Chapter Three — Mobilizing the Laity
n a trip to Israel to visit the geographic sites of the Old and New Testaments, I was fascinated to see the situ ation in Israel. This country, of course, has been a place of strife for decades. We saw people in civilian clothes walking down the street with guns over their shoulders. There were men on the beaches in bathing suits with submachine guns strapped across their bodies. Traveling through the Golan Heights, we saw signs along the roads warning that the fields were full of land mines. We saw plenty of other military
What Is the Great Commission?
activity as well. It seemed so incongruous: daily life was going on in a routine fashion, yet there was always a threat of military confrontation that could come at any moment.
What was most interesting about the military situa tion in Israel was how this small nation has to be prepared for the possibility of a military encounter at virtually any moment, and how it is fully committed to a state of mili tary preparedness. Upon graduation from high school, every male in Israel is required to enter the military for three years of service. Every graduating female is required to go into the service for two years. After the time of service is up, they're still required to spend one month out of every year in reserve training until age fifty-one. There's a sense in which every citizen is always considered a part of the army.
In Israel, military preparedness is the norm. And the New Testament indicates that something similar is expected of the church. While it is not the militancy of the sword, the imagery in the Scriptures and on the lips of Jesus in describing the mission of the church is borrowed from the military world. An army's readiness is one of its most important qualities, and it seems that the church today certainly has an adequate number of troops. We have considerable training opportunities available to us.
Mobilizing the Laity
What we lack is the ability to come together for action— to be mobilized.
Often, it is assumed that the best way to carry out the mission of the church is to hire a preacher or a ministerial staff and let them handle the engagements necessary for the battle to be won. But have you ever heard of an army whose general was the only one in the fight? For an army to be successful, it has to have a skilled, trained, and mobilized rank-and-file. That's no less true in the kingdom of God, and in the warfare that is not against flesh and blood but against rulers and authorities and spiritual forces of evil (Eph. 6:12).
There are some important biblical texts that speak to the issue of the mobilization of the laity. One of the most important ones is found in Exodus, in the account of Moses' being visited by his father-in-law, Jethro. It begins:
The next day Moses sat to judge the people, and the people stood around Moses from morning till evening. When Moses' father-in-law saw all that he was doing for the people, he said, "What is this that you are doing for the people? Why do you sit alone, and all the people stand around you from morning till evening?" And Moses said to his father-in-law,
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"Because the people come to me to inquire of God; when they have a dispute, they come to me and I decide between one person and another, and I make them know the statutes of God and his laws." (Ex. 18:13–16)
Jethro saw Moses ministering to the people all day long. He scratched his head and said, "Moses, what are you doing?" We can almost read between the lines here and detect the slightest hint of pride on Moses' part, or at least a sense of a feeling of accomplishment of a job well done, as he explains his crucial role in leading and judging the people.
Instead of congratulating Moses, Jethro lectured him:
Moses' father-in-law said to him, "What you are doing is not good. You and the people with you will certainly wear yourselves out, for the thing is too heavy for you. You are not able to do it alone." (vv. 17–18)
Notice that Jethro didn't come to Moses and say he was worried that Moses had bitten off more than he could chew, and that it might not end well. Rather, he spoke
Mobilizing the Laity in certainties: this state of affairs would surely wear Moses and the people out. It's not any good for anyone when peo ple think that they can handle all of the affairs of God by themselves. It simply cannot be done.
Jethro then gave Moses a solution:
Now obey my voice; I will give you advice, and God be with you! You shall represent the people before God and bring their cases to God, and you shall warn them about the statutes and the laws, and make them know the way in which they must walk and what they must do. Moreover, look for able men from all the people, men who fear God, who are trustworthy and hate a bribe, and place such men over the people as chiefs of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens. And let them judge the people at all times. Every great matter they shall bring to you, but any small matter they shall decide themselves. So it will be easier for you, and they will bear the burden with you. If you do this, God will direct you, you will be able to endure, and all this people also will go to their place in peace. (vv. 19–23)
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God moved Moses through Jethro to implement a careful organizational structure, not unlike a military orga nization, that would provide clear responsibility and a high degree of agility in reacting to circumstances. Jethro urged Moses to look for men who feared God and loved righ teousness and to set them over the people as judges. The judges would hear the small cases and bring to Moses any thing they couldn't handle. In this way, the burden would be spread among many.
We sometimes dismiss organization as something that secular people do. We want to have the spontaneous freedom of the Spirit. There's sometimes a subtle mis trust of careful planning, strategy, and organization in the church—but God Himself ordains that this kind of organization take place. Everyone is ministered to in it, everyone is accounted for, and all of the bases are covered.
In the book of Numbers, Moses finally implements this organizational process. In chapter 11, the people complain that they have no meat to eat. In the wilderness, there was no food. There was only scrub grass for their herds to graze on. There were no crops and no livestock for them to eat. They were subsisting daily on this miraculous provision from heaven, called manna, that God had given to them.
Mobilizing the Laity
Manna for breakfast, manna for lunch, manna for dinner. If you want to have a midnight snack, manna.
So, the people began to pine for their slave-labor days in Egypt. They didn't remember the scourgings they received from their overseers or how nice it was when Pha raoh forced them to make bricks without straw. All they remembered were the good old days of the leeks, garlic, cucumbers, and onions—and they were ready to trade in their salvation for a cucumber.
Moses was at the end of his rope, and he appealed to the Lord, saying that leading this murmuring people was too great a burden for him to bear. In his distress, Moses prays, "If you will treat me like this, kill me at once, if I find favor in your sight, that I may not see my wretched ness" (Num. 11:15).
The Lord promised to give the people meat—but so much meat that they would be sick from it:
You shall not eat just one day, or two days, or five days, or ten days, or twenty days, but a whole month, until it comes out at your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you, because you have rejected the Lord who is among you. (vv. 19–20)
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The Lord also told Moses to gather seventy elders to bear the burden of leading the people. Then, we read:
The Lord came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and took some of the Spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders. And as soon as the Spirit rested on them, they prophesied. But they did not continue doing it. Now two men remained in the camp, one named Eldad, and the other named Medad, and the Spirit rested on them. (v. 25)
Seeing these men prophesying, Joshua chimed in and said to Moses, "My lord Moses, stop them" (v. 28). The people were used to having only Moses being anointed by the Holy God. This looked like an insurrection to them: someone else was manifesting the power of God besides Moses.
It's crucial what Moses says to Joshua here. He says, "Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord's people were prophets, that the Lord would put his Spirit on them!" (v. 29). Moses saw that instead of one leader to bring the Israelites into the Promised Land, there were seventy-one. His prayer was that, someday, all of the Lord's
Mobilizing the Laity people would be prophets, that at some point God would pour out His Spirit upon all men.
By the time we get to the prophet Joel, that prayer of Moses had become a prophecy. Joel said that the Lord declared, "And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions" (Joel 2:28). At Pentecost, the prophecy of Joel was fulfilled and the Spirit was poured out upon the whole church (see Acts 2:14–21). No longer is the Spirit lim ited to a select few; He belongs to and indwells all believers.
The New Testament portrait of the church is that of an organization energized by God the Holy Spirit. In the New Testament doctrine of the church, every single person in the body of Christ has been enabled and energized by God the Holy Spirit to be battle ready—to be a part of the mission that God has given to His church. To look at the church as an organization where the labor and ministry are done only by the ministers is to miss the entire point. The ministers' primary task is to equip the saints—the rank-and-file, the people in the pews. The ministry of the church belongs to the people of God who have been gifted by the Holy Spirit to carry it out.