Discipleship: Our Calling to Holiness and Mission

Today’s reading begins Section V: Discipleship – Our Calling to Holiness and Mission. Read here.

In his mercy, God has worked through the Lausanne Movement over the past half century to catalyse evangelism to unreached peoples and communities around the world and to inculcate a sense of social concern in the face of injustice, oppression, and discrimination. These dual emphases have often been held together within the concept of “integral mission,” but integral mission has not always fully integrated the command of our Lord to be disciples and his commission to make disciples. As a result, despite our claim to be followers of our crucified Lord, we have often failed to live in keeping with the holy pattern of life he gave to us and to teach others to do the same. The result has been a steady stream of reports of financial mismanagement, of sexual misconduct and abuse, of abuse of power among leaders, of efforts to cover-up these failures while ignoring the pain of those who have suffered because of them, and of spiritual anaemia and immaturity in evangelical churches around the world. We grieve these failings; we lament our sin; we humbly repent and confess our profound need for the ongoing grace of the gospel to produce in us the holiness without which no one will see the Lord (Heb 12:14). We therefore commit ourselves to the following affirmations.

A disciple is a follower of Jesus, formed by the gospel for a life of loving God and loving others.

We affirm that to be a disciple is to be formed in the pattern of life that conforms to the good news of Christ’s incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension by which God in his love has saved his people from their sins and, through the outpouring of the Spirit by the ascended Christ, graciously granted them the power to live under his holy and righteous rule. As a result, mission is properly aimed toward the formation of disciples whose love for God and love for others are united in an undivided heart. This outcome is properly understood as the work of God to write his law in human hearts—a work that enables us to live as God’s one, holy covenant people made up of all peoples who continue the work of Jesus, the Servant of the Lord, to bring life and light to the world. As the embodiment of this divine achievement, the local church is both the means and the end of mission pursued in this way. (Jer 31:31-34; Matt 22:36-40)