imagining how the church can reorient around mission

Being "Missional" is currently the hot topic of conversation among churches, denominations, and networks everywhere. Most church and network websites have at least a mention of their missional posture, if it is not the central focus. There remains a disconnect, however, between being missional and joining God's global mission, with neither being informed by the other. Many churches appear to actually be choosing between the two, focusing either on justice ministry in their local context or involving themselves in global missionary efforts (you can read a previous post I wrote on the topic here). The question is, how do we fully embrace missional without losing the mission?

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Lesslie Newbigin has made significant contributions to ecclesiology.  First, along with with Bosch, he helped recover the missionary nature of the church by reminding us that mission is not primarily a task given the church, but the church in her essence is missionary, just as God is a missionary God.  His eschatological vision of all people from all over the world under one God, drove his ecumenical spirit to seek to bring what he saw as three ecumenical streams (preaching of the gospel, right administration of the sacraments and the Pentecostal approach) together. He shares the strengths that the various branches of Christianity have, but how all are necessary.  He demonstrates through Acts 19 that the main question is: “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” Not what Protestants might ask, “Did you believe exactly what we teach?” And not what Catholics or Orthodox might ask, “Were the hands that were laid on you our hands” (156)? The Holy Spirit unifies the body of Christ.  Finally, Newbigin brought significant clarity to the “relationship between ecclesiology, mission and the contemporary Western culture” (157). He brought to light people’s epistemological presuppositions, thus he has helped the church to both affirm and critique culture; modernity (modern scientific rationality that led to individualism) on the one hand, and the “nihilism and hopelessness” of postmodernity on the other.  Newbigin helped us understand the importance of becoming missionaries to our own culture, thus enrichening our understanding of contextualization.

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I am enjoying processing the following missional themes with leaders from a local church (which has had an active congregation for more than a century!). I’m more accustomed to doing training with pioneering leaders and church planters via a process CA’s president and I developed called INFUSE.  In this case I’ve built upon the INFUSE themes, with some new material added and a more simplified approach that frames the themes as a series of core questions. It is going very well so far, and the primary pastor seems quite pleased. I’ll soon be preaching at this church, so we’ll see how that could be additive to the DNA embedding process.

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Lesslie Newbigin wrote,

“…the missionary is assailed by three temptations: the first is to bury himself in the affairs of the church and to evade real meeting with the non-Christian culture. The second is to engage in a flurry of welfare activities of the kind most likely to be popular at the moment with the powers that be. The third is to align himself with the most sympathetic leaders of the other religions in the profession of loyalty to ‘truth’ the implication being that ‘truth’ is something which transcends and includes both his message and theirs.”  read more

Did you catch the line they shared about how they viewed the poverty and hardship of the township they minister in?  They were told to, "Look at the gap – what it is now and what it will be when Jesus returns."  I don't think we can do mission adequatley unless we have both a clear Kingdom theology and and a mature eschatology (beliefs about the end times).  

After spending time with these two this last summer, I was humbled and inspired to look at and live differnently in the city I reside in.   read more

I get the pleasure of being a part of Christian Associates’ North American Engage this weekend in Portland, Oregon (Portlandia – You Gotta Watch This!!!).  What a pleasure it is to meet and encourage a crew of folks who have set there sights on multiplying missional communities in some of the most amazing cities of the world.  We have people interested from Germany, the UK, Norway, and Latin and North America.  If you would make a note to remember to pray for them as they get poke and prodded a bit and as they further investigate the next steps for their lives (a weighty proposition, indeed) it would be deeply appreciated!

Thanks!

If you follow “The Drum” you have realized that it was deluged during the month of January by guest bloggers.  These fine people (18-22 year olds) were students of mine from Whitworth University who were in a course I teach called, "The Missional Church (Hey, back off. I named it before it was faddish)."  Their assignment was to publicly blog throughout the term.  I shamelessly volunteered mine for the exercise.  That wasn’t all they were to do, but we felt a little global exposure would be healthy as they processed the grand narratives of missionality in western culture.

I hope you enjoyed their honest and sometimes raw thoughts about the mission of God, our culture and how the Bride of Christ is to interact with both.  read more

I think this is absolutely brilliant by Keller (HT – Brian Newman).  

He talks about the slippery slope of religion – here are his steps: read more

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In The Gathered And Scattered Church, Hugh Halter talks about the differences between modalic and sodalic ministry. Modalic ministries would be classic evangelical or mainline churches. Sodalic ministries would be parachurches or other missional agencies. I began wondering as I started this chapter as to why we even need modalic churches. It seems as if today’s churches just are not working. They are not successfully pursuing mission and scattering people from the church to go out and spread the good news. Halter even refers to this type of ministry as nothing more than a “hospital, social/spiritual club, or a teaching center.”

            Halter believes that sodalic ministry is the “other arm of the church.” Without this type of ministry, it just can’t work. Why aren’t these churches using both of these arms to effectively carry out missional ministry? I thought it was interesting how he used biblical text, something that we are all familiar with, be associated with these two types of ministries – The Great Commission. read more