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...

Small group meetings are important. If you don't do meetings that well, then people will not want to explore life together outside the group. However, if we don't have much life interaction outside the meeting, how good can the meetings actually be? It's a chicken and egg thing. Good group meetings can lead to life together. And life together generates good group meetings. In order to have great small groups the goal cannot be to have a great group meeting. As soon as we put the success of a group meeting in the cross hair, then we will miss one another. The point of it all is to love one another. We have great meetings to the extent that we see the other persons, when we encounter them in truth, and when we serve the other. Great group meeting occur when we turn our faces to one another and we experience the other. When we value the success of the group meeting over the people in the meeting, then we fail. It's a paradox. We actually have a great group exp...

In yesterday's post , I asked the question related to why it is so hard for people to enter into community. Most of the time, we look for ways to fix this problem.  They usually come in the form of "6 Ideas for Taking Your Group to the Next Level" or "3 Sure-Fire Ways to Turn Your Group Around." Posts like that are needed. But this is not one of those. Sometimes I think we try to fix the problems in our groups without going deeply enough to identify the real issues. So we medicate the lack of community, while we become numb to what the Spirit of God really wants to do. The problem though is that the Spirit of God usually does not work as fast as we want him to. We want to "get over" the problem of the lack of community. While God wants to lead us into the painful reality that we are not very good at living in community. He wants to reveal show us that we don't know how to love others very well. That "considering others as more important th...

What does it mean to live in community in small groups? Or as a part of a church? Or in missional communities? Or with others who are holding us accountable, i.e. groups of two or three? When we think of community, too many times we think of it in terms of preferential love, which means that we will relate to others as long as they are pleasing to us. I've been reading and rereading Soren Kierkegaard's Works of Love recently. He has some challenging insights and reflections on what it means to love our neighbor. "Thus the neighbor is the person who is nearer to you than anyone else, yet not in the sense of preferential love, since to love someone who in the sense of preferential love is nearer than anyone else is self-love—'do not the pagans also do the same?'" The neighbor, then, is nearer to you than anyone else. ... 'the neighbor' is what thinkers call 'the other.' that by which the selfishness in self-love is to be tested." (21) This ...

When people talk about "missional community," the first thing you had better do is ask what they mean. Some use this as a label to describe task groups that are reaching out and ministering to a specific group of people or location. Others use it to refer to a group of 20-50 people, a mid-sized group, that has a mission beyond just living in community; in other words it refers to a specific structure. Reggie McNeal uses these words to describe what he calls a "post-congregational" church experience, which basically means that the coming of the missional community experience marks a shift from a centralized, building-centered church to a scattered one. While these description of missional community can be helpful for church leaders to understand their purpose and structure, I've not found them to be that compelling when talking with grass-roots people. That is, the regular people in the church who want to see God move through and even those  who do not attend a...

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...

"He [Jesus] appeared, as the Scripture makes clear, to those who had been chosen beforehand as witnesses. They are chosen not for themselves, not to be the exclusive beneficiaries of God's saving work, but to be the bearers of the secret of his saving work for the sake of all. They are chosen to go and bear fruit. To be chosen, to be elect, therefore does not mean that the elect are the saved and the rest are the lost. To be elect in Christ Jesus, and there is no other election, means to be incorporated into his mission to the world, to be the bearer of God's saving purpose for his whole world, to be the sign and the agent and the firstfruit of his blessed kingdom which is for all. It means therefore, as the New Testament makes abundantly clear, to take our share in his suffering, to bear the scars of the passion. It means, as Paul says elsewhere, to bear in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of the risen Jesus may be manifest and make available for others....

"The mission of the Church is to be understood, can only be rightly understood, in terms of the trinitarian model. It is the Father who holds all things in his hand, whose province upholds all things, whose tender mercies are aver all his works, where he is acknowledged and where he is denied, and who has never left himself without witness to the heart and conscience and reason of any human being. In the incarnation of the Son, he has made known his nature and purpose fully and completely, for in Jesus "all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell (Col 1:19). But his presence was veiled presence in order that there might be the possibility of repentance and freely given faith. In the Church the mission of Jesus is continued in the same veiled form. It is continued through the presence and active working of the Holy Spirit, who is the presence of the reign of God in foretaste. The mission of the Church to all the nations, to all human communities in all their diversity and in ...

