There is no such thing as a clergy-laity dichotomy in the Bible. There isn’t a select few and a whole lot of normal “Sunday only” Christians in the Bible. I’m real bothered by people who think that Sunday is special and the rest of the week is not special, because to me Christianity is a 24/7 total commitment to Jesus issue, and we’ve turned it into 2 to 3 hours once a week gathering in a building where a few gifted people get up on the podium and do their thing. There is a desperate need for a radical change in the mindset of believers today, where each one of us would have a sense of responsibility to a wider, deeper, and fuller Christianity. It’s not that i think what we do every worship Sunday is bad, it’s not that i think what we do is peripheral. I think what we do is preliminary, but when the preliminary becomes the essence, then we miss the New Testament call. I believe so strongly that we have guidelines, and those guidelines we would call the Great Commission in Matthew 28:16-20. The whole point is, the Great Commission was not just for the apostles; it was not even just for the inner circle of the 120 of the Upper Room. The Great Commission is for the Body of Christ. It’s for a wider whole. It’s for all of us. And then inside that Great Commission there are 2 calls. Number 1, i think we are called to help the Kingdom to be greater – the call to Evangelism, because God’s love rests on all human beings. And then number 2, i think we are called to help the kingdom deeper – Discipleship. Wider is the evangelism, while deeper is the discipleship. The wider is the “more would come to know Him”, and deeper is that those “who would come to know Him, would come to be more like Him”, and the church needs to have both of these emphases. There is a need to energize believers to be what the New Testament calls them to be. There has to be a sense of responsibility to share, and a sense of responsibility to mature, and all believers have gifts that are directly related to these 2 emphases(cf. 1 Cor. 12:7,11). Our culture today is a tendency to wrap ourselves in privacy; to wrap ourselves in “that’s not my responsibility”; to wrap ourselves in “I go to church, I give, and the rest of my life belongs to me” attitude. “God gets the tenth, i get the 90%. It’s the “God gets one day, and i get 6 days” mentality, that is so characteristic of modern-day Christianity. GOD OWNS EVERYTHING, EVERYDAY BELONGS TO HIM!

Believers need to get out of the church building, and into the fallen world and share Jesus with the same intensity and enthusiasm as when we’re clapping, rejoicing, worshipping Him on a Sunday church service. It’s not enough for us to enjoy this. We were called for more than this. There’s more to Christianity than sitting on dusty church pews on Sundays. God help us to be the true church of Jesus Christ.