I recently preached a sermon in which I recalled a conversation I had with my daughter when she was in high school. She was lamenting the lack of religious interest among her peers. "It's not that my friends are against religion," she said, "but for most of them, religion is just unnecessary. They look at it and see only bad things done in the name of God. They don't know why anyone would want to be a Christian." The perceived irrelevance of the church is a major obstacle to reaching younger Americans.

In this column, and periodically over the next few months, I want to advance a conversation about who we are as believers in Jesus Christ. What is our purpose? Why do we even need to have a church? Why would anyone ever want to join one? These are not only important questions in their own right, they are also questions we need to answer as we consider the mission and purpose of our presbytery in 2017.

Presbyterians have a short but important section of our Book of Order that deals with these questions. It is F-1.0304, which lists "The Great Ends" - or purposes - of the church. They are:

the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind;

the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God;

the maintenance of divine worship;

the preservation of the truth;

the promotion of social righteousness; and

the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.

The list was first published by the United Presbyterian Church in North America in 1910 and became part of the broader Presbyterian tradition when the UPNA merged with the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. in 1958. The language may be a bit dated and reflect a more static view of the church in the world, but they are a good place to start a discussion of the church's purpose today.

The first of the great ends is "the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind." When this was drafted as the first great end in 1910, "missions" (note the plural form) meant "overseas missions." It was the year of the Edinburgh Missionary Conference, at its time the largest mission gathering in history, which lay the groundwork for ecumenical Protestant global mission in the 20th century. National missions at the time were often focused on converting and assimilating groups we judged as inferior or in need of rescue (e.g., Native Americans, the urban poor).

Nowadays, the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind is still our most important purpose, but the focus has changed. "Missions" are no longer only for those in faraway lands, and certainly not from a perspective of social or moral superiority. The mission of the church - including its evangelistic mission - begins right at our doorstep, and with the people we encounter every day.

We are in a "new apostolic age." That is, just as Jesus commissioned the apostles to bear witness to him "in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth" (Acts 1:8), so we too bear witness to Christ starting in our own "Jerusalem" - right where we live. Not only that, but the tone of our proclamation must also change. In a world where words have lost their credibility, and we can no longer simply assume that people know or even care about the Bible, evangelism follows a different path.

The old model was to convert a person's mind through persuasive sharing of the gospel, then convert their heart through the loving fellowship of believers, and finally convert their will through training in holiness and spiritual nurture. The "believe-belong-behave" model no longer applies. Today, the typical American is suspicious of institutions like the Church, and reject truth claims based on some external authority like the Bible. Before a person will respond to the love of God in Christ, they must first witness and experience it themselves, and test its authenticity over time. "Believe-belong-behave" has become "behave-belong-believe," in which a profession of faith is the culmination of a long period of relationship with a community of believers, not its beginning.