“We look at what has been given to us in our Scriptures and in Jesus and try to understand why we have a church in the first place, what the church, as it is given to us, is. We are not a utopian community. We are not God’s avenging angels. I want to look at what we have, what the church is right now, and ask, Do you think that maybe this is exactly what God intended when he created the church? Maybe the church as we have it provides the very conditions and proper company congenial for growing up in Christ, for becoming mature, for arriving at the measure of the stature of Christ. Maybe God knows what he is doing, giving us church, this church. (Eugene Peterson, Practice Resurrection , 14). I love this passage from Peterson but I also have a distain for it. He brings us as leaders into the realm of sober reality while not leaving us to settle for reality as we know it. Too many writers and speakers about the church are in the business of talking about an ideal utopia. They pull on ou...

“The fact that Christian faith becomes increasingly a matter of personal decision can be misunderstood to mean that Christianity is concerned only with the narrow range of personal moral problems. When this happens, there is a grave danger that the Gospel may be mistaken for a mere offer of individual and private salvation, like the mystery religions which were its rivals during the first centuries of its mission. … The Gospel is concerned with something greater, with the redemption of the world, including precisely those realms of human life which are being so drastically secularized in our day. (Newbigin, Trinitarian Doctrine for Today’s Mission, 60). This sounds good. It resembles things we have heard in the Bible. But if truth be told, it is hard for most Western Christians to even begin to think about the Gospel and salvation in these terms. Salvation is most often seen as a personal experience that we have so that we have a personal relationship with Jesus, deal with our moral p...

“The difference is that these churches must now ‘package’ their spiritual ‘values’ in accordance with the dictates of the market, which means that they must effectively vacate the specifically Christian content of their life and language.             Under the terms of this agreement, whatever it means to be a Christian can no longer be tied to the practices that constitute the church as a social body visibly, publicly manifesting the intrusion of God’s apocalyptic regime into the world, but must be limited to mattes of the soul, leaving the body to the authority of the powers and economic principalities of the age. Christian identity and church authority are thus disembodied, relegated to a separate sphere of private life, transvalued into ‘religion,’ that is, habits and practices that are useful for both depicting the mysterious and invisible whole taht is the body politic of the modern state and global market, and also for c...

Missional Reflection #8 in a series where I quote a theologian and reflect on how it might shape a missional imagination. This quote is from Henri Nouwen.   "To pray is to unite ourselves with Jesus and lift up the whole world through him to God in a cry for forgiveness, reconciliation, healing and mercy. To pray, therefore, is to connect whatever human struggle or pain we encounter—whether starvation, torture, displacement of peoples, or any form of physical and mental anguish—with the gentle and humble heart of Jesus. ...   Prayer is leading every sorrow to the source of all healing; it is letting the warmth of Jesus' love melt away the cold anger of resentment; it is opening a space where joy replaces sadness, mercy supplants bitterness, love displaces fear, gentleness and care overcome hatred and indifference. But most of all, prayer is the way to become and remain part of Jesus' mission to draw all people to the intimacy of God's love." (Henri Nouwen, The O...

Missional Reflection #7 in a series where I quote a theologian and reflect on how it might shape a missional imagination. This quote is from Jacques Ellul. "Christians who are conformed to the world introduce into the Church the value-judgments and concepts of the world. They believe in action. They want efficiency. They give first place to economics, and they think that all means are good. ... They are denied by their sociological milieu. The protestant thinks to adopt this the means which the world employs. Since he finds those means useful in his profession, or in his leisure time, they stand so high in his estimation that eh cannot see why he should not introduce them into the Church and make the things of the spirit dependent upon them. He never faces the problem of these means. ... They are effective. Hence they are good. Since they are in a sanctified world and are effective, why not make use of them in the Church? The criteria of his thinking as a Christian are...

Missional Reflection #6 in a series where I quote a theologian and reflect on how it might shape a missional imagination. This quote is from Eugene Peterson. “So, why church? The short answer is because the Holy Spirit formed it to be a colony of heaven in the country of death. … Church is the core element in the strategy of the Holy Spirit for providing human witness and physical presence to the Jesus-inaugurated kingdom of God in this world. It is not that kingdom complete, but it is a witness to that kingdom.… Church is an appointed gathering of named people in particular places who practice a life of resurrection in a world in which death gets the biggest headlines. … The practice of resurrection is an intentional, deliberate decision to believe and participate in resurrection life, life out of death, life that trumps death, life that is the last word, Jesus life.” (Peterson, Practice Resurrection, 12) Why church indeed? If we are really honest, much of the time church seems ...

