Church For Monday

By: Svetlana Papazov

One of Jesus’ disciples, Matthew, wrote about Jesus commissioning his followers to be the church wherever they go.

Matthew was paying close attention to Jesus and penned with accuracy where Jesus commissioned his followers to go and carry on the mission of God, because if it wasn’t for Jesus, Matthew might had never known God.

Matthew was a tax collector who, according to societal norms, wasn’t allowed to step into a church. But Jesus modeled to his disciples that wherever Jesus was the presence of God was there as well, manifested in healing, restoration, and reconciliation.

Jesus spent the majority of his time in the marketplace and that is how He met Matthew, at work—a type of work that ethically, socially, and structurally isolated Matthew as a sinner. Jesus modeled to his disciples that most often mission doesn’t happen within the church walls because God’s mission is a mission of reconciliation and healing and most of the broken people in the first century Judean culture were found outside the church building.  And such is the reality today too.

Jesus didn’t stay away from the communities filled with desperate people, lost in their spiritual quest for God and in need of a Savior.

·  He made 132 public appearances in the New Testament and 122 of them were in the marketplace.

· Of the 52 parables Jesus told, 45 had a workplace context

· Of the recorded works of Jesus, 72% were on application

Jesus wasn’t seeking for the comfort of a synagogue to fit his lifestyle. He was seeking for God’s healing presence to fit the wounds of his neighbor’s life.

Read Matthew 28:18-20

God doesn’t just love our Christian communities. God loves the world and that is why Jesus gave us the Great Commission.

Q1: How do we live out the Great Commission to become a Church for Monday?

We must as ourselves three questions:

·Where do we go?

We go to a mission field in the marketplace, deploying both our faith in God and our gifts from God.

·How do we go?

As whole-life disciples with a deep-seated, seamless, faith that we live everywhere we go and affect everything we do.

Churches for Monday equip followers of Christ with a holistic faith that affects the work they do, commissioning them to a mission field in the marketplace, deploying both their faith in God and their gifts from God.

·What do we do?

God has called us to be his church on mission: God’s mission that is. Meaning that we are all called to go and affect transformation in the world, outside of the church walls; to engage people and affect transformation.

May the favor of the Lord our God restore us; establish the work of our hands—yes establish the word of our hands.
— Psalm 90:17

Svetlana Papazov is Lead Pastor and Founder of Real Life Church, President/Founder of Real Life Center for Entrepreneurial and Leadership Excellence, a first of its kind model of church and business incubator that educates in entrepreneurship, leadership and faith praxis, and author of the book, “Church for Monday.