As a child growing up in multiple Pentecostal churches, nothing was more important to us than the “winning of souls” via evangelism. I can recall so many sermons where we were guilt-tripped with repeated questions of how many souls we had won for Christ that year. We were criticized for our lack of care for the souls of all those going to hell, and how we needed to do more to evangelize the world. What is today commonly referred to as the “Great Commission” aka Matthew 28:18-20, was read and repeated as the go-to command of Jesus, which requires us to be diligent in preaching salvation to all men who are destined for hell.

But Father Richard Rohr says, “You only see what you are told to see”, and the more I have studied this “Great Commission” passage, along with the help of other bible scholars, the more I see how we miss the point of it, confirming Richard Rohr’s statements. Apart from the fact that this passage is itself one of the most important summaries of what our “good news” should actually be about – which “good news” has very little to say about “souls” destined for a “hell” – it’s become obvious to me that many Christians read this text with their mind already made up and miss the very real meat of the matter. This has made me begin to think that for all the money, time, prayers and energy spent in fulfilling what we have called “the Great Commission”, perhaps we may rather be fulfilling “the Great Omission”, to the joy of the devil himself.

The Great Omission

“(18) Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. (19) 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, (20) and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely, I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matt 28:18-20, my emphasis)

As mentioned before, my emphasis is on verse 20, and especially on the words “and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you”.

But first and foremost, we will notice that Jesus’s command is for us to make disciples. For many Christians, our first mistake arises from having a wrong mental image of what a disciple is. The mental image we have in our heads is that of students – people who sit in a school classroom/lecture hall, listen to the teacher/lecturer, take notes, acquire knowledge into their heads, and regurgitate that knowledge at an exam. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

The word disciple here is akin to “apprentice” i.e., one who is learning a trade from a master. The mental image we should have should be that of a young man or woman learning carpentry/masonry/auto mechanic/dressmaking/hairdressing from their master. A good master shows their apprentice what to do practically, whiles explaining why it needs to be done that way. In the end, the goal is to produce an apprentice who is as skilled in the trade as their master, not through examinations, but through practice.

Applying this logic to Christianity, the goal of Christianity is Christlikeness. It’s not “Christ knowledge” – aka piling on sermon upon sermon, neither is it “saving souls” from hell to heaven, nor is it the typical African’s favourite form of religion – transactional religion aka getting God to do what I want for me. Rather, it is being empowered by the Spirit of God to become more like Jesus in his example of self-sacrificial love – even if it means the disgrace of the cross and ultimately, the suffering of death.

If you doubt that the goal of Christianity is Christlikeness, ask the foremost “soul winner”, Paul the Apostle.

“He is the one we proclaim, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone fully mature in Christ. To this end, I strenuously contend with all the energy Christ so powerfully works in me.” (Col 1:28-29)

“For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters” (Rom 8:29)

And this is why Matt 28:20 is critical, and so easily misunderstood, even amongst many classical Protestant Christians who pride themselves in being more “biblical” in their Christianity than the Pentecostals, Charismatics, Roman Catholics et al.

Jesus doesn’t say “teach them about me”, as if he is a person of historical curiosity that we learn about in school, like Kwame Nkrumah or Christopher Columbus. Even more importantly, Jesus doesn’t ask his disciples to “teach them to obey the bible” or “teach them to obey scripture”. Jesus is homing in on the specific instructions he gave his disciples when he was alive and with them, which the Holy Spirit has graciously preserved for us in the sweat and labour of the Evangelists we call Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Why? Because Jesus is not interested in producing apprentices of Moses, David, Joshua, Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah or any other biblical character. Jesus the Master is interested in producing apprentices of himself, therefore his teaching, that is, his own words hold supreme to anything that came before him or even after him (including the revered Paul the apostle).

Jesus knows that even if you focus on teaching “scripture” or “the bible”, you are still very capable of missing Jesus, whom scripture points to. That is exactly what he told the Pharisees who were serious students of the scriptures, in John 5:39-40

“You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.” (John 5:39)

So, to misconstrue “teach them to obey everything I commanded you” to mean “teach them to obey the bible” is a very serious mistake, a mistake Jesus had warned the Pharisees about. And if we think this mistake is not that serious, check out what the impact of “teaching the Bible” leads to, from Jesus’s own mouth.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.” (Matt 23:15).

And this is why I call the current model of evangelism and church planting that dominates the African landscape the “Great Omission”. Many of our churches are busy making students and not apprentices, and in the end, making them twice the sons of hell because they refuse to teach them to obey what Jesus commanded, but rather anywhere and everywhere in the Bible that suits their cultural fancy.

I see a billboard on my way home at Atomic Junction, advertising an “Evangelism Conference”, and I am saddened. I hear millions of dollars being raised to organize so-called “crusades”, and I cringe. I see people zealously engaging in street evangelism or holding signs with pithy messages about “accepting Jesus”, or street preachers with their megaphones raining the fear of hell on passersby as I walk to the Madina market, and I sigh. So much zeal for the Great Omission.

And because we have made “soul-winning” the benchmark of what Christianity is about, and not Christlikeness, we can’t see when our pastors have totally missed the mark and need to be corrected, because after all, who are we to correct them when they are “winning souls”, and the church is “growing” (numerically of course, but not in Christlikeness)? God must be pleased with such increased numbers of “souls won”, not so?  And if our local pastors are treated this way, then how much more are our church founders/overseers/presidents/moderators/bishops/chairmen? They are Jesus themselves, after all. They are God himself!!

