Toward the end of the DNA forum in South Africa, where stories of community transformation were shared and ten years of the Disciple Nations Alliance working in Africa were celebrated, one of the founders, Bob Moffit shared a message from his heart. He said that in any ministry we can lose our focus. There are things we do in ministry, and if we aren’t careful, accomplishing those tasks can become our measure of success. We can begin to think that if we accomplish those tasks, we have been successful; we have met our goal. We have to keep preiminent in our thinking the main goal, even as we do those things, be it mentoring, or training, or doing a special project.
Bob went on to ask the participants, “So what is our primary task in the Disciple Nations Alliance movement?”
Then he explained that it is to equip every follower of Jesus Christ to be the heart, the ears, the mouth, the hands, and the feet of Jesus. It’s not good enough just to have good programs in the church where half the congregation watches the leaders do the task. The main task of the church is to equip every person who desires to follow Jesus Christ to allow the incarnate Christ to live through them. So when the world sees them they see, they hear, they are touched by Jesus. Our main task is to prepare every member of every church to be witnesses of God’s sacrificial compassion, or to be an ambassador of God’s agenda of Shalom. Why?
Bob shared that DNA principal number one can be summarized with this phrase. Not our glory, but God’s glory. Our target, then is God’s glory. It’s not the processes that lead to that, it is God’s glory. That’s our primary end goal. But our task is teaching obedience. And scripture indicates that we are God’s glory. Genesis 1:31, We were made in His image. We are the crown of creation. Isaiah 62:3 We are Gods glory. John 15:8-10 We glorify the son and we bring God glory through obedience.
I was impressed as I listened that in a movement that was reporting so much success in this forum, their leaders were not just sitting back on their laurels, as would have been easy to do, but were thoughtfully exploring the possibility that they could easily get distracted by the very activity they were reporting on! It could be focused on as being the main task. It made me really think about what I do every day.
Below is a video clip of the rest of what Bob said in his message about this main task. The clip is right around 4 minutes long.
So how does what you do reflect what Bob is talking about? He certainly raises an interesting point to think about. I’m still thinking about it…
