And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 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 and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.-Matthew 28:18-20

Sometimes, I am astonished at how little instruction Jesus gave his disciples on how to set up Christian community. Oh, certainly he instructed them about forgiveness (seventy-seven times over!) and about leadership (whoever would be great must be a servant of all) and about welcome (let the little children come to me) and about generosity (feeding thousands with one kid’s sack lunch), but he never gave them a structure to follow. No by-laws. No committees. No Robert's Rules.

Instead of giving us a structure, Jesus gave us himself and let us decide how best to share with the nations of the world. Over the past two thousand years, we’ve done Christianity in just about every different way you could imagine. 

There are house churches, made up of neighbors coming together to worship anywhere they can squeeze in. There are soaring cathedrals and squat little churches. There are state churches and separation-of-church-and-state churches and banned-by-the-state churches. There are congregations with more staff than most small businesses and there are congregations that can’t afford even a part-time professional leader. There are denominations with a top-down structure and denominations with a bottom-up structure and some that can barely be considered to have any structure at all.

I happen to think that the balance we’ve struck in the ELCA between power for the congregation and for the synod and for the churchwide offices is a pretty good one, but at the end of the day, the question to ask for its evaluation is whether or not it helps us make disciples, baptizing and teaching in Jesus’ name.

That is the question that gives purpose to our congregational meetings, too. Not just “how do the reports look?” or “how well have we followed our policies?” but a deeper question: how does our work, our worship, our giving, and all the rest of our ministry come together in service of the “Great Commission:” make disciples.

There are a lot of good answers to that question– and I won’t repeat them here because you can just read the congregational report. I will, however, encourage you to come and be part of the congregational meeting so that you can be part of our important disciple-making work. This is God’s church, and you are the ones God has called to be disciples here. I hope you’ll be here on May 4 at 9:20 so we can plan for the next year together.