The History of the Great Omission

But how did we come to think that “saving souls” and teaching “the Bible” was what Christianity was about?

Well as I always say, if you don’t want to learn your Christian history, you always think that what your church is doing is the best thing since sliced bread. So, let’s dig into history a bit.

According to a scholar of early Christianity – Alan Kreider – in his book “The Patient Ferment of the Early Church”, in the first 400 years of the church’s life before it became a national religion of the Roman empire when a person wanted to become a Christian, they went through a process called “catechism” – a period of 1-3 years where the interested person, called a “catechumen” was introduced to the faith by a teacher officially called “a catechist”. A watered-down version of this is still practised in Roman Catholicism and in orthodox churches in Ghana. An even more watered-down version is done today in some modern churches as “new converts” classes.

Hear what Alan Kreider says.

“Many catechists saw that instructing the catechumens in the teaching of Jesus was central to their catechesis”. (pp 157, Patient Ferment of the Early Church)

And where will the “teachings of Jesus” be found? Not in the book of Exodus, nor in 1^st Kings? It will be found recorded in Matthew, Mark, Luke & John. Now it doesn’t mean that they didn’t teach any other books of the Bible, it just meant that they focused a lot more on what Jesus taught. The Old Testament was taught as background to show how Jesus’s teaching was different, while the rest of the New Testament was used to give examples of how Jesus’s commands in the Gospels were practicalized. The Gospels were the centre of their teaching because they knew the Bible was capable of being twisted to teach anything you desire if you don’t home in on Jesus. They knew very well the story of the Pharisees.

This practice produced Christians who mainly focused on being like Jesus. Of course, there will always be a minority who struggled, but that is normal for any human institution. Christlikeness was the goal, right from the word go, and the leaders of the early church tried their best to get that message across right at the door, or you were free to leave and continue life as a pagan. They were not in a hurry for numbers, yet the church grew rapidly because their lives (not just their beliefs) were so radically different and yet attractive.

But in the 4^th century, the Roman emperor Constantine declared himself a Christian (no kidding, he refused to attend catechesis and decided to teach himself the bible – you see where this is going?), and at least the persecution of the church stopped. The leaders of the church were so happy that Christians were no longer the hated class of the Roman world and began to change the teaching of the church to accommodate the empire’s ways of doing things. What better place to find “laws” and “rules” that work for an empire that dominates the world through violence, than to do away with Jesus’s commands on the love of neighbour and enemy alike and to begin to focus more on Moses, David, Joshua and Solomon – great leaders and kings of Israel – with the excuse that “all of it was Scripture” after all.

In the 5^th century, St Augustine, an African bishop, called on the empire to use violence to attack not another empire/state/country, but fellow Christians who were teaching heresy. Yes, the Donatists were teaching falsehood, but is that the way of Jesus? Did Jesus kill his enemies? Because the church now had state backing, it began settling disputes amongst itself not by talking with one another or maybe just shunning heretics but asking the state to capture and kill heretics. Of course, by this action the church had lost the ability to question emperors when they go to war and began to find biblical passages from anywhere but from Jesus, to support the empire’s wars and violence. The church had the power now, why jaw-jaw, when it could war-war? It was a numbers game, and the official church was winning.

All this ingrained the habit of not obeying Jesus’s commands but finding whatever passage suits one’s agenda in the bible to do whatever one desired, so far as one claimed to be “Christian”.

Over centuries, this led to so many excesses in the church, and Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin led a Protestant Reformation in the 16^th century, which led to a break from the Roman Catholic church. And when some of those who were part of that resistance pointed out to these Reformation leaders that they were not obeying Jesus’ commands, what did they get? Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk followed in the examples of his mentor from 1000 years earlier, and like St Augustine, asked the German state to capture and kill those who questioned him, who are today called the Radical Reformation. Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin also perpetrated some of this same violence, forgetting again that it’s not about “knowledge of Scripture” as Jesus told the Pharisees, it’s about following Jesus’s example. But alas, it was a numbers game, and the Radical Reformers were small fry.

Today, we are children of the revivalists of 18^th century America, who were so gripped with angst about Jesus’s immediate return and the fact so many people would be condemned to hell if Jesus returned. They prioritized raising money and exerting their lives and organizing mass “crusades” and “tent gatherings” to preach to thousands and “win souls” in preparation for Jesus’s second coming. But again, following Jesus’s commands was not really a priority. It was a numbers game.

In Ghana, our churches, whether Roman Catholic, traditionally Protestant or Penteco-Charismatic, might be doing their best, but too many of us don’t realize the water we are swimming in is already contaminated. The desire for numbers (and the power that comes from it) means that even when a local church pastor is interested in Christlikeness, the system they are operating in is interested in numbers. Even a pastor’s local congregation measures him by numbers. And since Jesus’ commands are not really amenable to building large numbers, the Great Omission will always be preferred to the Great Commission.

But building with the Great Omission instead of the Great Commission has its consequences, and I’ll leave us with the words of perhaps the most faithful builder of God’s church – Paul the apostle.

“If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work.” (1 Cor 3:12-13).