LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 2001, Page 95

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3. Church Fellowship and Telling the Good News about Jesus
As kids growing up in California, we learned very early
that you could do almost anything with anybody. Some of
our best friends in school and in the neighborhood were
Asian and Hispanic. Our family dentist was African-American. Tante and Onkel Goldberg were like another set of
grandparents. You got together with all kinds of folks for
all kinds of things. For those few things you didn’t do with
everybody, you knew there was a reason far more important than age or color or accent.
As a young professional in Washington, D.C., I attended
an ecumenical Reformation service one year at the National
Cathedral. We got together with a whole lot of folks, and it
was a magnificent event—huge organ, a thousand voices,
vestments I’d never seen before. But somehow, it wasn’t
Reformation—and not just because we sang “A Mighty
Fortress” using the “wrong” translation.
As a green, new pastor in Michigan, I was speaking with
a visitor before the service. He was from the ALC congregation in town, but he was a former Missouri Synod member, and he was beginning to recognize the differences between the Synods. This sounded to me like one of those
“extraordinary circumstances” requiring “responsible pastoral care,” “by their nature, relatively rare.” 1 Unfortunately, after his communing and my calling on him, he told
me his friendships on the softball team were pretty strong,
and he’d decided to stay where he was.
Later, as a pastor in Texas, I had a little better visit one
evening when a lapsed and unchurched Baptist told me, no,
he wasn’t offended that he couldn’t come to Communion; he
really appreciated finding a church where “everything you
people believe is laid right out.” After adult instruction, he
and his wife, their grown son and daughter, and their families became some of our strongest members, and he and
his wife were out with me making evangelism calls.
For our time this evening, I’d like to continue Dr. Gibbs’s
and Dr. MacKenzie’s discussion of church fellowship, but
for this session, let’s talk specifically about how our Synod’s
fellowship practices impact our doing evangelism, “Telling
the Good News about Jesus.” Could it be that our understanding of fellowship is a straitjacket, that you simply
can’t do evangelism within our church’s guidelines of closed
Communion and against unionism? Let me answer that
question by asking and at least beginning to answer quite
the opposite question: “Why is our practice of fellowship
vital to fulfilling the Great Commission?”

serve all things.” That’s an essential part of the Great Commission, isn’t it—not just an afterthought.
I remember, back when I was a brand-new Sem I student, first year at the seminary, really naive, talking to another first-year student, an equally reliable theologian,
about various evangelism methods. Kennedy was big back
then.2 My friend’s words of wisdom were, “You just give it
to ’em down and dirty at first, then you clean up the theology later.” I nodded in agreement.
Boy, was I dumb! “Teaching them to observe all things”
is not an afterthought; it’s the Great Commission; it’s cutting-edge evangelism. In the Greek text, “baptizing” and
“teaching” are parallel participles, just as they are in English. Both—equally—describe means by which we make
disciples. Baptizing and the preaching and teaching of the
Word create and sustain disciples. It’s not as if you do evangelism to make a disciple, then teach doctrine to fix a disciple. Baptizing and teaching, together and as a lifelong
process, are evangelism, and, obviously, both are to be done
right the first time.
I’ve always been bothered a bit by the distinction between mission and maintenance ministry. The suggestion
seems to be that some of the work we do in teaching and
preaching isn’t mission, it isn’t evangelism. It made me
wonder what I was doing as a pastor. I was making nonmember visits every Monday night and training others to
do them; I was continually leading adult instruction
classes; I was baptizing and confirming new members. And
I was making shut-in visits—some of which were adult instruction classes; I was preaching to my regulars every
Sunday; I was baptizing babies and confirming eighth
graders. So what was I doing? Mission or maintenance?

I.
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the
Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). We all know very well what
Jesus has commissioned us to do, don’t we. In fact, you
know it well enough to quote the part of the Great Commission I left off: “teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you” (28:20a). “Make disciples of
all nations, … baptizing them” and “teaching them to ob95

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