The Relational Mission

“The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.” —Hebrews 1:3 God is only known by us if God himself reveals himself to us. I do not have the ability to see God rightly from within the way that I see the world. Left to myself, I am stuck in a closed loop, like a race car perpetually racing around the same track. Every new thought, every new perception is simply an incremental advance upon what is already known. In other words, when it comes to God and my understanding of God, my "looped" way limits, dulls and even prevents me from seeing what God is really like. Therefore I project my experience in my loop of life upon God. I cannot not do this. This has in fact shaped much of the history of various conceptions of god. We need not go beyond Greek mythology to see how the gods were projections fro...

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...

I've read a ton on the topic of "missional." I read just about everything that mentions the word. A few years ago I picked up a book entitled The Attractional Church . Since I interviewed the author for my first magazine article back in 1996, I was interested in what he had to say. Surprisingly, I found comments about missional in a book on attractional. The author wrote: "Being 'missional' is an individual responsibility—each of us must accept the responsibility to share Christ with others in any given situation.       "Being 'incarnational' is an individual responsibility—our transformation into the image of Christ by the renewing of our minds cannot be dictated from the pulpit but must come as a desire from within. Biblical instruction is necessary here.       "Being 'attractional' is a corporate responsibility—the leadership of the local church has the responsibility to present Christ and His Kingdom as perfectly...

Long before "missional" became a popular theme, Lesslie Newbigin wrote the following in 1963, identifying the "missional" nature of God's people: "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 the developments in the field of theology in the direction of a missionary understanding of the nature of the Church itself. The truth that the Church is itself something sent into the world, the continuation of Christ's mission from the Father, something which is not so much an institution as an expedition sent to the ends of the earth in Christ's name, has been grasped with new vividness" ( Trinitarian Doctrine for Today's Mission , 12) I have something like six shelves of books that in some way r...

God is a missional God. The Spirit of God is moving across creation to restore all things. There is nothing beyond the reach of God's redeeming touch. God calls his people to join him in his mission. Some churches (and small groups) step into the flowing river of God's mission. Others don't. In this post I want to identify one of the most significant things that keeps God's people from joining God in his difference-making venture. I call it "Attacking Easy Targets." Ultimately we are complaining ourselves out of mission as we place blame and pick fights. Like a bully at a playground who picks on those who cannot fight back, there has been much ink used and tons of rhetoric spoken by church leaders attacking these easy targets. These easy targets fall into the category of things about which we are concerned but over which we have little to no influence. Target #1: The Culture The first set of opinions can be grouped under the label “There’s a problem wit...

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 ...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer observes in the opening paragraph of his book Ethics that those seeking a Christian ethic "must give up, as inappropriate to this topic, the two very questions that led them to deal with the ethical problem: 'How can I be good?' and 'How can I do something good?'" His words challenge the notion that the goal of Christian ethics is to find out how an individual can become good or how an individual can change the world for the good by his or her actions. He wrote, "Of ultimate importance, then, is not that I become good, or that the condition of the world be improved by my efforts, but that the reality of God show itself everywhere to be the ultimate reality." (See the translation on pages 46-7 pg Vol 6 in the Dietrich Bonhoffer Works series.) Practically speaking this means that Christian ethics is a focus on the ultimate reality that "God be known as good, even at the risk that I and the world are revealed as not good....

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...

Mission, being on mission, being missional—anything having to do with this topic—is popular. Just type in "missional" on Amazon and see just how many books come up. How do you navigate the various options. No church leader will disagree with the call for the church to be on mission, but there is all kinds of disagreement about what this means. The best book on this topic is The Missional Church in Perspective by Craig Van Gelder and Dwight Zscheile. In it, these authors map out the various trends by looking at tons of books on the subject. They offer 4 primary branches and additional sub-branches under each of those four. Reading this book is worth the time. I've found that most leaders have not taken the time to understand the kind of mission that they are leading people on. From my research, I've developed a simplified way of comparing the various perspectives of mission in the church. This is not so much based on any sets of books, but on how I see leaders actua...

A few years ago, a prominent church leader was promoting the mantra "The church is the hope of the world." I'm not entirely sure who it was, but I remember it being a popular saying. At first glance, this looks like a great way of talking about role of the church in the world. I've been thinking about it a bit more as I'm working on revisions to my next book, which are due much quicker than I'd like. It seems to me that we have to think about what we mean by church and it's mission in the world a bit more. The church's mission is itself. For many, the mission of the church is growing itself. The assumption that if the church grows that the world will be impacted. The mission of the church with this mindset it to enlist church members to help gather more people. The church has a mission. In this imagination, mission is one of the things that it does, alongside other things. Mission is the outreach activity and a part if it's church strategy. U...

We settle for works of mission instead of God's mission. We replace doing things that look like mission for participating in the deep things that God is doing in our world. We are a people of action. We want to become "externally-focused." We want to see "movement" growth happen. We want "exponential." Don't get me wrong. I think our intentions are good. We want to see people get saved, the church grow and the world changed. We want to see love shared. We believe that God's mission expands as we do "small things with great love." And I agree with all of this. But we overlook at deeper truth. Too often the church is trying to share love that it has not it's encountered and experienced. I'd like to draw from the words of Kierkegaard in his great book Works of Love : "Love's hidden life is in the innermost being, unfathomable, and then in turn is in an unfathomable connectedness with all existence. Just as the quiet la...

Today, I picked up The Sky is Falling by Alan Roxburgh and reread the introduction. There you will find two paragraphs that summarize the call to be missional as well as any I've read. I quote them here because they help us think about what it means to live in missional community. "Throughout Western societies, especially in North America, there has occurred a fundamental shift in the understanding and practice of the Christian story. It is no longer about God and what God is about in the world; it is about how God serves and meets human needs and desires. It is about how the individual self can find its own purposes and fulfillment. More specifically, our churches have become spiritual food courts for the personal, private, inner needs of expressive individuals. The result is a debased, compromised, derivative form of Christianity that is not the gospel of the Bible at all. The biblical narrative is about God's mission in, through, and for the sake of the world and how...