Missions is not the ultimate goal of the Church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man. When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever.
– John Piper
I saw this quote the other day, and it challenged me to think a little deeper, so I thought I would share with y’all. The thoughts below are my own; they do not reflect the opinions of any person or entity with whom I may be associated. I will try to lay out my thought process as clearly as possible, but often ideas that seem logical in my head, do not seem so rational to folks without that access (count your blessings). All that to say, these simply are my thoughts/opinions at the time of this writing, based on my own experiences and what I believe to be in the Text – feel free to send me any questions, comments, concerns, challenges you may have.
The portion of this quote that piqued my interest was Mr. Piper’s assertion that worship is the ultimate goal of the Church. I’d like to challenge that idea.
First, what is the Church? Here Piper is not referring to the building with the stained-glass windows and steeple. Nor does he intend for us to think of the hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons beneath the Pope. I don’t believe Piper was referring to organized religion at all. Instead, the Church, as I believe Piper meant it, is the collective body of Christians. It is the Church that Jesus referred to when He said to Peter, “Upon this rock I will build my church” (Matt. 16:18). Let’s not get into a discussion about denominations just yet – that is another blog post entirely.
For the sake of this discussion, I need you to grant me an assumption. I make this assumption in the interest of brevity for this blog post, and I will revisit the topic in a future post. That assumption is: God created. What was God’s purpose for creating us? Personally, when I noodle on the subject of how and why God created, and what may have been His intent, I go back to the Garden, before the Fall. I believe that God created perfection. Before Original Sin, everything was perfect. Earth was perfect. Eden was perfect. Man was perfect. All was as God intended. During that time, Scripture intimates that God walked with Man in the Garden. To me, that sounds like relationship rather than worship. It is after the Fall that worship becomes a key component of that relationship. Could the argument be made that Man was made for worship? Sure. Perhaps more successfully: stewardship. However, based on the Scripture and my own experience, I believe that we were created for relationship with Him.
If Man was created for relationship with God, then doesn’t it stand to reason that the ultimate purpose of the Church is to support that relationship? To nourish those who already have begun that relationship and to serve as an incubator for those who haven’t? So, my dear Mr. Piper, my revision to your assertion would be that the ultimate purpose of the Church is to support the relationship between God and His children, of which missions and worship are two critical elements.
Further thoughts: I have a tendency to be a bit particular about words (Bekah knows). Or perhaps more accurately: semantics. I believe that words have meaning, and that one should always say what one means. Often there are subtle differences between two words that seem insignificant, until you encounter them in a situation where using one would connote a completely different meaning than the other. I don’t believe this to be a malapropism, since the two words do not sound the same, and the resulting meaning usually is not ludicrous, but I do not know the correct academic term. For the purpose of this discussion I will refer to this as the “fallacy of definition.” I must grant, of course, that we usually do not employ all of the rules of language in speech, and that, over time, written language and the rules thus associated change as well. This is precisely how Romance languages evolved from Latin, or English evolved from Romance and Germanic roots. But this is not a discussion on linguistics; let us return to the matter at hand.
A second error that I often see is an error in logic. In this case, one leaves out a step in building their argument or assumptions, leading to (what seems to me) an incorrect or incomplete statement. It could be that this sort of error is a non sequitur, but I am not comfortable enough with the term to employ it here. Instead, for our discussion, we will refer to this error as the “fallacy of connection.”
We will need both fallacies for this discussion.
Piper is correct in his statement that missions will end while worship is eternal. However, I believe that at the point where missions no longer is necessary, the Church as we know it no longer will exist; we all will be reunited with God, and thus no longer require the Church. Following that logic, the idea that the ultimate purpose of the Church is worship because worship is eternal is a fallacy of connection.
Perhaps, as has been suggested, Piper meant to say that individual worship is our ultimate purpose. However, he said “the ultimate purpose of the Church,” so if he meant individual worship, then he committed a fallacy of definition. In the event that he did mean “individual worship,” I discussed above what I believe to be our ultimate purpose as individuals: relationship with God.
Please don’t hear me wrong. Worship is an incredibly important part of our relationship with God. And missions is an incredibly important method for many to be introduced to that relationship. And for many, missions is worship. Ultimately, what I am trying to say is that both of these are key components in our search to fulfill our purpose: relationship with God.
P.S. Yes, it did take me a few minutes to be ok with using “missions” as a singular noun.
