This particular cause has been one that I’ve received a lot lately.  Maybe because I’m a Youth Pastor and the sender of such cause invites assumes that I believe in their petition.  The cause: Put prayer back in school.

Put prayer back in school!

The heart of the sender is good and they deeply believe in the cause.  But, I sometimes fear that we expect too much out of government institutions (such as public schools).  In a public school, in one classroom, you can range from born-again Christians to Muslims, atheists to agnostics.  Do we really want to impose our prayer time on them?

But really, this only scratches the surface of the issue.  This issue is intrinsically tied to the Ten Commandments debacle and the call to bring God back into the public sectors of our nation.  We fear that “In God We Trust” has been removed from coins.  Politicians aren’t getting sworn in on a Bible.

The madness stems from this misunderstanding that somehow the United States is a Christian nation.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The U.S. wasn’t even founded as a Christian nation.  Our founding documents show great influence of the Enlightenment and seek to separate, as much as possible, the state from the Church.  We live in a highly secular, skeptical society.  Plain and simple folks, our culture is open to spirituality but it is not ideologically Christian.

But really, the issue even goes deeper than that.  We followers of Jesus have failed to recognize the most basic principle of theology.  Upon acceptance of Jesus Christ and commitment to Him as our Lord and Savior, we were indwelt with the Holy Spirit.  Think how crazy that is for a moment…God lives in us!

So, when a student goes to school, the following Scriptures are lived out:

⁹You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ. ¹⁰But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. ¹¹And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you. (Romans 8:9-11, NIV)

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? (1 Corinthians 6:19)

We do not need the government to sanction out a space for God to be present in schools.  Governments are of this world.  This world will continue to be the fallen mess that it is.  Our job is to be the light of hope, love and grace.  We are to bring renaissance and renewal to public sectors like schools.  We do not wait around for a law or an amendment to put back up our sacred items or carve out sacred space for us.

When students walk into schools, this is what should be happening

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23, NIV)

These fruits should be exemplified in all our lives.  As the Holy Spirit takes dominion, judgmental attitudes, meanness, bitterness, narcissism, anger, hatred, gossip, demanding things to be my way…all of these things should be purged out of us.  As the old self flakes away, what is born is a life of love, a spirit of joy, a presence of peace, an attitude of patience, an outlook of kindness, a modeling of goodness, a call to faithfulness, a reputation of gentleness, and a commitment to self-control.

Attention Christians in America: the difficulties we face are not because prayer is out of school.  It’s not because Barack Obama is president.  It’s not because of our secular culture even.  Our world is programmed into sin…it knows no difference.  We cannot keep expecting the world to act like the Church.  Furthermore, the Church needs to stop acting like the world!

What this world needs to know is what we, as Christians, are for and not always what we’re against.  Prayer in school should be happening because the people of God are there.  God’s presence in school should be evident because the followers of Jesus there are shaped by Him and model Him to those around them.

It is time to allow this hope of Christendom to die.  We need to stop propping up these relics of putting prayer in school and hanging the Ten Commandments.  We need to stop hiding behind statements, government wish lists, bullying, and being sin detectives in the world around us.  We need to instead pick up our role laid out in Romans 8:

¹⁸I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. ¹⁹The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. ²⁰For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope ²¹that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

²²We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. ²³Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? ²⁵But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. (Romans 8:18-25, NIV)

If we want prayer back in school, maybe we should begin developing a life of prayer becoming more and more aware of His presence.  If you want the Ten Commandments in public places, maybe we need to live lives shaped by their virtues.  If we want God back in schools, maybe we need to A) exhibit the fruits of His Spirit in the schools and B) grab hold of His purposes outlined above each and every school day!

Remember: God is in school when His people show up!

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (18-20, NIV).

Right now, you may be asking, where is he going with this post?  The reality is that this message is foundational to the life of many churches, especially evangelical churches, and rightfully so I would argue!

I just feel that many times the church is not fully obedient to the words of Jesus.  We read the “go” and announce that people need to get out of their spiritual laziness and hit the streets sharing the good news.  But, if you’re like me, you may have felt like the messengers of this glorious news need a little work?

