What We're Up To...
When Jesus commissioned his disciples he gave them an astounding order. He sent the church to disciple the nations, to baptize them in the name of the triune God and to teach those nations to obey everything Jesus had commanded. Here they are, 11 bewildered men, somewhere between overwhelming joy at the resurrection of Jesus and complete confusion over what had transpired. They are then given an impossibly large task: Go and proclaim the absolute and universal authority of Jesus over everything. Disciple entire nations. Baptize those nations. Teach those nations how to obey Jesus. And so, after a few thousand years we find ourselves on the other side of the world, in a remarkable and lost city named Denver, still seeking to obey our King’s orders. Seeking in a local way to do what God commanded the church to do everywhere. Working to proclaim the good reign of Jesus over everything. Calling our neighbors to know the glory of God’s grace and to fear his terrible judgments. Hoping to see our city, which has been given so much good to worship and follow the triune God who has redeemed us and reconciled us to himself in Jesus.
Sometimes it’s helpful, particularly at the end of one year and the beginning of another, to stop and consider the big picture of what we’re up to. While the above summary sets the big picture - what’s the long picture? What sort of goals and actions come into play as we think about doing what Jesus commanded his disciples to do 2000 years ago?We hope to do five things:
Proclaim the good news of Jesus, teach everyone to obey the Scriptures, and counsel people with those same Scriptures. And we want this Jesus and our take on the Scriptures to be deeply unoriginal. We want to be old and marked by the aroma of centuries. And then, with that news, we want people to do something that may sound relatively simple, but is missing from a lot of Christian work in our day. We want to help people live like Christians. Real Christians who really believe all the marvelously crazy stuff in the Bible and seek to live in faith-filled obedience to everything Jesus commanded. The discipleship of our city cannot be accomplished without that city being filled with and served by people who worship and pray and live and work like Christians.
We want to continue building a church that worships joyfully and faithfully every Lord’s day and we want to help start and partner with lots of churches throughout our city who will do the same. The life and worship of the church shapes every part of our life in the city. It is the heavenly city that fills the earthly city with grace. But we need lots of churches to do that. Our hope is to formally partner with and plant lots of biblically sound, worshipping churches throughout our city. This will involve training men to be pastors and supporting the pastors and churches we partner with.
We want to support the foundation of all this culture shaping: families. Our hope is that an inordinate amount of our effort will be helping husbands and wives be godly husbands and wives and to raise children who love God, who fear God and who obey God. While singleness can be a wonderful gift - one that we hope to support and nurture, the overwhelming attitude of our secular culture is a general disdain for one of the most beautiful institutions God created. We want to champion the beauty of a husband leading his family in joyful obedience to God and a wife who finds great joy in glad submission to her husband. We don’t believe this is oppressive or some patriarchal left-over. We believe it is God’s design and it is both good and produces marvelous fruit.
We want to support and encourage Christian education throughout our city and region. God instructs parents to raise their children in the paideia of the Lord. We believe education is always discipleship into a particular way of believing, loving and worshipping in the world. As we partner with and plant new churches, our hope is to find opportunities to start and support new schools, as well as supporting existing schools and parents who’ve chosen to educate their children in the home. Schools, at their best, are not a partnership between the government and families but a partnership between churches and families. We want to go back to this rich and forgotten history.
Lastly, and informally, we want to encourage entrepreneurs, business leaders and all Christians at work in the city. One of the great rediscoveries of the Reformation was that all work is, in some way, holy to God. The mission of the church is not divorced from the work most people do 9 to 5. Rather, our worship on Sundays serves as the foundation for all the work God’s people do throughout the city. We also want to help Christians to do their work in increasingly faithful and fruitful ways - in ways that honor God and love their neighbors. Furthermore, our city is increasingly difficult to afford, for Christians and for everyone. Business is a way that our city can become increasingly hospitable and affordable. Our hope is that more Christians will do more good work in our city together that results in tangible good.
This is what we’re up to. It’s a long term vision and one that won’t be finished in any of our lifetimes. We hope to be building all of this, not just for ourselves, but for our grandchildren and beyond. Over the course of the coming year, we hope to take some decisive steps forward - some larger than others. One important step for our young church is to grow in our skill as worshippers. This is one reason why the elders of Trinity have set a goal to hire a worship director in the coming months. The bigger vision is always tied to faithfulness in the foundational work we’re called to. And the most foundational thing the church exists to do is to worship our God and King.
As we approach the end of the year, we also ask you to prayerfully consider an end-of-the year gift to Trinity Church. (You can use this link here.) We hope to grow the work we’ve been doing in our city in the coming year and are dependent on end-of-year giving to expand what we’re up to. Our elders have set a goal of $50,000 to help us with a number of initiatives including finding and hiring a worship director. Please pray for our church as we continue to call our city to believe and live in the light of the reign of Jesus over all things.