SUSTAINING THE REFORMED WITNESS AND MISSION OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF NIGERIA (UNABRIDGED VERSION)

A reformed understanding of Church will clearly reveal that it is the creation of God. As a creation of God, it is accountable to God and work in different ways to please its creator. One of such ways is to promote reach out to the unreached and hold firmly the word of God. God in His sovereignty also calls the church to collaborate with Him in mission; and as Onwunta quoting Emil Brunner said that “The Church lives by mission as fire lives by burning.”1 This means that the Church and mission belong together, thus, a Church without mission or a mission without a Church are both contradictions. The Missio Dei (God’s mission) in the world can be summarized this way: God’s purpose in Christ is to reconcile all things to Himself. The church as the body of Christ in the world—the means by which the world will know that Jesus Christ is Lord and through which all believers will reach maturity in Christ and unity in the faith and knowledge of Christ. The Presbyterian Church of Nigeria as a church with reformed background seeks to engage in this God’s ordained Catholic (universal) responsibility of making Christ known within and outside its bounds. However, sometimes the reformed witness and mission of the PCN seem to be choked by certain factors around it, what Piper would refer to as “poison of the Church.”2 This paper seeks to proffer ways of sustaining the reformed witness and mission of the Church, so that the reformed heritage of the Church becomes not a myth in years to come.