Many years ago, something I said led to a Pastor getting sacked. (Let me add straightaway that that wasn’t my intention!). I was a student in Glasgow at the time, and sometimes attended a small and rather obscure Pentecostal church. This church had recently called a new Pastor who was young and enthusiastic; they were very pleased with him although I personally didn’t much like his style.

Anyway, one Sunday the church held a Baptist-style service of “Believers’ Baptism” in which grown-up people publicly spoke of their faith before being fully immersed in water. Of course everyone was excited about the service but I noticed something slightly odd about the words which the Pastor used before each person went into the water: instead of “I baptise you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” he said, “I baptise you in the name of Jesus with the promise of the Holy Spirit” I briefly mentioned this to one of the Deacons at the end of the service and thought no more about it.

Some weeks later the same Deacon interrogated me (well, that’s what it felt like) more closely about what I’d said. I wondered why he was doing this and thought that I must have upset someone. The next thing I heard was that the Pastor had been dismissed – for heresy. Apparently I wasn’t the only person who’d noticed his unusual choice of words, so the Deacons had talked to him and discovered that he was what’s called a “Jesus Only” or “Oneness” Pentecostal. I won’t go into details of what that means, except to say that it’s a branch of the Church which doesn’t believe in the Trinity as three distinct persons. Yes, they believe in God: but they see the Father, the Son and the Spirit as ways in which God chooses to manifest himself at different times. So God first operated as the Creator, then he took human form and became Jesus, now he is the Spirit who lives within us. But – and this is the crucial bit – God isn’t all three at the same time. These ideas came into Pentecostalism around 110 years ago but in fact they’re an ancient heresy called “Modalistic Monarchianism” (there’s a name to play with!) which goes right back to the end of the second century.

Matthew’s Gospel closes with Jesus’ famous last words, often called the “Great Commission” and used in missionary meetings (although these didn’t seem to be as popular as they were when I was younger!): “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you”. These words are rightly regarded as a mandate for worldwide evangelism although, for several centuries after the Reformation, many Protestant leaders insisted that they were given to the Apostles alone and did not apply to modern Christians, a view exploded at the end of the eighteenth century by the Baptist William Carey, the so- called “Father of modern missions” although he was actually building on the writings of several others.

I digress! The emphasis of this passage has often been on the “going”, an exhortation for Christians to get off their backsides and out of their churches in order to proclaim the Christian message. That’s certainly necessary (how would we be Christians if the Gospel hadn’t been spread around the world?), however the original Greek text hints    that Christ’s followers don’t need to be told to “go” as it’s something they’ll already be doing, and that Jesus is actually telling them what they must do as they go: “make disciples of [people from] all nations” and “baptise them”. That’s what I’d like to unpack a bit now.

First, I’d like to emphasise that Jesus doesn’t say, “Preach the Gospel so that people will come to faith in me” or, “Get people converted to Christianity”. That would be gross misunderstanding of his command. It does strike me that, over the centuries, two massive mistakes have been made as far as conversion is concerned, both with negative consequences. One has been conversion by force, even at the point of a sword, by colonial powers – I’m thinking perhaps of the Spanish in Latin America, who compelled indigenous people to become Catholic Christians or face death. They thought that they were doing God’s will but we’d say they were tragically misguided. (As an aside, I suspect that there were folk living under British rule who, although not forced to become Christians, did so because they thought it would show them to be “civilised” and advance their career prospects with the authorities).

The other mistake is when preachers have called for people to make a quick response without really understanding what they’re doing. That response could be of walking to the front of the meeting and saying a prayer, even of just putting their hand up as a sign to the evangelist. In some cases these conversions are, of course, genuine and real; but others are surely nothing more a reaction to the atmosphere of the occasion. Indeed, although Gospel meetings of this kind are not as common as they used to be, there are tales of individuals “getting saved” repeatedly (and no doubt adding to the evangelists’ statistics!)

So, if Jesus didn’t say, “Make converts”, what did he say? The answer is, “Make disciples”. And that, to me, is far more profound: it means speaking to, and working with, people who want to become serious and deep-rooted followers of Jesus; not people who glibly say, “I’ve become a Christian” or even, “I’m a churchgoer”. We’re thinking of people who are willing to let God transform every part of their lives: their thinking, their actions, their actions, the way they interact with other people, their values, the ways they use their time and money … although a dramatic decision might just be involved, this is really a process which takes years, even our entire lives, as there’s always more for us to learn. Dare I say that many, many people who delight to call themselves Christians have hardly begun to understand what discipleship really involves? That’s why churches are weak and why these folk haven’t been able, or even wanted, to make disciples of other people.

