Reformed and evangelical theologians have argued for a generation over the mission of the church, and the argument is worth understanding before anyone drags politics into it. On one side stand those who hold the mission close and narrow. Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert, in What Is the Mission of the Church?, locate it in the Great Commission and nothing wider: the church is sent to make disciples by proclaiming the gospel and gathering the converted into congregations. The men at 9Marks — Mark Dever, Jonathan Leeman — press the same line with an added distinction. The church as an institution has one commission; individual Christians, scattered into their callings, carry broader duties. Confuse the two and you get mission creep, a church that trades the gospel for a program of social repair.
On the other side stand those with a more robust account. The missional movement and writers like Christopher Wright argue that disciple-making cannot be quarantined from justice, mercy, and the mending of the world — that teaching a people to obey all Christ commanded is teaching them to do justice, and that a church which proclaims the gospel while stepping over the wounded man on the road has misread its own commission.
The dispute is real, and I am not going to settle it here. I want to point out the ground both sides stand on. Everyone agrees that the mission of the church is to make disciples. That is not in question. Matthew 28 is not a contested text. The fight is over how far the word disciple reaches.
So look at what disciple-making requires, in a case Scripture hands us plainly. Ephesians 4:28: “Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.” Paul gives the thief two commands and bookends his old life between them. Stop stealing. Start working. Put off taking; put on giving.
Between those two commands lies everything Paul does not say. He does not tell the thief how to find employment. Nothing about writing a letter of introduction, acquiring a trade, discerning which trade, reading the local job market, approaching an employer, or managing wages once they begin to come in. Paul issues the command and leaves the execution unaddressed. If the former thief cannot learn those things, he cannot obey. The command stands over a gap, and the gap is filled with skills Scripture never lists. Helping a man cross that gap, walking him from the command into the competence that makes obedience possible, is discipleship — the substance of the work, not a distraction from it.
Now carry that into the civic realm. Scripture gives commands about a Christian’s life as a subject and a citizen. Honor the governing authorities. Seek the welfare of the city. Do justice. Love your neighbor, including with your vote. These are the bookends. What Scripture does not give is the prudential middle — which system of government, which policy, which candidate, how to weigh competing goods in this election, in this country, under this constitution. There is no regulative principle for politics in the Bible, no complete script that prescribes the civil order the way the Reformed tradition says Scripture prescribes the elements of worship. There cannot be. Nations rise and fall, regimes change shape, and the New Testament was not written to charter a republic.
The spare account of the church’s mission reads that silence as a boundary: Scripture stops here, so the church should stop here. The thief shows why the silence is not a wall. Scripture stops short of the practical skills in his case too, and no one concludes that helping him find honest work falls outside discipleship. The space between command and competence is where discipleship does its work — in the thief’s trade, and in the citizen’s duties.
This does not make politics the mission of the church. It keeps politics inside the mission rightly understood. To help a believer think through his obligations as a citizen — to reason from the commands Scripture does give toward the prudential judgments it leaves open — is to teach him to obey everything Christ commanded. That is the Great Commission, not an addition to it. A church that refuses this work in the name of staying on mission has not guarded the mission; it has handed one more zone of the disciple’s life to someone else to form. We saw in the first essay who is glad to take what the church declines to claim.