Mike Horton Lends His Voice To The "Mission of the Church" Discussion

Michael Horton:

In recent days, Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert have taken a fair number of hits for their arguments in What is the Mission of the Church? (Crossway, 2011). (See one review here) The main worry is that they define the mission too narrowly, focusing on the Great Commission. At least on the more vehement side of the opposition, the concern is that there is no place for the church to have an impact on culture, particularly in social and economic terms. 

Having received some similar objections to my argument in The Gospel Commission (Baker, 2011), I think that many criticisms rest on basic confusion of categories. There are several examples that could be mentioned, but I’ll stick with this one: the confusion of the church as a divine institution (place) with the church as Christians (people).

Read the rest. I'll have thoughts on this later.  I am finding this discussion to be quite helpful for how we think about doing things at The Vine.