Many live in an area where there are seemingly few, if any, kingdom-minded Christians. What do you consider as the essentials for the planting and local gathering of the church in such areas? I think you've covered that to some extent as far as people. Do you want to add to that? Yeah, maybe I'll add a tiny bit on that. And by the way, Robert, good to hear from you here through the Q&A. It's good to see you. Hope you and Kayleen are doing well.
Yeah, I would say that kind of a related question to that is essentials, how do you define the essentials? And what does that really mean? Because a lot of people who are thinking about the kingdom does it, do you have to include 10 things, nine things, what else in that? And we really try to stress that the essentials are the commands of the New Testament. And what that means is that we're not allowed to pick and choose. It's a high bar, admittedly, but sometimes you'll hear this test in all things.
In non-essentials liberty and all things charity, right? That's the phrase there. In essentials unity and non-essentials liberty and all things charity. And that sounds nice and you know like a good saying, but then it just begs the question, what are the essentials? It doesn't actually really answer very much. And unfortunately, their essentials gets redefined according to the context. And people will treat things that should be essential and they'll say, oh, that's a non-essential. So that's Romans 14.
And so we can agree to disagree about that. I think we have to be striving for the New Testament and it's the totality of its commands. And so you know we talk about sometimes head covering and non-resistance and divorce and remarriage and these kinds of topics there. Those are all essentials. I will say this, though, that we have to remember that it's very, very easy to neglect other commands. So I often say lifting up holy hands is a command of Scripture 1 Timothy 2.
Evangelism, Matthew 28, is a command of Scripture. And there's plenty of things out there that we can be totally stuck on and then be blind on other things. And that is just as bad as the other errors of just neglecting some of those other teachings as well.
So we need to be very zealous here to not be basically giving ourselves a pass on issues that are just hard for us or we don't want to consider there and not be content with anything short of, as what Jesus said in Matthew 28, teaching them to obey everything that I've commanded you, right? That's our mandate as disciple makers and church planters is to teach people to follow everything that Jesus taught.
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