The Great Omission
Dallas Willard on the neglected element of The Great Commission
Dallas Willard once said he could not name a single church group with a working plan to teach its people to do everything Jesus said. Not a sermon series. Not a discipleship track. A plan, the kind a coach has, the kind a master craftsman has when he takes on an apprentice. He looked, and he could not find one. Then he sharpened the knife: he was not even talking about everything Jesus said. He was talking about a few things.
That is a strange sentence to read as a pastor. Most of us would protest. We have classes. We have small groups. We have membership processes and curriculum and a calendar full of programs. But Willard’s question cuts deeper. He is not asking whether we are busy. He is asking whether anyone in our care is being trained to obey what Jesus taught, to live their everyday life in the manner Jesus would live it if He were them.
You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: The Great Omission on Conversatio Divina
This is the lecture where the entire Fuller series begins to land on the pastor’s desk. Up to this point, Willard has been describing the gospel of the kingdom and the impossibility of doing ministry in our own power. Here he names what we have left out of our obedience to Jesus, and what it has cost us.
The Commission Has a Verb We Skipped
Willard is precise about Matthew 28. The risen Jesus has been given all authority, and from inside that authority He issues one command. Here is Willard’s paraphrase:
“Make apprentices to me. Submerge them in Trinitarian reality and train them so that they do all things I have commanded you.”
Read that slowly. The command is to make apprentices. The submerging, what we call baptism, is the entry. The training is the substance. The Great Commission is, at its core, a training command.
Most of our churches have treated the first two pieces as the substance of the Commission and the training as optional polish. We make converts. We process them through baptism. We hand them a Bible and hope something happens. The training never gets built. The teaching is the omission.
Willard’s vision of a Great Commission church is concrete. He describes it as a community of people who, when “confronted with something Jesus said, well, they would just do it.” That is the test. Not whether we agreed with the sermon. Not whether we cried at the altar. Whether the next time we run into something Jesus said, we just do it.
Most of our congregations cannot pass that test. The reason is that we never planned to.
A Plan Is the Thing That Is Missing
The most uncomfortable sentence in the lecture is this one:
“I do not know of a single group that has a plan to teach the people in the group to do everything that Jesus said and actually, not everything, just a few things.”
Willard is not accusing pastors of laziness. He is naming a structural absence. The plan is missing because we never believed the teaching in the Great Commission was the point. We believed that getting people in was the point, and the rest would somehow follow.
It does not follow. It has not followed. We have rooms full of baptized people who have never been told, in any practical way, how to live their financial life or their marriage or their resentments or their hours under the kingship of Jesus.
Here Willard turns the rebuke into a gift. The reason the plan is missing is not that we lack the resources. We have looked for the resources in the wrong place.
“[It] requires no special facilities, programs, talents or techniques… Anyone can do it; it doesn’t even require a budget, just the decision to do it and the willingness to learn as you go from the One who has all say and who is with us.”
Notice what Willard has done in a single sentence. Every excuse we offer for not doing this, that we are too small, that we have no building, no staff, no budget, has been stripped away. None of it is required. The only things required are a decision and a willingness to learn from Jesus as you go.
The Curse of Performance Is Why We Stopped Trying
Willard is also honest about the reason the church has quietly omitted the teaching ministry of Jesus. He calls it the curse of performance. He is not against doing your best. He is against performing for impression, against letting the work of ministry get hijacked by the management of how it looks.
“The sufficiency of Christ to all is the basis of our efforts in gathering and in service. The ministers, pastors, teachers and others should, with time and experience, expect to receive from ‘Christ with them’ profundity of insight, sweetness and strength of character and abundance of power to carry out their role in the local group. The minister does not need tricks and techniques but need only speak Christ’s Word from Christ’s character standing within the manifest presence of God.”
The whole burden lifts in that paragraph. The pastor’s sufficiency rests not in his preparation, his cleverness, his program, or his platform. It rests in Christ with him. He does not need tricks. He needs to speak Christ’s Word from Christ’s character standing within the manifest presence of God. That is the job description.
Apprenticing people to Jesus does not produce visible numbers quickly. It produces transformed lives slowly. A pastor under the curse of performance cannot afford slow. So the teaching command gets traded away for something more measurable, and we tell ourselves the trade was necessary. It was not necessary. It was the omission.
The Benchmark for the Whole Thing
Willard ends the lecture by giving us the standard. If we want to know whether our ministries are doing the thing Jesus told us to do, here is the measure:
“An apprentice of Jesus is one who is learning from Him how to lead my life in the Kingdom of God as He would lead it if He were I.”
That is the benchmark. Not how full the building is. Not how the budget closed. The measure is whether the people in your care are learning from Jesus how to lead their ordinary week as He would lead it if He were them. Their marriage. Their money. Their work. Their grief. Their anger at the deacon who hurt their feelings.
If they are learning that, you are doing the Great Commission. If they are not, you are doing something else, and it does not matter how well you are doing it.
For Reflection
These are Willard’s questions, not mine. He asked them of pastors in his classroom, and they are the questions that ought to follow us out of this lecture.
Do you have a plan, not a calendar, not a curriculum, an actual plan, to teach the people in your group to do the things Jesus said? Even just a few of them?
If the people in your church were confronted this week with something Jesus said, would they just do it? If not, you are responsible to close the gap between hearing and doing. Where will you start?
Are the people in your care learning from Jesus how to lead their life in the Kingdom of God as He would lead it if He were them, or are they only learning to attend, give, and behave?