Yesterday, just before I had a meeting with another pastor, I was able to spend a bit of time around the end of our English Classes in church. I was so encouraged to see how they had grown. What used to be one class, which later became one big class with a little adjunct second class, turned into two reasonable sized classes and is now two fairly sizeable classes. Every person attending represents somebody from the local community we now have meaningful, ongoing contact with and the breadth of nationalities represented is significant. As has been noted a number of times, by our Muslim neighbours locally, when they run things for the community they tend to be monoculturally Asian; everything we do is always multicultural. We are probably the most multicultural thing in the area.

I don’t want to suggest that any of that is unimportant. Quite the opposite. Without things like our English Classes – but all the various other outreach works we do too – we simply wouldn’t have the reach into the community that we do. So, don’t mishear me here. Without these works we would not have the excellent contact with so many people in our community that we do. So doing these things is important to us.

However (and you knew one was coming), frequently people’s excitement stops at these works. They see the growing English Class and say, ‘wow! We’d love it if we could do this’. They see the plethora of nations represented in the room and say, ‘wow! We’d love to have this at our church’. They see the efforts made to show practical love this way and say, ‘this is brilliant!’ To which I always want to ask – genuinely, and not facetiously at all – what is so brilliant about it?

Too often, we get wowed by people in a room. But when all is said and done, our English Classes, our Dialogue Evenings, our Food Security Programme and all the others ultimately are just people in a room. Yes, we might say we are showing the love of Christ to people. But let’s not pretend the Food Bank down the road, the interfaith forum in town, the English courses in the college aren’t doing exactly the same stuff without any attempt to show the love of Christ to anybody and they look, frankly, much the same as what we’re doing. We can’t even claim ours is loving because its volunteers offering their time for free because some of these other places can say the same. To get excited about these things, from a Christian perspective is to get excited about very little in the end.

Let me say again, that doesn’t make that stuff unimportant. But it’s a bit like the person who gets excited picking out paint and is happy – once they have picked it out – to leave the pot in a room without doing anything with it. To get excited by the paint pot you picked out misses the point of why you got it in the first place – to paint the room! Of course, you need the paint to paint the room. You can’t paint the room without it. But the paint isn’t important of itself; it is what you do with it that matters. Similarly, getting excited about English Classes, Food Clubs, Dialogue Events – and being content with those things for their own sake for whatever reason – misses the point of why we do them. They are not ends in themselves; they are means to ends. Which begs the question: what are the ends we are working towards?

Well, I’m glad you asked.

The answer is, there are two. The one hopefully leading to the other. First, these things are only of value if they lead to meaningful relationships. Second, we want those meaningful relationships to lead people to become disciples of Jesus Christ. Few people trusted Christ because somebody taught them English and had a cup of tea with them. But teaching English might just lead somebody to become friends with their teacher who is willing to take the time to get to know them. Those who become friends may have meaningful conversations about Jesus because they trust each other to be honest which, in turn, might lead somebody to become a disciple of Christ. And that is exciting.

We want people to be excited about making disciples. Christians and churches ought to be excited about making disciples. We may need to think carefully in our respective contexts about how we are likely to make disciples and what things we may need to do to get us to a position where we can be effective in disciple-making. That may mean we need to run various outreach activities and we may be pleased when they grow so that we have the opportunity to develop more relationships, with more people, who we can point to Jesus. But the thing that should get us excited is not a full room, or our busyness and activism, but the relationships that roll out of those things that lead people to become disciples themselves.

It is important that we don’t lose sight of what we are supposed to be about. We are in the business of disciple-making. The end to which our outreach activities must point is the making of disciples. If they are not doing that, or we have no plan or understanding of how we get people from what we’re doing to being disciples, then we’re not really doing much more than filling a room in the same way as anyone else. We shouldn’t settle for doing what anybody else can do; we should be working towards what only the church can uniquely do and what Jesus has specifically called us to do. And he hasn’t specifically called us to teach English, hand out food bags or have interfaith dialogue. These things may be legitimate means to a specifically gospel end which Jesus does specifically ask us to be about. To paraphrase James Carville, it’s disciple-making, stupid!