When Faith Church was considering adopting the purpose driven model, my struggle was not with what was contained in the five purposes, all of which are thoroughly biblical. I was concerned with what was missing.
Presbyterians already have a purpose structure that defines the core functions of the church, and our structure is more comprehensive than the plan Rick Warren developed. The Great Ends of the Church are laid out in the first page of our constitution:
* The proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind
* The shelter, nurture and spiritual fellowship of the children of God
* The maintenance of divine worship
* The preservation of the truth
* The promotion of social righteousness
* The exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world
With some squeezing, you could lump Warren’s five purposes (Worship, Fellowship, Discipleship, Ministry and Mission) into the first three of the Presbyterian Great Ends. That leaves three other Great Ends that Presbyterians consider essential to the church’s work and that do not fit in the Purpose Driven model.
I think the last three of the Great Ends are statements of genius. They capture the activities of a well-rounded church that are usually missing from evangelical churches. Further, these are the outward thrusts of the church that the missional movement has been trying to recover.
Faith Church has settled on the five-fold structure of the Purpose Driven model, but we have used our own words for the five components, and one of those five words has to carry a lot of freight in order to accommodate the principles in the Great Ends.
Beginning with Worshiping as the center of the famous Purpose Driven baseball diamond, Faith Church organizes its life around Belonging, Growing, Serving, and Proclaiming. It’s not really balanced, because for us Proclaiming includes four of the six Great Ends: proclaiming the gospel (of course), plus preserving the truth, promoting social righteousness, and modeling what God’s kingdom looks like.
In practice this has meant that the final three Great Ends don’t get much air time except to the extent that I preach on those themes. Further, since our purpose driven plan hides the last three Great Ends in the word Proclaiming, Faith Church doesn’t notice if we are neglecting them in the missional activities we organize.
What to do? Add more purposes to our structure? No, five is enough to keep track of. Switch to the Great Ends? No, they are well stated but a little wordy: too much to remember.
For now, I’ll let that word Proclaiming bear as much theological weight as I can load onto it. And as Faith Church continues down the missional path, the word will matter less than the substance.
