The question yesterday was what is most important for the local church: discipleship or evangelism?
A lot of you had some great answers and reasons why for one….or both, for those of you who gave a cop out answer 🙂 (Don’t worry I still love you).
You can read the first post HERE.
Today I’ll provide my answer:
Evangelism.
This isn’t to say that discipleship isn’t important and isn’t key for a church to focus on though.
My main reason is this: good discipleship leads to evangelism.
For too many churches, discipleship becomes keeping people happy. Christians in American love their comfort. I love my comfort. Evangelism isn’t comfortable. It means we have to go somewhere. Whether that be out the door, away from our comfort, or across the world. Evangelism means we can’t just stay put.
Here is the main reason why I say evangelism. Matthew 28:19 was a popular quotation for why discipleship is most vital, but I think it shows that evangelism is most important. Why?
The verse begins with “Go therefore,” and this phrasing invokes a sense of as you are going, do these things. And then the verse follows with make disciples, baptize, and teach. For me, to go is to evangelize and as you are doing that then you make disciples, baptize, and teach.
I can’t imagine the goal of Jesus’ ministry was to come and teach people and perform miracles and yet draw no one to himself. A lot of Jesus’ ministry was focused around discipleship, but all of it encompassed His passion for people to be drawn towards Him.
So in my worship music at a church role, how does this play out?
I’ll answer that tomorrow…I don’t get paid to blog so I’ll to stretch this out a little 🙂
For now you can argue with me about my poor Bible study and my use of only one verse to back up my point (hey famous pastors do it all the time!)
By the way if you ever want to frustrate my wife ask her the same question: discipleship or evangelism? She wasn’t very happy when I wouldn’t accept her “both” answer. At that point she refused to answer the question because she said it was dumb, haha.