Every church I’ve ever known has felt this tension, and most have argued about it at least once. One group says the church exists to reach people who don’t know Jesus yet, because the lost are lost and our neighbors are heading into eternity without having heard. Another group says the church exists to form disciples who know Jesus deeply, depth over breadth, because a church full of shallow converts isn’t serving the kingdom well. The outreach vs. discipleship debate has worn out a lot of elder boards.
Who’s right? Both of them are, and the tension between them is real. Where most churches go wrong is treating it as a choice.
Two convictions, one body
The first group is holding on to the Great Commission. The second is holding on to the Great Commandment. Neither one is wrong, and neither can be dropped without the church becoming something less than what Christ intended.
But when a church treats them as rivals, you can predict what happens next. Budget meetings get tense. The “outreach people” feel like the church is a comfortable club. The “discipleship people” feel like the church is chasing events and neglecting depth. Leaders end up refereeing instead of leading.
I’ve come to think of it with two pictures: the frontier and the homestead.
What the frontier needs from the homestead
The frontier is the outreach ministry, the work happening out in the community. It needs a steady supply of people who are genuinely formed, volunteers whose faith is deep enough to carry them through difficult relationships and needs that don’t go away and what look like failures. And it needs leaders shaped by Scripture and prayer and community.
Anyone who has run an outreach ministry for more than a year knows why. You fix an engine and the family disappears. You spend hours with someone and nothing visibly changes. Shallow faith doesn’t survive that for long, and people burn out or drift away. Without the homestead, the frontier runs out of people.
What the homestead needs from the frontier
The homestead is the church in its gathered, discipling form: Sunday worship, Bible study, pastoral care, children’s ministry. It needs the frontier to keep it honest.
Want to know whether what you’re teaching on Sunday is actually working? Send people into the community on Tuesday. Nothing exposes a shallow, theoretical faith like the demands of actual service. Agreeing with a sermon about patience is one thing, and staying patient with someone who is frustrated and scared and taking it out on you is something else.
The frontier sends people back to the homestead asking better questions and carrying deeper convictions.
The rhythm that ends the argument
Paul describes the design in Ephesians 4. Christ “gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:11–12).
Look at what’s happening there. Leaders equip every member for ministry; they don’t do the ministry while the members watch. The homestead work of preaching, teaching, and care exists to produce people ready for frontier work. And the frontier produces people who come back hungry for more formation.
So here’s the rhythm I describe in Turn the Key: the homestead forms, the frontier deploys, the frontier sends back, the homestead deepens. And then around it goes again. Neither one is the point. The point is the whole body working the way it was designed to.
At Living Faith we’ve deliberately refused to choose. Our Sunday service, our weekly Bible study, our pastoral care, and our children’s ministry are homestead expressions. The Garage is a frontier expression. We don’t treat them as competitors, and what I’ve seen is that the people most deeply formed by the homestead become the most effective frontier workers, and the people most stretched by the frontier come back with an appetite for the Word they didn’t have before.
Figure out which way your church leans
Every church leans one way, and that isn’t a sin. It comes from temperament and history and the gifts of the people God has gathered. But every lean has a risk.
A church that leans homestead risks turning inward. It can become rich in teaching and warm in fellowship while its neighbors never meet anyone from it. Its people may know a great deal and practice very little.
A church that leans frontier risks thinning out. It can be busy and visible while its volunteers run on fumes, and new believers never get rooted.
How do you find your lean? Look at your calendar for the last three months and your budget for the last year. Where did the time and money actually go? That’ll tell you more than any vision statement will.
Questions to take to your leaders
These come straight from the discussion questions at the back of the book:
- Has your church ever felt pressure to choose between outreach and discipleship? What caused that pressure?
- Which is your church more naturally inclined toward: frontier or homestead? What are the risks of that inclination?
- What would a healthier balance between outreach and discipleship look like specifically in your congregation?
Then take one small step toward connecting the two. If you lean homestead, ask your Bible study to serve together once this month and spend the next meeting talking about what they saw. If you lean frontier, ask your outreach volunteers what questions the work has raised for them, and build your next teaching series around their answers.
Refuse the false choice
I’ll say it the way I said it in the book. The false choice between outreach and discipleship is one of the enemy’s most effective tools for keeping the church small and self-absorbed. Refuse it.
You don’t need to pick a side. You need both halves of the body doing their work and feeding each other. Give your homestead a frontier to send people to and it’ll get deeper, and your frontier will last a lot longer with a homestead to come home to.
If your team wants to work through this together, the free Turn the Key leader’s guide walks through Chapter 3 and every other chapter as a planning series. And if your frontier volunteers need a deeper theology of service to sustain them for years, not months, that’s why we wrote Full Service.
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