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To accomplish the mission God gave us, we must understand the purpose of the church and our place in it—making and multiplying disciples in the power and presence of Christ.
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What is Our Purpose?
Nate Roten / High Impact Church Series / Matthew 28:16–20 / 5.31.26
Main Idea
To accomplish the mission God gave us, we must understand the purpose of the church and our place in it.
For the next four Sundays, we will pause our study of Mark for a time of equipping and dreaming together… dreaming and catching a renewed vision of our purpose, corporately and individually… globally and locally. I will begin the series, and the other elders will continue it while I am in Italy. We feel this is perfect timing for us as the body of AAC, which I’ll explain more as we go through the sermon today.
To begin, let me actually address this sermon’s title and ask two separate questions:
1. What is your purpose as a Christian?
2. What is the purpose of the church (broadly and locally)?
Take a moment to think through those two questions. Some of you may be thinking:
“What is your purpose as a Christian?”
• To read my Bible more regularly
• To pray more consistently
• To give faithfully
• To be in a community / a small group
• To have a personal relationship with Jesus
• To be a good, moral person
All of these things are good, but are they our purpose? Reading scripture isn’t just about completing chapters; it’s about being transformed by what you encounter there. We can pray more yet be distracted. We can give to finance amazing things for God, but it can become a transaction that satisfies the requirement instead of the fruit of a changed heart. We can be in a group setting yet not share our lives, keep a relationship with Jesus private rather than public, and be a good person who thinks that earns something from God.
These things are the means by which we live and grow as Christians or the benefits of being one, but none of them is our underlying purpose.
“What is the purpose of the church?”
• To have great Sunday services with strong preaching and worship
• To serve and meet the needs of our community
• To provide a place where my family can grow and belong
• To give people a safe, welcoming place to explore faith
Similarly, these are wonderful things. The excellence of our corporate gathering is crucial to our spiritual lives. We are commanded to be servant-hearted and to meet the needs of our community, but good works without the gospel are just a nonprofit with a steeple. We should be a place where our kids can be poured into… and where they feel safe.
Every one of them is good, but each is a means or a benefit, not an end. They’re the training, not the race. And here’s what happens when a church mistakes the training for the race: you end up with disciplined, well-attended, biblically informed people who have almost no idea what they’re supposed to be doing out in the world.
So let’s go back to the source. Let’s not guess at the mission. Let’s hear Jesus say it.
Passage
Matthew 28:16–20 CSB
16 The eleven disciples traveled to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had directed them. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped, but some doubted. 18 Jesus came near and said to them, “All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. 19 Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
I – The Global Church: Make Disciples
On its face, this seems like a flat list of four jobs. We read “Go, make disciples, baptize, teach… and then later… remember (which would be a distant 5th).
However, in Greek, there is only one primary verb, which is a direct command. That load-bearing commanding verb is: ‘make disciples.’
Think of this as a coat rack. The upright pole is “make disciples.” Everything else — going, baptizing, teaching — are the hooks. Take away the hooks, and you’ve still got a coatrack. Take away the pole, and there’s nothing to hang anything on. “Make disciples” is the pole. Before we can really dig into the meat of today’s sermon, we must see this framework clearly.
Notice who it’s for. “Make disciples of all nations.” Not just our denomination and associations. Not just the people already inside this building. Not just those who look like us, vote like us, or already believe like us. All nations means every kind of person. This command is given to every follower of Jesus, for the sake of followers and not-yet-followers alike. There is no version of being a Christian in which this doesn’t apply to you.
And speaking of all of us… I want you to see verse 17 because it’s powerful yet subtle. When the eleven saw the risen Jesus, “they worshiped, but some doubted.” Read that again. At the original commissioning, the launch of the global mission, some of the very men Jesus was sending still had doubts. And He sent them anyway.
