The Relational Mission

I have many fond memories of the church of my childhood, Foote Baptist Church, located in McKinney, Texas, in what was then a rural setting north of Dallas about 30 miles. One of the most significant memories was the altar call, the time at the end of the three weekly services when the pastor would extend an invitation to make decision for Christ. This decision time was the culmination of the entire service. It was a call to walk the aisle and make a public demonstration that a person was “getting saved.” Later, I was a part of a charismatic church in Houston. At the end of our services, we too emphasized an altar call, though the invitation was not as focused on people making decisions for salvation as much as making decisions to come and get a touch from God’s presence. However, both focused on the importance of making a decision. This practice of making a decision has been shaped historically by the revivalist experiences of the American church. The first and second Great Awaken...

As I survey the landscape of church leadership training—including that which comes from a "missional" perspective, I get concerned about how the focus seems to center around the need to experience some degree of success in church life. By "success" I am not referring to it as an antonym of "failure", which is how we typically view success. I am not espousing some kind of church victim mentality where we revel in failure. Instead, I'm referring to success that we achieve through a form of triumphalism, the kind that comes when we take control and we make things happen for God. The kind that comes when we put the mission of God on our own shoulders so that we can avoid suffering, pain, and deep questions that stir our souls. It's a subtle lie, one that arises when we talk about grace when we preach, but the rest of church is something we as leaders assume is our responsibility so that we can make church work. The only remedy to this kind of triumph...

  John Howard Yoder is most known for his theological work in ethics and non-violence. However, from 1964-1983, Yoder taught a class on theology of mission. This book is a editorial revision of the recorded lectures from that class. While the content pre-dates the current missional conversation initiated by Lesslie Newbigin and furthered by the publication of Missional Church , edited by Darrel Guder, et al., it’s message is a prophetic and welcomed voice to the missional conversation. Yoder’s theology interprets mission through the perspective of what he calls “believer’s church.” As is consistent with the rest of Yoder’s body of work, he works through his chosen topic from an Anabaptistic perspective. His contributions add considerable weight to the conversation of mission in the North American context. Some of these contributions include the following. First, Yoder emphasizes the importance of the dynamics of the church as faithful covenant partners to mission in the world....

Last week, I wrote a post that challenged the practice of complaining about the things we see wrong . Most specifically, I challenged the habit we have in the church of complaining about stuff over which we have no direct influence. We like to complain about our concerns and we get stuck there. But this raises the question: What do we do with our concerns? Or What do we do about the things we see going on in our world over which we have little to no influence? Besides re-posting something on Facebook, is there another option? The answer is found in one word: Lament. But we don't lament in our culture. We don't lament in our churches. We don't even talk about lamenting and how central it is to the a biblical imagination. Just read the Psalms or the first chapter of Nehemiah. It's all over the place. We understand complaining. But we don't understand lamenting. Jesus said, "Blessed are those who mourn." This is the most paradoxical of all the b...

In my previous post , I offered three different ways that people commonly "imagine" the missional conversation. Our imagination works as a kind of interpretive grid or pre-understanding that we bring to the subject. So when we hear a word like "missional" we see what we expect. Here is a quick summary of the three common interpretive grids that I've observed are: A Redeemed Society-The church possesses truth that outsiders need and the mission is conceived as getting outsiders to become insiders. In some ways this is a bit like an enclave that could be escapist , where insiders have truth and outsiders are welcome, as long as they believe and behave like the insiders. A Redeeming Society-The church on mission is primarily viewed as action, what we do for the sake of the world. This imagination is characterized by energy , expressiveness, and enterprise. It's about getting the mission done and making an impact. A Redemptive Society-The mission is viewed ...

In Missional Small Groups , I introduced the four stories of small group life, which provide a way of talking about the vision for how we live in community and on mission that gets us beyond church structures and strategies. Instead I identified four common stories that describe typical patterns of life in the church. They are: The Story of Personal Improvment The Story of Lifestyle Adjustment The Story of Relational Revision  The Story of Missional Re-creation In most of the churches with whom I work, the desire is to experience the latter two, but the reality of most people in the church reflects the first two. There are many strategies that can move us into relational wholeness and missional engagement. However before we jump into the middle of answers related to the question of "What do we do?" it is important to talk about the imagination that we have when we talk about things like community and mission. I've found that it is quite easy to use the same word...

