A Turn Towards Mission

Well, I guess it's time I started to unpack some of those pairs. I'll begin with two that are closely related:

Community Focused vs. Internally Focused

The modern church has become a monument to itself. Its facilities, services, programs, and ministries are 90% focused within the church, to provide support, encouragement, inspiration, and community to its members. These are not bad things, but they miss the point. The collective mission of the church is to shine the light of truth into dark places; to share hope with the hopeless, and to just generally act and talk as Jesus would for the world's benefit.

When the people of Jesus lose sight of this core mission, they begin to focus, almost exclusively on themselves. The work of real ministry is replaced with the mounting responsibility of keeping happy church members who mistakenly think the church is supposed to revolve around them. At best, the internally focused church becomes isolated from its surrounding community. At worst, it becomes exclusive and self serving.

So the first step towards becoming a missional church is to learn to think outside ourselves; to reacquaint ourselves with the fact that we serve a purpose in the world, and not just within the walls of our facilities.

Missional vs. Attractional

Of course, not all churches become so internally focused. Some are very committed to service within their communities, and to reaching people with their message. We, however, are not only concerned with whether or not the church gets outside of itself, but how it does so.

The accepted standard for church methodology is to initiate benevolent or evangelistic campaigns with the intent of attracting people back to the church. Thus, the church's focus within the surrounding community is almost exclusively on getting people back into the church. The false assumption at work here is that real church and spiritual life take place nearly exclusively within church initiated and controlled environments.

Furthermore, once the church manages to attract someone, it begins to drive a wedge between them and the communities of which they are already a part. Thus, writers like Hirsch and Frost not only characterize these churches as attractional, but extractional, inasmuch as their intent is to attract people to the programs and resources they have to offer, then extract them from their other community relationships.

We believe this creates a bit of an ivory tower. Church people develop a certain arrogance about the distinctions between who is in and who is out of their group. And the mission is compromised in the sense that, in order for people to experience the good news about Jesus, they must enter into and submit themselves to our organized religion context.

In response, we are sorting out what it means to be genuinely missional, in the sense that getting people back to our facilities or into our programs is not a primary goal, and may not even be important. The missional church functions on a sending model. We are learning to see ourseves as sent out into the community, to connect with people, be a positive influence, and, when given the opportunity, to share the source of our hope.

We don't want to extract people from their current community ties. In fact, we would love it if they began to value Jesus themselves and share that discovery with others they know.

Church, then, becomes not a place to go to or a meeting to attend, but something that simply happens in the context of relationship and communities.

Blessings,
Doug