The Apostolic Imperative

How do we send everyone?

Years ago, when I first wrote my first book, Everyone Sent to Multiply Everything (the precursor to both Living Sent and Everyone Sent). The core concept in the book was a phrase I called the “apostolic imperative”. The apostolic imperative is the idea that all believers have been sent to make disciples.

At the time, we were in the midst of a fairly intensive season of formation as a church. Driving that formation was a simple goal: to see everyone in our church equipped and empowered for disciple-making.

If you boil down most of my thinking on church life, church planting, and mission, much of it centres on a single question: are all believers called to ministry?

In almost every church context, people would agree on the universal call of believers to some kind of ministry focus. There is a general consensus that all Christians ought to contribute to the Kingdom of Jesus. However, if the answer is yes, then two follow-up questions become equally important.

First, is the local church the best place to engage in disciple-making ministry? Second, how do we as a local church ensure that we are faithfully providing the means by which all believers can be trained and equipped for ministry?

Disciple-Making Belongs in the Local Church

With respect to the first question, disciple-making is the domain of the church. We were not commanded to plant churches by Jesus. We were commanded to announce the gospel and make disciples. When we are faithful to evangelism and discipleship, the result is church planting.

Alternatively, when discipleship is disconnected from the local church, we end up with confusion. Either our discipleship becomes unclear, or our ecclesiology does, because discipleship is not naturally flowing into the life of the church and its covenant relationships.

The logic then follows like this: because every believer has a mandate to make disciples, and because disciple-making best happens in the local church, the local church has a responsibility to ensure that every person is maturing toward fruitful disciple-making ministry.

Engaging Everyone

As a baseline, it is the responsibility of church leaders to work how to engage everyone in mission. It is with this basic principle in mind that we have worked out the “everyone” value.

Everyone serves

This is our starting assumption: being and making disciples is intimately connected with serving others.

Consequently, it is our hope that every person connected to our church will intentionally seek out opportunities to serve others alongside their church family. If every person is regularly serving both the church and the wider community, the soil for ministry becomes rich.

Everyone experiences discipleship

Everyone needs to be in intentional contexts where they can experience the joy of life-on-life discipleship in an accountable way.

At LIFT, we use our Simple Churches toward this end. Every person is integrated into a smaller family of disciples that intentionally engages non-believers. This provides the practical context to be discipled while also engaging in evangelism.

Everyone disciples

Because everyone is in discipleship relationships, it is only natural that, over time, everyone is empowered to reproduce disciples themselves.

The vast majority of our energy is given to this challenge: how do we ensure that we are providing discipleship opportunities that are appropriate for each person’s stage of maturity?

Keeping It Simple

All of these implications of the “everyone” value require support systems, processes, and deep relational commitment.

When I try to explain what we are doing as a church, I often make the mistake of getting lost in the details. There are many moving parts and tools that we have developed. But underneath it all is a simple assumption and objective:

We are all called to make disciples. So, we lead in such a way to equip the saints in our church so that all of them can flourish in that pursuit.