Church buildings dot the landscape in Western countries. Many are old and represent an bygone era. Some are very new and look more like modern shopping malls or office buildings. Most fall somewhere in between. These edifices are an unquestioned part of Western culture. The church has become so unquestioned that we rarely think about the role or the purpose the church plays from God’s perspective. For most, it is assumed that the church provides spiritual services for the sake of people who feel that they need such things. Sadly, the idea that the church is a provider of spiritual goods and services is not limited to those outside church life. Many faithful church members perceive the church as being a spiritual association that is primarily designed to provide a certain set of spiritual services. And if those services are not met according to their liking, there are plenty of church options who may meet their needs better. As a result the church is often viewed as a spiritual vend...

In June, my new book Difference Makers is released. This is a book that aims at the person in the pew who is asking the question of how his or her life can make a difference. While I was writing this book for individuals, an ongoing subtext was how we as difference-making individuals participate in the people of God, the church, which is called to be a difference-making society. The question for us is How then do we make a difference? The church is much more than just a group of individuals who make a difference on their own. We need to have an imagination that sees the church as a soceity. In Stanley Hauerwas' commentary on Matthew he writes about the church in his introductory reflections on the Sermon on the Mount. He called the people of God a "society." I like this word because it pulls back the curtains on what the church is called to be, something much more than an institution that provides religious meetings once per week. It helps us to see how Jesus was and...

When we think about the church we often think about it in functional terms. We ask questions about what church is for, what it does for people and what purpose it has. It is a place or an activity where we get something or we go and do something. In discussions about the church tend to talk about axiological questions, i.e. values, priorities, and activities which are important for accomplishing a certain set of goals. There is an ontological assumption behind the axiological focus that rarely gets addressed. Most of our talk is about what the church does for us as individuals. Ontologically, we define ourselves as individuals so we talk about church through the lens of the individualistic way of being. We think of life as individualistly lived, and the church is an organization that promotes various ways following Jesus as individuals. The church is therefore defined ontologically as being an entity, whether small and organic or large and organziational, that serves as source of l...

Lesslie Newbigin wrote the following in 1963: "The Western world has had to be recognized once again as a mission field, and the Churches have been compelled in a new way to define their nature and mission as parts of a divine society distinct from the wider society of nations in which they live, and all these factors have contributed to developments in the field of theology in the direction of a missionary understanding of the nature of the Church itself." (Newbigin, Trinitarian Doctrine for Today's Mission, 12). I grew up on a farm. While most of our tools, tractors and implements were very basic and some were a few years old, I was trained in the ways of farming that depended upon machinery. I remember the day that my father brought home a brand new round bailer. It was a revolutionary machine because we could form hay into a form that could feed cows for a week instead of the small bails that would only last a day. We were fully dependent upon such machines in our pat...

No this is not the Horton from Horton Hears a Who. That Horton is an elephant who hears something that no one else can hear. With his huge ears he hears the people of Whoville, that live on a speck of dust. (You can tell that I have young children.) The Horton of this post is Michael Horton, a Reformed theologian and a prolific author. I am processing his assessment of American Christianity in his book Christless Christianity. He provide a cogent critique of the popular version of Christianity by associating it with two themes. First he recognizes that it is another form of legalism that is based not on rules but on good advice about how one can become a better person. As a result, there is no recognition of sin or a problem in our world from which we need to be saved, except for the fact that we don't understand who we are and that we simply need to believe the right things about ourselves.  The second theme is that of Gnosticism. He observes that common talk about God claims that...

Last week I was in San Antonio and had a bit of time to walk about the Alamo. I had done so years ago, but I was in college and I don't think I could appreciate the gravity of what transpired on that plot of ground. It was a bit weird for me to walk around in the very place where things transpired that shaped history in significant ways. There a little under 200 volunteers stood for something in which they believed against all odds of victory and impending death. They fought for independence from Mexico, but the reality is that they did not really know what they were fighting for. They did not have great philosophical leaders like those who led the American Colonies to fight for independence from England. They did not have a clear picture of the future of Texas. They only know that what they had been experiencing was not working. And the fact is that many of the volunteers did not even have a first hand experience of the Mexican government because they were part of Davy Crockett...