This little slice of Matthew’s Gospel has a lot to teach us about what it truly means to be a missional follower (read disciple) of Jesus, one whose life is captured by the mission of God.

1. Jesus messianic authority. The verb translated “given” is understood as divine action in which God placed authority over all existence into the hands of Christ.  Jesus is the King and we are His subjects.  It’s not about what can the church do for me or whiny attitudes about whether the church is feeding me.  It is about the Kingship of Jesus and announcing that to the world!

2. The charge to make disciples. The controlling imperative of the Great Commission is the simple charge to make disciples.  This is the only verb in the entire commission that is actually a command.  The central motif of this commission is disciplemaking.  In fact, the rest is merely three participles that explain how the making of disciples is to be carried out – going, baptizing, and teaching.  What do I mean?  Where we read “go”, the Greek is actually saying, “while going“.  While we are going we are to make disciples.  Large numbers at a church service does not equate with discipleship.  Disciplemaking takes time, a commodity that is in scarce resource in our culture.

3. The charge to go.  The word apostle implies one who is sent or commissioned to go on behalf of the sender.  The tendency for a Jew during this period would be to stay in Jerusalem where it is safe.  That tendency still resonates with us today.  But apostleship transforms one’s identity.  These disciples were no longer just living life for themselves.  The radical call of the Messiah mandated that they go to all nations.  Just because followers of Jesus don’t like something doesn’t mean that they must stay away.  We may not like drug addicts, crack moms, drunkards, porn lookers, etc, but God does and we’re called to show His love to even “the least of these”.

4. The charge to baptize them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Disciples become disciples by being united with Jesus.  In the Christian community, we join, are united to, Jesus through baptism.  Baptism is the public declaration of our allegiance to the kingdom of God.  Baptism has been trivialized to simply become a membership development issue in some churches and denominations; I join the church through being baptized.  In the ancient world, and much of the world today, baptism could, and does, mean physical death.  When a believer is baptized they announce to the gathering that they have truly counted the cost of their discipleship with Jesus.  Do the waters of baptism signify to us to count the cost of our allegiance to Christ?

5. The charge to teach them to observe all that Jesus had commanded. Disciples need to be taught what the life of a disciple is all about: the character of the disciple, the ministry of the disciple, the meaning of kingdom membership, how to live as disciples in a Christian community, and where to fix their hope.  This teaching and training are ongoing and unending.  There are always new challenges for disciples.  In the context of Matthew’s Gospel, the expression translated “all that I have commanded you” refers to the teaching/training Jesus did with His group of disciples.  My fear for Christianity in America is that it has become a head game. Theology, Bible, and faith have all become things to study. Orthodoxy and orthopraxy have been forced to stand alone in separate corners while denominations bicker about why the other is wrong for their choice.

6. “I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (28:20). This mission is ongoing.  Even with high times and low times, tragedy and triumph, event or no event…the mission of God moves on.  The hope through it all is that the rabbi, Jesus Himself, journeys with us every step along the way.

In the end, I’m left with a question, how am I, how are we, doing in this mission of disciplemaking?  Are we picking and choosing which parts of the Great Commission we desire to follow?

We’re not called to effectiveness, we’re called to obedience.  Paul declares that we’re not even called to win the race but to finish it.  My fear is that we’ve learned to associate big numbers, events, worship services, and buildings with how we live out the life of a disciple.  We wait for the church to create a program or event so we can plug and play into whatever we want.  This week the church is having a community outreach project, I’ll plug into that and check community service off my list.

The life of a disciple is more involved than that.  It’s more beautiful and more heart-wrenching, all at the same time.  In the delicate tension of already and not yet, Spirit and flesh, Word and Spirit, sacred and secular, big and small, deep and wide, in the world and not of the world, we find the pathway to which God has called His disciples.

We can bring the gospel to the world!  I hope that we never lose this missional impulse in the Body of Christ.  But, as we encounter people and as we examine the churches in which we find ourselves, are we also bringing people to the gospel.  Simultaneous to our evangelistic stream should be one of sanctification.  As people are reached for the gospel of Christ, are people meeting the gospel in a transformative way?  As the good news goes forth is it also going within and manifesting lives of purity and holiness.  As we follow the Rabbi are we getting some of the dust kicked up by His sandals on our face?