And what about the other part of Jesus’ command – which takes us back to that Pastor in Glasgow and also to Trinity Sunday – “baptise them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit”? This is the part which rarely gets mentioned at missionary meetings, possibly because bringing people to faith seems far more important than baptising them, or perhaps because (going back to what I said earlier) it conjures up mental pictures of forced mass baptisms by imperial powers. However baptism definitely forms of Jesus’ command, and we know that it’s something the early Church took very seriously. For on the day of Pentecost, after Peter has preached to the crowds who have gathered, they cry out, “What shall we do?” He not only replies, “Repent and be baptised, every one of you” (and here for some reason that actually is in Jesus’ name with the expectation of the Spirit), but the Apostles then get to work and baptise 3000 people – we wonder how they did it!

Now I do need to underline that what we’re thinking about here are people who get baptised after deciding to follow Jesus – they are “first generation” Christians who have come to faith from a pagan or Jewish background. They aren’t the children of Christian parents and they certainly aren’t living in a supposedly “Christian” country. I say this to avoid any confusion with child baptism or “christening” – whatever your views may be on that, it’s a whole other ball-game and isn’t in focus here. Jesus is saying (and you really need to hear it without any punctuation!), “Make-disciples-and-baptise-them”. The “making” and the “baptising” go together – and what’s interesting in the Pentecost story is that, straight after their baptism, the new converts “devoted themselves to the Apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer”. They were serious about their new-found faith.

These final (or nearly final) words of Jesus inextricably link Mission and the Trinity. But is there more to this link than making sure we use the right words at baptism? There must be, or Jesus wouldn’t have bothered giving us this apparently trivial detail. In fact he gives us other glimpses of the Trinity in John’s Gospel, telling the disciples that he will ask the Father to send them the Spirit of Truth to teach the world about him; and that, in the power of the Spirit, they will be able to do “greater works” than he has done. We may struggle to work out exactly what’s going on, but it’s clear that Mission means much more than just talking to people about Jesus or seeking to get people to follow Jesus; all three Persons of the Trinity are involved.

This is a huge subject which theologians and missiologists thrive on (I bet you didn’t know that such people existed!). I don’t want us to get bogged down in rarefied academic theories this morning, but these folk have stressed something that’s important: making sure we mention the Trinity when we’re talking about Jesus, realising that we’re not describing him properly if we don’t link him to the Father and the Spirit. The United Reformed Church scholar Colin Gunton wrote that the Gospel “is the Father interrelating with his world by means of the frail humanity of his Son, and by his Spirit enabling us to anticipate … the promised perfection of the creation”. It’s more than just “Jesus saves”.

And there is more, for the Trinity tells us that the three Persons of God exist in perfect communion with each other. We can therefore tell the world that we have a God who longs to draw us, too, into fellow-ship: a wonderful message for folk who feel lonely, isolated or cut off from society – and a challenge to the churches, which must seek to display God’s love by living out that warm sense of inclusion and invitation. The great missionary theologian Lesslie  Newbigin wrote that the Church “exists to continue the mission of Jesus by being a foretaste of the kingdom, a community in which the kingdom’s freedom and joy are already tasted and celebrated in praising and adoring God”. He suggests that the gospel becomes believable when people can see a congregation which truly believes and lives it: Trinity in action.

The Trinity has mystified Christians ever since the time of Jesus. Our human minds find it impossible to work out how God can be One and Three at the same time. No picture or illustration we devise (and I’m sure you’ve heard lots over the years, from three-legged stools, a man who is a father, husband and son, H₂O which can be ice, water or steam, shamrocks, or whatever) actually does the Trinity justice; all fall short in one way or another. That’s doesn’t actually worry me, as I delight in the idea that God is bigger than my brain!

The idea of God as Trinity may puzzle or intrigue us. But we shouldn’t ignore it or say after this service, “Well, that’s got it out of the way for another year”! Our God is a Trinity who sends us forth with his good news of love, life and inclusion. That’s something we can all understand.