He didn’t wait for them to feel ready. He didn’t commission only the confident. He looked at a group that was worshiping and wobbling at the same time, and the first words from His mouth were, “All authority has been given to me.” As if to say: the mission doesn’t run on your steadiness. It runs on mine. If you’ve ever stood in this room loving Jesus and doubting yourself in the same breath, you’re exactly the crowd He commissioned. You’re not disqualified. You’re the target audience.
II – A Disciple: What We Are Actually Making
The mission is to make disciples, which raises the obvious question we rush past: what is a disciple?
The Greek word for disciple is mathetes, meaning apprentice. In the ancient world, an apprentice didn’t just absorb a master’s teaching. He didn’t sit in a lecture hall, take notes on his master, and then get quizzed on the information. He moved in. He watched how the master worked, talked, and thought. He imitated him until, one day, you couldn’t tell where the master’s craft ended and the apprentice’s began. He became a living picture of the one he followed.
So a disciple of Jesus is not, first of all, someone who merely accumulates Bible facts. A disciple is someone who surrenders to Christ and is formed into His likeness. And that plays out in two directions, and every follower of Jesus is called to both.
1. Become: Wholeheartedly embracing the apprentice mindset: staying surrendered, staying in the Word, and actively pursuing growth in Christ. A disciple is always becoming. That posture never ends.
2. Multiplying: Actively helping others grow in the same direction by investing in the people around you, sharing what God is doing, and living in a way that points others to Christ. What you’ve received is meant to be passed on.
Receiving and giving, being poured into and pouring out… this is the rhythm by which the church has grown for 2,000 years. It’s what Jesus modeled with twelve ordinary people. It’s the Great Commission in action: go, make disciples, baptize them in the name of the Triune God, teach them to obey, and trust that the Spirit does what only the Spirit can do. And it’s crucial to understand that this process is not a program. Programs can run without you. Discipleship cannot. A program needs a sign-up sheet. Discipleship needs you, in a real relationship with a real person, moving toward Christ together.
This is why we can’t say that reading the Bible more means I’m being discipled. That is an important part of your growth, but you can read more and still retain none of it 10 minutes later. You can log more time in prayer, but if you aren’t connecting with and abiding in your Heavenly Father in a way that changes you, you aren’t really becoming like the master. These are the means, not the mission.
Corporately, as a church, we can have the best worship, deep and moving. I can preach boldly from the Word, but if you believe that Sunday mornings are the whole of discipleship and spiritual growth, you will stagnate in your faith, because as vital as the Sunday gathering is… It’s the huddle before the play. You come here to be encouraged and equipped… but the playing field is outside these walls the other six days a week: in the living room with your kids, across the table from someone further down the spiritual road, and in honest conversation with a few others who know your real-life circumstances.
The mission of the church, and your personal part in it, is to make disciples.
III – The Mission Field: Our Unique Calling
We all agree that ‘make disciples’ is the global mission. It’s the same for every faithful church on the planet. We all baptize. We all teach. So here’s the question that separates one church from the next: what’s our field? What does that mean for AAC in Ashe County in 2026?
Every church receives the same mission, a different field, and is uniquely gifted for a specific action. This is worth thinking through because it changes how we act in our community. There are so many needs, but we can’t cover them all. We can’t meet every need, and a church that tries to do everything ends up doing nothing well. So what has God uniquely put in front of us?
To answer that, we simply look at what He’s already doing. Look at the building project. We didn’t decide to expand because we wanted more square footage. We’re building because God is bringing the next generation into this family and asking us to invest in them. When we look up close, we’re making room to pour into more children and youth. And when we look from a distance, we are pursuing multi-generational discipleship, a church where a seventy-year-old is intentionally forming a seventeen-year-old, and that seventeen-year-old is already learning to pour into a seven-year-old.
That’s our field. That’s the why behind the construction. Not bricks — souls. The next generation of Ashe County, knowing Jesus and growing in Him.
Do we all agree with that?
