The Great Commission is, first and foremost, what we are to be about as Christians and as Baptists.
Go – make disciples – teach – baptize.
Yes, we are to be stewards of all God has blessed us with and to make the best use of those things in order to fulfill the Great Commission. But to put stewardship above the Great Commission would be a great folly by the church.
Protecting the environment along with the social gospel are well and good, but when the church sacrifices doing its primary work, then those things are as bad as sin. The next thing you know, people will be saying we should stop printing Bibles because we are destroying trees. Or we should stop baptizing people to save water.
We are in the “proclaiming the gospel of Jesus and saving souls” work. This is our priority; saving the planet is not the priority. We are called to be witnesses first, and that does include being stewards. We can’t neglect the Great Commission to be better stewards. Our stewardship is part of our witness, which means we are not wasteful of financial or material resources.
To mobilize church members to pick up litter is one thing; to mobilize them to knock on doors and share the gospel is another. To our shame, we can get more people to pick up the litter than knock on the doors.
We have to ask ourselves, “Do we want to be known as litter people or soul winners?”
If we think about it, perhaps we can combine the two. Knock on a door and tell people about Jesus, and give them a litter basket made from recycled paper for their car with the name of the church on it.
We, as Christians and Baptists, must never replace our efforts to share the gospel, make disciples and baptize with the single-minded effort to save the planet. We are Great Commission people.
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