The Relational Mission

I am in the middle of writing a short chapter on the call for the church to be a contrast society. I believe this is a concrete way we can talk about the practical implications of being a missional church. Even with this the practicalities are vague in nature. But we can easily say that it is impossible to be on mission in a neighborhood unless the people with a mission live in a distinctive way. Too much of our imagination has been about evangelizing people church participation that resembles a club membership more than a way of life. Those within the church typically live life in much the same way as the wider culture. The patterns of consumerism, individualism, isolationism are not just part of the life of the church members, they actually shape the imagination of how we should be shaping our churches. 

I grew up with sheep. My Father always had a small flock  on the property near our house. Quite honestly, I did not like working with them. They required a lot of attention. They were rather frail, easily frightened, and needed protection from the elements. There were not like the cattle we owned who were more self-sufficient. They were highly dependent.  This was especially true of the weakest sheep. Young lambs would wonder off and we lost many to preditors, even though we had a fence that enclosed the flock. We were always monitoring, protecting, tending, and healing these frail animals.  From my experience with sheep, I find it a bit offensive that the Scriptures often compare us to them. Most of the time I like to think of myself as strong and self-sufficient. The independent, self-made mindset rebels against this association. And I assume that if I act rightly and perform according to expectations that I am worthy of God's attention and love. It is hard for me to imagine othe...

As I am writing about the nature of the Missional Church, I think about the previous shifts in the church over the last 2000 years. The shift from Jerusalem based Messianism to Antioch based Christianity. From an underground network of counter-cultural revolutionaries to a government-backed religious movement. The split between the Greek and Latin churches. The Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. I think about Martin Luther or Menno Simmons and how they had an experience of the church that did not prepare them for the radical shifting of the church that was transpiring. The future of the Reformation church was not an extension of the church that they knew from their past. Martin Luther knew how to be a good Catholic, but he did not know what it meant to lead people into this new thing that the church was becoming.  The future of the church at this point in history is not a logical extension of the church that I know from my past. I know this from my experience with Shepherd Commun...

In my leadership at my church, I wrestle almost every week about what it means for us to move into a missional way of being the church. It is so easy for our leadership team to grab hold of easy answers to the question of what our church will look like in the future. We are tempted to label a structure for the future church and define all of the new structures that we will provide for the church. We try to define the church around geographic mid-size churches or we try to predict that our church will become a network or networks of small groups. But there is a problem here. We assume that changing the structure will change the people. But if you move a person from sitting in a weekend service with 1800 people into a group of 300 people or into a house of 15, we cannot assume that people grasp the nature of a missional perspective on the church. We can change the language and the structures of the church all we want, but to assume that we have changed the people is just plane stupid.  B...