This morning I was in Wal-Mart and saw once again the popular books that continue to be on the best-seller’s list about heaven and the after life. We are fascinated with questions about the hear after. We want to hear the story about 90 Minutes in Heaven and want to know if the little boy can tell us if Heaven is for Real . Is it true that Love Wins or are we just Erasing Hell ? Americans are fascinated with the afterlife. I guess I should not be surprised by this phenomenon after watching the frenzy of book buying that occurred with the Left Behind series. So much of American Christianity has been built upon the question of what happens after death. This made me want to write a book with the title 90 Years of Heaven on Earth or Heaven on Earth is for Real . But as soon as I say that, I wonder if the conservative contingent out there will automatically pigeonhole me into some kind of liberal camp. Nonetheless, I cannot get all wrapped up in this afterlife ranting. To a Jew listeni...

Missional Reflection #5 in a series where I quote a theologian and reflect on how it might shape a missional imagination. This quote is from Henri Nouwen. “Our society is not a community radiant with the love of Christ, but a dangerous network of domination and manipulation in which we can easily get entangled and lose our soul. The basic question is whether we ministers of Jesus Christ have not already been so deeply molded by the seductive powers of our dark world that we have become blind to our own and other people’s fatal state and have lost the power and motivation to swim for our lives. Just look for a moment at our daily routine. In general we are very busy people. We have many meetings to attend, many visits to make, many services to lead. Our calendars are filled with appointments, our days and weeks filled with engagements, our years filled with plans and projects. There is seldom a period in which we do not know what to do, and we move through life in such a distracted ...

Missional Reflection #4, a series where I quote a theologian and reflect on how it might shape a missional imagination. This quote from David Bosch. “There is a tendency in Protestantism to stress the vertical relationship between God and the individual in such a way that it is distinct from the horizontal relationship between people; however, the “vertical line” is also a covenant line with the community. Theologically—and practically—this means that Christology is incomplete without ecclesiology and without Pneumatology. We cannot speak about Christ, the Lord and Savior, without speaking about his Body—his liberated and saved community. By the same token, the Spirit, in the New Testament dispensation, is not given to individuals, but to the community. If our mission is to be Christological and pneumatological, it also has to be ecclesial, in the sense of being the one mission of the one church.” (Bosch, Transforming Mission) In many cases, community is incidental and sometimes ev...

This is the third installment of my weekly Missional Reflections where I quote a theologian and then reflect on how that might challenge our common understanding of being missional. This quote from David Bosch. “In the new image mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God. God is a missionary God. ‘It is not the church that has a mission of salvation to fulfill in the world; it is the mission of the Son and the Spirit through the Father that includes the church’ (Moltmann 1977:64). Mission is thereby seen as a movement from God to the world; the church is viewed as an instrument for that mission. There is church because there is mission, not vice versa. To participate in mission is to participate in the movement of God’s love toward people, since God is a fountain of sending love.” (Bosch, Transforming Mission, 390) If we are going to see that the call to mission is much more than doing certain things that we deem as “missional,” the place to start i...

This is the second installment of my weekly Missional Reflections where I quote a theologian and then reflect on how that might challenge our common understanding of being missional. This quote from Stanley Hauwerwas. "To emphasize the idea of character is to recognize that our actions are also acts of self-determination; in them we not only reaffirm what we have been but also determine what we will be in the future. By our actions we not only shape a particular situation, we also form ourselves to meet future situations in a particular way. Thus the concept of character implies that moral goodness is primarily a prediction of persons and not acts, and that this goodness of persons is not automatic but must be acquired and cultivated."(Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue, 49.) There is such a thing as missional character. This idea challenges us to go beyond questions of what can we do to be better at doing missional acts. It calls us to think about missional community as somethi...

This is the 1st installment of my weekly Missional Reflections where I quote a theologian and then reflect on how that might challenge our common understanding of being missional. The first is a quote from one of my favorite theologians, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. "Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. In the end all his disciples abandoned him. On the cross he was all alone, surrounded by criminals and the jeering crowds. He had come for the express purpose of bringing peace to the enemies of God. So Christians, too, belong not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the midst of enemies. There they find their mission, there work. ... "According to God's will, the Christian church is a scattered people, scattered like seed 'to all the kingdoms of the earth (Deut. 28:25). That is the curse and the promise. God's people must live in distant lands among unbelievers, but they will be the seed of the kingdom of God in all the world." (Bonhoeffer, Life...