We must be 'Cause Driven'

I came across an old email the other day that I sent out shortly after returning from our two years in China. The email referenced a very short article entitled, 'The Cause Driven Church' written by my favorite speaker, Erwin McManus. It refreshed for me one of my passions and so I thought I'd try to articulate it here.

The cause of Christ is singular - to bring God glory by expanding his Kingdom. And as the church is the body of Christ [the way the world in this age contacts, sees, and experiences the physical Christ], the church's purpose is singular as well: to bring glory to God by expanding his Kingdom. Everything we do must flow out of this cause or we are missing the point. When we miss the point, we wonder 'where in the world is God?' and 'why isn't this working'?. All the while, God says to us, 'if you would stick to the point, you will not fail because that is what I'm all about and I do not fail.'

A little background - Kingdom is a strange term we don't use much, but it helps me to think of it as the extent of God's rule, or the places where God's will is done (Thanks Dallas Willard for that helpful hint!). The Kingdom can be expanded in two ways: in our individual lives as we act more and more like God wants us to act, and corporately as more people begin to join the process. My church's mission statement expresses this well: to reach people for Christ and grow believers to be like him. These are simply the two ways the Kingdom expands.

Here is where I, we, all of us, so often get it wrong. We pursue community and unity as the end goal and end up faking it, then wonder why it falls apart. We pursue discipleship as 'knowing' more and convincing others to agree with us rather than becoming more obedient. We serve out of obligation or in an attempt to manipulate or impress other people or God, instead of out of a desire to help. We pursue missions to bring other cultures our supposedly superior (and more comfortable) western ways. We pursue worship by singing to make ourselves feel better. All of these basically good pursuits, (you may recognize them from Rick Warren's 5 purposes) become distorted when we pursue them outside of the main thing: the expansion of the kingdom of God.

Jesus teaches us to pray 'thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven' because this is the point! Everything else comes after this and in fact is a result of it. There is a reason that when you join the cause to expand the kingdom you bond with a team in an incredible way, you begin to act more like Christ, and you serve without recognition. You begin to realize that people don't have to sleep with a feather pillow but they do need food, water, basic care, and Jesus. And then you celebrate with music the worship you have already demonstrated through your actions.

The church must be 'cause-driven'. It is the key to it's success! How are you doing at keeping the main thing the main thing? I haven't been doing so well lately.

Here is a portion of Erwin's article:

"Healthy community flows out of a unified cause - not the other way around. Jesus called his disciples and said, “Follow me. I’ll make you fishers of men.” This was not an offer of community. “Follow me and I will give you something worthy of giving your life to” is a statement of cause. But the neat thing is, when they came to the cause, they found community like they never knew could exist. That’s the power of the church.
One danger of the American church is that we often try to offer people community without cause. Without cause, you’re just another civic organization. You don’t have life transformation.
Jesus said, “I have come to the world to seek and to save that which is lost.” The cause of Christ is accomplished by expanding the kingdom of God."