What If Jesus Said “Go” and We Heard “Come”?

Think about the last conversation Jesus had with His friends before He went back to the Father.

He had walked with them for three years. He had died, and He had risen, and He had spent forty more days teaching them about the kingdom. They had watched Him do everything. Then He handed them the mission, and the first word of it was a direction.

“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20).

Go.

About seventeen hundred years ago, when the emperor Constantine started paying for grand church buildings, we began to turn that word around. We built rooms, put a sign out front, and learned to say “come.” Come on Sunday. Come hear the pastor. Come to the new series. Bring a friend so they can come too.

I want to be careful here, because I love a lot of people who sit in those rooms. Many of them love Jesus with everything they have. My problem is with a system that slowly taught all of us, over centuries, that church is a place you attend.

Watch where Jesus spent His time

Read the Gospels and keep a count of where Jesus is. On a hillside with a crowd. In a fishing boat. At a tax collector’s dinner party, surrounded by the kind of people who made religious folks nervous. Beside a well at noon, talking with a woman everyone else in town avoided. In a graveyard with a man nobody could control.

He went to the synagogue too. But most of His days were spent out where people lived, and a lot of those people were the ones religion had already written off.

When the religious leaders complained about the company He kept, He said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance” (Mark 2:17).

Then there’s Zacchaeus. A short, rich, crooked man climbs a tree to get a look at Jesus. Jesus stops under that tree, looks up, and invites Himself over: “Zacchaeus, make haste and come down, for today I must stay at your house” (Luke 19:5). By the end of that dinner, a man who had cheated half the town was giving half his goods to the poor. Jesus summed up His whole purpose in one sentence that day: “the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10).

To seek something, you have to go looking for it.

The first church kept going

After Pentecost, the first believers kept the rhythm Jesus had taught them. They met in homes. They ate together and took communion. They prayed, and they shared what they had so nobody went without. And they were out in public every single day.

“So continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved” (Acts 2:46-47).

A few chapters later they had been arrested and beaten for it. Luke tells us what they did next: “And daily in the temple, and in every house, they did not cease teaching and preaching Jesus as the Christ” (Acts 5:42).

The temple courts were the busiest public space in Jerusalem. That was their street corner. The people were there, so the believers went there. Nobody printed a flyer for a Sunday service, since there wasn’t one. The whole city was the room.

And look at who did the adding. The Lord added to the church. They loved people and told them about Jesus, and He took care of the growth.

How “come” crept in

Nobody sat in a meeting and voted to stop going. It happened slowly, and every step made sense to someone at the time. A building needs a mortgage and a light bill. A paid staff needs a budget. A budget needs people in the seats on Sunday, because the seats pay for the building.

After enough years of that, the number everyone watches is attendance. And the everyday Christian gets a quiet message: your part is to show up, listen, and maybe bring somebody. The professionals will handle the rest.

I don’t believe that’s what Jesus had in mind when He looked at a crowd and was “moved with compassion for them, because they were weary and scattered, like sheep having no shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). He told them to pray for workers, and a few verses later He sent those same disciples out as the answer to that prayer (Matthew 9:38; 10:5-7).

Go doesn’t have to mean far

Going is simpler than we’ve made it.

You don’t need a plane ticket. You don’t need a title, or a seminary degree, or anyone’s permission. Peter was a fisherman with no notes when he preached at Pentecost. Later, the religious leaders looked at Peter and John and noticed two things about them. They were “uneducated and untrained men,” and “they had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13). The second thing turned out to be enough.

For me, lately, going has looked like a piece of white posterboard and a black Sharpie. I stand by the road with a sign that says something like “Need prayer today? Text us. A real person will pray for you by name.” Most cars just go by.

This summer it looked like a stack of free pizza at an apartment pavilion by the basketball courts in St. George, with an open invitation to ask anything about Jesus. Nobody preached at anyone. We ate, and anyone could ask anything.

For you it might be your neighbor. Or the guy at work whose marriage is falling apart, or the older woman at the laundromat who talks to anyone who will listen. It might be as small as a meal. Jesus did some of His best work at dinner tables.

You don’t have to leave your church to go

If you belong to a church now, you can go from right where you are. Stay, and love the people there. Then ask what the first church’s habits could look like in your room. It might be a meal with two other families, a prayer that turns into a phone call, or a neighbor who hears about Jesus long before Sunday.

Talk kindly with the people who lead. Many of them would be glad to hear that someone wants to go. In the weeks ahead I’ll write about how to bring Acts 2 into the church you’re in, and about what to do if a season comes when the door stays closed.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.