”As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a
net into the lake, for they were fishermen. ’Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, ’and I will
send you out to fish for people.’ At once they left their nets and followed him.” – Mark 1:16-18
Jesus saw people. Individual people. He observed what they were doing. Two of them were fishing with a net. Jesus sees them, notices their activity, and then he contextualizes his call to them.
“Come follow me and I will send you out to fish for people.”
Jesus could have offered a generic call. Come follow me and learn my ways. Come follow me and I will make you spiritual people. Come follow me and I will make you holy.
Instead he contextualized the call to them. He wanted his invitation to connect, to resonate. And it did.
They left their nets and followed him, immediately.
It is interesting that this call to follow was not a call to pursue personal growth or spiritual development or holiness. I think the disciples experienced all these things and more, but these were not the focus of Jesus’ call.
Jesus called them to participate in his mission. He called them to follow him for the purpose of becoming fishers of people.
Is this the call of Jesus to everyone? Does he invite all of us to participate in his mission or is that reserved only for the few select followers that Jesus chooses? Does Jesus call some to be “normal” Christians and others to be missional disciples? Or is this mission open to all and required for all, so that if you are a follower of Jesus you are to be moving toward and into mission?
I hold the latter view, but I do not think this is the standard perspective held by most Christ-followers today.
We tend to look at discipleship as the pathway to holiness, not mission. We engage in spiritual formation to become holy people. We then hope that these holy people, or at least some of them, will enter into mission.
The problem with making holiness the goal is that it often causes people to disconnect from the world in order to become holy. Their faith then develops in what amounts to a self-centered vacuum separate from the real world and messiness of the mission field. The produces religious people who are separate from culture and weak spiritually. The church is accomplishing its mission of developing “holy” people, but as it does it creates an inability to fulfill the mission of Christ. The church stops reaching people. The platform for influence in a community is diminished. And the church dies a slow, painful death.
Holy, but ineffective.
Perhaps this is what Jesus sought to avoid. Rather than calling people to spiritual rituals that simply form the inner person, he called people to service and mission so the Good News could be proclaimed.
He knew that people called to look inward would only focus there. But people called to mission would focus on the world that God loves. As they labored in the mission field, they would naturally look inward so they could have the power necessary to keep going.
Jesus wants the church to be holy, but holiness without mission is a dead-end pursuit that does not accomplish the full will of God. He calls us to mission and when we pursue that end we advance the Kingdom and our lives are changed in the process.
What Do You Think?
Should we be holy or missional?