And if so, the vision of our unique calling needs to be the driving force behind what we do and how we spend our time at Ashe Alliance. We need to sharpen our language so it says exactly that. What if we refocused our mission statement to be action-oriented around that unique mission? What if, every time we got together, we started our gatherings and meetings by declaring who we are:
“Ashe Alliance makes and multiplies fully-formed disciples of every generation in Ashe County.”
To be clear, fully-formed does not mean finished or sinless. Nobody in this room is finished. A disciple is always becoming. Fully-formed means whole. A disciple with no piece missing: surrendered to God, set apart from the world, sober about themselves, serving the body, and supernatural toward those who don’t yet know Jesus. Not a perfected disciple — a complete one, with nothing left out.
This doesn’t mean we stop everything else or kill every ministry that doesn’t fit a slogan. We will always build ministries around the way God has gifted the people in this church. But because we can’t do everything, naming it this clearly keeps us laser-focused, on a corporate level, on the one thing we exist to do and on how we uniquely carry it out in this community.
IV – How We Know We’ve Done It
We know the mission: make disciples. We know the disciple: whole, becoming, multiplying. We know our field: the next generation. That leaves one more question, and it’s the one most churches never answer: how do we know when we’ve actually done it? What does winning even look like?
Every sport defines what winning is. In football, you score touchdowns and field goals. In basketball, you make baskets. Nobody walks onto a court confused about which way to run. And here’s why that matters: if you don’t know what winning is, all your effort can go in the wrong direction, and you’ll never even know it.
Let me tell you about a guy I went to high school with and played football with. His name is Abraham Morlu, and he was, hands down, the fastest athlete I’ve ever shared a field with. After high school, he went on to run for Liberia in the Olympics. He’s fast.
But here’s what Abraham was famous for on the football field. You’d hand him the ball, and instead of driving downfield toward the end zone, he’d take off from sideline to sideline… juking, zigzagging, and dodging every defender they sent at him. He was so fast he could do it. He’d leave the whole defense grabbing air. There was just one problem: He was running east and west when he was supposed to be running north and south. All that speed, all that talent, all that effort… and the ball wasn’t moving toward the only thing that puts points on the board: the end zone.
Church, that’s the danger. We have talent in this room. We have energy, sincerity, and giftedness running all over this building. But if we don’t know where the end zone is… if we don’t know what the win actually is… we can run ourselves ragged, sideline to sideline, and never score a single point.
If you can visualize a coach drawing Xs and Os on a whiteboard to help players understand the various plays to run on the field, then you can visualize our game plan to accomplish the mission and a way to define what it means to score a point.
Here’s our playbook in five movements:
1. The Lost come to Christ
2. The Found get connected into the life of the church
3. Those who are connected mature in their faith
4. Those who are maturing discover their God-given gifts to serve
5. Those who are maturing and serving naturally multiply other disciples.
Every person in this church should be growing in this way, and the leadership’s effort should be like coaches developing every player. The lost found, the found growing, the growing serving, the serving sending, and the sent going back out for the next lost sheep. When that cycle is turning in a church, the mission is being accomplished. That’s our game plan… the end zone toward which every bit of our talent should be driving.
Each milestone is a scored point. This is how we win as a team. When a lost person comes to Christ, that’s a point. When a person can look back over the course of a year and clearly see how their life has changed, that’s a point. When a person learns how they are uniquely gifted by God to serve Him and is deployed into a life-giving area of ministry… that’s a point.
As I’ve studied for this sermon, I’ve been encouraged to see how we’ve scored points over the years. There has been significant growth in many. Others are faithfully serving in their gifts. But one sobering reality hit me hard. To my knowledge, no one in our fellowship has come to faith in Christ through our own witness. As a church body, we’ve not yet scored that goal. That’s weighty… and we should let that sink in.
V – A Call to Great Faith and Expectation
We’ve spent these weeks in Mark watching Jesus call His followers to one thing, again and again: faith instead of fear. Faith that says, with the father in chapter nine, “I believe; help my unbelief.” Faith that worships even while it doubts… like those eleven on the mountain.
