Jesus. 

Paul tells us that this comes from the body of Christ and that they will carry our burdens (Galatians 6).  Not only that, but Paul tells us plainly that we cannot tell other members of Christ’s body that we have no need for them (1 Cor 12).  Just as our bodies are fallen and become sick with disease, Christ’s body, the church, can likewise suffer sickness and disease.  Therefore, when you put your hope in a community of believers, you will be disappointed because they are not perfect.   But, just as you don’t discard your biological brothers and sisters when they disappoint you, neither should the family of God. 

Someone who has the gospel and mission, but no community will be lacking much influence from the totality of who Jesus is and in the end, really have no mission at all and are proclaiming a distorted gospel.  Furthermore, but what happens if people start to follow them?  Will they tell their new disciples to go away because of their lack of desire for community?

Community, family, the body is necessary for Kingdom building with Jesus as the King.  Solitude, seclusion and isolation will only build your own kingdom where you are the king.  This level of individualism leads right back to the garden where Adam and Eve bought into the serpent’s promise that they could be their own gods.

Two points to consider:

1. From the very beginning of the Story, we see that God's image was created to be reflected through community, not merely through individuals.  When God then calls Abraham and his family to be the means by which He would restore the world, God is using a family, a community of people to accomplish that end.  God's purpose has always been to fulfill His mission through a family of people.
2. Jesus makes clear in John 17 that the best tool we have to engage in mission is the Christian community living together as family.  As Leslie Newbigin said many years ago, the church as a community is a "hermeneutic of the Gospel" through which the message of the gospel will become intelligible. 

Community + Mission - Gospel

Sadly, some believe that the mission of the Church is merely to exist as communities of sent ones working to usher in the Kingdom.   They don’t proclaim what we see as the full, Biblical gospel, just the fruits of the good news from when Jesus brought the person from death to life.  The culture loves these communities because they usually care for the broken, the downtrodden, the sick, the poor, the widow and the prisoner.   No doubt their acts of service are ones that are needed and loved by the culture, but in their desire to help, they give no eternal hope.  The still are under the lordship of this world and are only citizens of this kingdom.  They usually put most of us to shame in their good deeds, and most of us need to learn from these types of Jesus followers, so we can’t easily dismiss them.  However, they need to embrace the full, Biblical gospel in order for their communities and mission to reach their full potential.

The reason that they do their good works is because of what they understand Jesus has done for them so that they have a greater hope, but then they don’t offer that good news to those that they help.  It would be like a cancer survivor going back to the hospital and instead of giving the cancer victims the cure for their cancer; they give them Tylenol to mask the pain.   

The gospel mission isn’t trying to replicate what Jesus has done by saving the broken.  Rather, the gospel mission is showing and telling of the good news of what Jesus has already accomplished and seeing disciples made by the power of that message.  We are not to try and be the gospel, we are to tell others of the gospel, the good news, and then live out the effects of the gospel in our lives.  Doing good works without speaking about the good news is like putting a band aid on a bullet wound. 

Without the proclamation of Jesus’ death and resurrection, though these good works seem very pious, they are actually a form of spiritual abuse. If people do not trust the finished and greater work of Jesus for their eternal souls, then any justice done on their behalf is only temporary. It does not usher them into the enjoyment of the New Creation.   If a mom fed a child cookies for dinner every night, she would not be caring for her child’s long term health. A child might be happy for the evening because they got cookies, and this happiness might last for years, but overall the mom is abusing the child because she is not giving the child a balanced diet for his well-being. 

Doing good works without gospel proclamation will give people a picture of the Kingdom of God without its true substance; it’s missing true life which comes from partaking in Jesus’ death and resurrection.    

This group has historically been an overreaction to the first group who cares about the gospel and community but not the mission.  They help the community in many ways, and we can learn from them in this regard.  However, removing the message of Jesus’ death and resurrection from our mission is like removing the engine from a car, it make look pretty but it won’t take anyone anywhere.

Conclusion

We have to be the people of God, affected by the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection that brings us from death to life, not only in our past and future, but right now in the midst of our sanctification.  We have to be so affected by the gospel that we desire to live this out with others whom God has put in His family as our brothers and sisters because of the death of His perfect Son on our behalf.   God has always wanted a people for Himself to call family that would image him to others.   Because of his Son, we can be that family, that nation, that lives out these lives for his glory to show others what he is like as his ambassadors.  

We know that we will not live this out perfectly and we will continually battle our tendency to overemphasize one or two of the components we discussed above the others.  However, we do know that we have a perfect One in heaven who is the gospel, who made us His Body and gave us the Comforter, who is the very Power living inside us to be the sending force of the church.

May we do this all for the glory of our God and may our mission in all this be under the authority of the risen Christ to do what he called us to do: make disciples who make disciples.