That changes the whole vocabulary of a “call.”
Many people are asking the wrong question, because they’re like, God I’m going to live for myself until you interrupt my life like the Apostle Paul and knock me off my horse. When really, if you’ve been transformed by the gospel, the question is not if I’m called, it’s only where and how, and you’re saying, Lord, please send me somewhere.
I tell our church that God called me to the pastorate by calling me first to the mission field. I spent two years in Southeast Asia working among Muslims—my call to the ministry began as a call to the mission field. The way that I’m fulfilling my call to the ministry is as a pastor of a church that sends, because even more core than my call to teach the Bible is my call to mobilize people and send them to the nations.
Let’s trace the development of your thinking through some of the books you’ve written, beginning with Gospel: Recovering the Power That Made Christianity Revolutionary, which came out in 2011.
For most evangelical Christians the gospel is the entry rite of Christianity. It is the prayer you pray that begins the Christian life. The metaphor I use in the book is the diving board from which you jump into the pool of Christianity. But what you see throughout the whole Bible is that the gospel is not just the entry rite, it’s not just the diving board, it’s the pool itself. We grow in Christ not by growing beyond the gospel, but by growing deeper into the gospel. It’s not by learning 10 ways to be a better husband then five things that good church members do. It’s as you grow in your wonder and amazement of who God is and what he’s done for you that you then become the kind of person who loves God and loves others.
A couple years later, you came out with Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart: How to Know for Sure That You’re Saved. Was there something particular that precipitated that?,/h2>
When I was 14 years old, I began to doubt my salvation. If there were a Guinness Book of World Records for how many times you could say the Sinner’s Prayer, I would hold that record. I got baptized four times. I was like, I’ve got to know for sure.
My inability to get assurance was because I tied it too much to this ceremony of salvation, which in evangelical churches we turn into our own kind of Protestant ritual. A Catholic goes to confirmation; we walk the aisle and pray a prayer. And it ends up giving assurance to people who shouldn’t have it and keeps assurance from those who should.
Salvation is not a prayer you pray. It’s a posture you take toward the finished work of Christ. It’s recognizing his lordship, and adopting the posture of surrender in faith. That posture begins at a moment—that’s conversion—but it’s a posture you maintain for the rest of your life. The way you know that you got into that posture to begin with is not because you remember praying the prayer, but because it’s the current posture of your heart—trusting what Jesus did and surrendering.
In 2014 you released Jesus Continued: Why the Spirit Inside You Is Better Than Jesus Beside You.
It seems like when we talk about the Holy Spirit in the Christian world, there are two categories. There’s one category where—I say this respectfully—people seem obsessed with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is always speaking to them or spelling things out in their Cheerios or something. The other concept is maybe in reaction to that: There’s a group of Christians who ignore him altogether. They believe in him, but they believe in him like I believe in and relate to my pituitary gland. I know that it’s in there, I know it’s essential for something, I wouldn’t want to lose it, but I don’t relate to it; I don’t interact with my pituitary gland.
As a conservative Christian, that’s how I grew up. The Holy Spirit was almost like a footnote. The Trinity I grew up with was God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Bible. The Holy Spirit is not in the sensational hysteria where a lot of Christians look for him, but he is very much alive and moving as a person. And the primary place he moves is in and through the gospel. Depth in the gospel releases the power of the Spirit in your life. We are to be Christians led by the Spirit but taught by the Word.
Which brings us to Gaining by Losing: Why the Future Belongs to Churches That Send.
The measure of success for most churches is how big you get and how much money you have. But when you understand the promises of the Holy Spirit, what Jesus says about the church, the promises about the greatness of the church are always tied to sending, not gathering.
The church is like a huddle—imagine you have a group of football players that came together for a huddle. The quarterback calls the play and then they spend the next 10 minutes talking about what an awesome play the quarterback called and how well he called it and how they will remember the play for years to come, but then they go back and sit down on the bench. The point is not calling the play, the point is running the play. Churches ought to measure their success not by how many they bring in, but how many they raise up and send out.
Gaining by losing is the inevitable result of believing the gospel and the promises of the Holy Spirit—you become a sending church.
In Part 2, J.D. Greear explores what it means to be a sending church. >