We’re going to need it because I won’t stand here and pretend this is small. What I’m describing is a big task. Let me be honest with you: we are already stretched, faithfully pouring into the people sitting in this room right now. Talking about getting ready for more can feel like piling weight on a back that’s already bent.
But here is the whole gospel of this passage. The same Jesus who said “make disciples” also said, in the same breath, “All authority has been given to me” and “I am with you always.” The mission never comes to you stripped of His power and His presence. You do not go alone. You never have.
The Herculean task of pouring our efforts into the next generation will take steps of great faith, trusting God to bring more to us and equip us for the lies ahead.
What we need to discern right now is our capacity and the responsibilities God is placing in our hands. God has given us many children and youth to steward: “Whoever is faithful in very little is faithful also in much.” The master gives more to the servant who proves faithful with what he already has.
God isn’t standing back, arms crossed, daring us to perform. He’s watching to see what we do with what’s in our hands today—and preparing us for more.
🔥 Application: A Charge for the Next 6 Months
So here’s the charge and the challenge. The builder says six months… six months until the walls are up and those new doors open. And here’s the question I want you to carry out of here: when those doors open, will we be a church equipped to make disciples of the people who walk in, or just to seat them in a Sunday service?
If the doors opened tomorrow, are we ready? Is everyone in this room equipped to welcome new families, new kids, new souls that Jesus is entrusting to us, and to disciple them?
In all honesty, I don’t think we’re there yet.
And that’s not a rebuke… It’s the assignment. This is not to discount what many in the church are already doing… it is a time to align as the full body of Christ at AAC with a new vision and fresh zeal to carry the mission forward. So for the next six months, while they build our capacity in brick, we build our capacity in stewardship. We get in line with the mission. We see our individual roles in it. We are resolute in giving, not just receiving. We grow in the right direction, not just logging more Bible reading and more prayer, but actually becoming and multiplying, so that when those doors swing open, we’re not caught flat-footed. We’re ready.
So, let’s finish our time together by making it personal, because a church only gets ready one disciple-maker at a time. This week… not someday… this week, name these three things:
- One pathway of discipleship you will commit to
- One gift you will step into
- One person you’re going to begin pouring into
We offer multiple ways to get discipled that will fit every lifestyle. If you don’t know how God has gifted you, we will help you discover it. The person who needs your investment might be your kid across the breakfast table…. the neighbor who doesn’t know Jesus, or the believer a few steps behind you in their spiritual walk who needs someone to show them the right way forward. One name. Start there. That’s how a whole church gets ready.
Because the One who gave us the mission left us a promise to stand on as we carry it out: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
He’s with us, the field is in front of us, and now, we have the game plan to score points.
Church — let’s get ready for the growth God is calling us to.
FAQs
1. Isn’t reading the Bible and praying part of my purpose?
They are essential, but they are means, not the end. They shape you into a disciple, but the mission is to become like Christ and help others do the same.
2. Do I have to feel ready before discipling someone?
No. The original disciples worshiped and doubted at the same time, and Jesus sent them anyway. The mission depends on His authority, not your confidence.
3. What if I don’t know enough to disciple someone?
Discipleship is not about having all the answers. It’s about walking with someone toward Christ, sharing what you know, and growing together under His Word.
4. Is discipleship just a church program?
No. Programs can support discipleship, but they cannot replace it. Discipleship requires real relationships and intentional investment.
5. Why focus on the next generation?
Because that is the field God has placed in front of this church. Faithfulness means stewarding the people and opportunities He has already given.
6. What does success actually look like in the church?
Not just attendance or activity, but people coming to Christ, growing in maturity, serving with their gifts, and multiplying into others.
7. What if we’ve been busy but not effective?
That’s a real danger. Without a clear goal, effort can be misdirected. This is a call to realign, not to despair.
8. Isn’t this too big for us?
Yes—and that’s the point. The mission is carried out by Christ’s authority and presence, not human strength. He is with us.