The Relational Mission

Word and action. Promises and promises kept. Proclamation and fulfillment. If you want to understand who God is you must view how God both states and acts. He makes promises and he comes through on what he has promised. Many toxic images of God result from the fact that we don’t hold these two in collaborative tension. If we lean toward a God who speaks but his actions are not expected, then we create an image of a god who has a lot to say to us but for the most part it’s up to us to get it right. His talk, our action. Sadly, I see this happening in the "missional" movement today. We think that since God told us to go and "make disciples" then we must go. We act as if God has said all he is going to say and we don't trust that God is actually going ahead of us and with us. But Jesus's final words to the Great Commission are "Look, I myself will be with you every day until the end of this present age." (CEB) If we have an image of ...

How do you communicate to the average person in the church what it means to be on mission with God without using the word "missional"? I've found that most of what has been written about being missional aims at the church leader. Most of the people  worshipping in our churches want to make a difference in this world, but they don't want to learn all the theological language of being "missional." So in my writing over the last couple of years, I've sought to talk about being missional in a way that relates to everyday people. The results will hit the shelves next month in the form of Difference Makers . My aim was to write about a theme in a way that relates to the average person, the kind of person who goes to work everyday — as an accountant, a teacher, a factory worker — and does not have the time or the energy to read thick books about what it means to be a "missional" Christian. The approach taken here is multifaceted. The chapters ...

What does it mean to develop a spirituality that is dispersed into the life we lead seven days a week? What does it mean to move beyond the kind of spirituality that most Western Christians have developed, the kind that Helland and Hjalmarson call “temple spirituality”? In Missional Spirituality , they write, “Temple spirituality is dualistic: Sunday is sacred while Monday through Saturday are secular. Temple spirituality views God as a church-based deity whom we worship once per week, but Jesus was a seven-days-a-week mobile Messiah” (27). Missional spirituality is the metaphorical phrase that the authors use to capture this seven-day-a-week life with God, a phrase that many could easily misunderstand because the term “missional” is being used today to mean so many different things. Everyone, it seems, wants to be missional, but so many can miss the meaning. For instance, it might be tempting to think that this book would be synonymous to something like "evangelistic spritual...

"I have come to see how I am not the protagonist of God's story. In fact, I am not even a main character. This does not diminish my importance or value in God's eyes. It is simply a confession of the fact that God acts and initiates, and our part is simply a response to his initiation. But so often, we focus way too much upon our initiation and too little on what God does." This is a paragraph from a book manuscript that I'm writing. Anyway, a friend has read an early draft of the book and found this paragraph to be helpful. I am been meditating on it over the last few days to see if it is really saying what I want it to say. Here I want to experiment with a few expanded thoughts. Scot McKnight's book, The King Jesus Gospel, helps us to see that in order to understand what the Bible means by the word "gospel" that we need to think in four big ideas: The Story of Israel/the Bible The Story of Jesus The Plan of Salvation The Method of Persu...

I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:14) Whenever we use the word "training" in the church world, we think about conferences, seminars, classes, webinars and written resources. All of these depend upon an expert giving us information, as if information should be classified as "training." Contrast that with training in the sport's world. Athletic training does not require athletes to sit and listen to experts. In fact it can be done with very little input or direction. When my 7th grade football coach gave us instructions about how to prepare over the summer for 8th grade football, he handed out one piece of paper and told us to go do it. Now if you walk into a bookstore, you will find hundreds of magical plans for getting in shape, but the biggest part of the training is just doing it. I wonder if we have made Christian training as difficult and complex as it seems like physical training has become. ...

I'm doing some training in October with a church in Edina, MN. The funny thing is that the church is only about 30 minutes from where I used to live. Anyway, The Table is the name of the church and they are holding a retreat for which they developed a video to promote. I was so impressed by their promotion which you can view here that I asked them if they would do some slight modifications to use. The first time I saw this, I cried. I was moved by the fact that the Spirit was revealing a missional imagination to these leaders. Explore the More from Jeff D. Johnson on Vimeo .

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...

Last Friday night I took my five-year-old to his t-ball game. The first 30 minutes is set aside for practice. While a light rain fell, my son traipsed through the wet grass and tried in vain to climb the soccer goal frame. Then he came back to the car. I told him that he needed to go through the ball with his team. He said to me "It's just practice. I don't need to practice. I'm already good." His comments remind me of how we often live our faith. We tend to emphasize action, radical choices and public declaration. In other words, we prioritize our faith when it's measurable. But no sport works that way. Games are won or lost on the practice field long before the games begin. But this is the way it is with anything worth doing. I've heard stories about how Jim Carrey would practice his facial contortions and unusual noises for hours in front of a mirror. Monet painted over more paintings than we will ever know. Doctors call their daily work "pract...

Have you ever heard about baseball hitters "being in a slump." It refers to an extended time when a player is not hitting the ball well. Unlike basketball or football where the way to break out of a period of below average performance is to either get more aggressive or to rest your body so that you can return with more vigor and effort, the approach in baseball is slightly different. Aggression actually works against you in baseball. Hitting a ball consistently is about allowing your mind and body to relax so that you can swing in a fluid motion that naturally connects with a ball in an unforced manner. The times when I have hit the ball the hardest were the times when I was not trying to swing the hardest. Every time a hitter tries to over-swing he misses the chance to actually apply the restful force that results in a hard hit ball. So to break out of a slump, one has to train the mind and body to exert effort in a restful manner. It sounds counter-intuitive, but that is...

Last night I was teaching a class about how we have to practice church in order to be the church. I was challenging the notion that the practice of church life is primary shaped by our public meetings. I then began to reflect on my years of playing baseball and I realized how many of the drills that we would do don't actually look much like what we did on the field. While there was a resemblance, we would do things with a bat and ball which would be absolutely absurd to do in a game. I'll just site one example: multi-million dollar super-star players will hit a ball off a tee into a net, the same kind of tee my six year old uses in his games. Now if you saw a 250 pound slugger hitting a ball off a tee in a game, that would be just weird, but that is exactly what they do in practice. The way we practice when no no one is looking shapes how we live as the church when people can see us. This goes so far beyond things like having a personal quiet time or being morally upright w...

I am reading David Benner's new book, Opening to God . It's well worth the time. Last night I finished the chapter on what he calls "Attending." He plays off the four parts of Lectio Divina and uses the metaphor of paying attention to help us understand what it means to practice Part 1, which is traditionally called "Lectio." He challenges us to expand our ability to practice Lectio, that is "reading," by calling us to pay attention to what is going on in life around us. He invites us to read life, to read ourselves, and to read creation. He calls us to wake up to what is already present but we don't often see. In many ways, we could apply the four parts of Lectio Divina to the call to "being" missional. It provides us with a tool to see how life on mission is much more than doing some activities that look missional. (As I have stated before, I am not against "doing" missional things. Therefore, don't hear me promoting...