5 Views of Mission & Missional Church

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 actually leading their churches.

The church's mission is itself. For many leaders, the mission of the church is the growth and success of the church itself. The assumption is that if the church grows that the world will be impacted. This a a very church centered approach and anything that is done is usually controlled from the center. The mission of the church with this mindset it to enlist church members to help the church do its unique mission more effectively.

The church has a mission. In this imagination, mission is one of the things that the church does, alongside other purposes like worship, community an teaching. Mission is the outreach activity and a part if its church strategy. Usually, this comes with statements like "if everything is mission then nothing is mission." 

The church is on mission. Those who take this perspective, emphasize the work of the church in the world. Usually there is a focus on doing what Jesus would do in the world. This sounds very correct, but usually it comes with a set of rules and lists of what Jesus would or would not be doing in this mission. 

The church is mission. In this point of view, the church does not have a mission, the way of the church is the mission. The church is viewed as a enclave that is withdrawn from the world and is not so much called to impact or engage the world but to be a world in and of itself. 

The church participates in God's mission. This view seeks to discover how to encounter the God of mission and join the Spirit who is on mission. The focus is not just on "what" we do, but even more so on "who" we are. The church seeks to develop practices that help people engage the local context and join in on what they see the Spirit of God doing in the local. The focus lies on what God is doing on the fringes, in our local neighborhoods, and not so much about what's happening at the church center.

How do you see the mission of the church?

Comments

Anonymous said…
This is a helpful summary, Scott. Would you see these five lining up on a continuum from 1 as the most church-centric toward 5 being the most Spirit-centric understanding of mission?
March 7, 2013 at 8:19 AM
Scott Boren said…
Schoon, I actually thought about using a spectrum to talk about these five. I think we may see this in the same way, but the problem is that when you use the words "church" and "Spirit" every reader has their own definitions of this. My fifth category emphasizes church as much if not more than the first. And everyone has a different perspective of what it means to be Spirit-centric. What do you think about 1 being organization based or institution based where 5 might be neighborhood based. I'm not sure I like this either. I'd love to have other ideas. ???
March 7, 2013 at 8:28 PM
Andrew Mason said…
Great topic here. Scott, where would the "Purpose-Driven" Church model fit into these 5?
March 7, 2013 at 11:13 PM
Scott Boren said…
Mason. Great question. If you were to analyze the language of the Purpose-Driven Literature it would fall into the second category. However a church could actually manifest the 5 purposes in any of these views. I'm trying to write a short paper on this but no time to finish it.
March 8, 2013 at 6:09 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blessed are Mourners: Beatitudes Pt 7

I've been trying for two weeks to write this post. I knew what I wanted to write, but I did not know (the kind of "knowing" that really matters) what this beatitude means. After all, it is the most paradoxical of all the beatitudes. On the surface it makes no sense whatsoever. If a synonym for blessed is "happy," as some translations put it, and mourning is associated with unhappiness, then in some ways Jesus is saying "happy are the unhappy." At the very least, we must admit that Jesus' way of seeing happiness is absolutely different than the common ways that we view it in our culture. I think part of the insight we need comes from the shortest verse in the Bible: "Jesus wept" (John 11:35). Over what was he weeping? Lazarus' death? The fact that he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead? That his followers did not have faith? I've heard all of these reasons and while any of them might be true, I think there is something that ...
Read more

Form Without Presence

During the time of Jesus the temple faith possessed all the right forms, liturgies and rituals but those things became ends in and of themselves. The temple religion was practiced in order to sustain and reinforce the temple religion. We don't read any stories about Second Temple Judiasm that come anywhere close to resembling those of the first temple or the Tabernacle where the presence of God was manifest and revealed. It seems as though they had all the forms without the ultimate goal of those forms. I think this is an easy trap for us today in the modern church. The questions about church, how to make the church work, how to keep the church running, how to make the church relevant, how the church can grow, or even how the church can be more biblical can lead us down a similar path. It's as if we think that when we find the magical church pill all will suddenly be well with the world. Over the last 40 years trend after trend promises to make the church what God originally ...
Read more

The Beatitudes and Personal Blessings, Pt 2

Image
I have been spending a lot of time with the beatitudes over the past few months, words that I heard so many times in my many years in the church have finally come to life. (See Part 1 of this series here .) One of the things that has stood out to me is just how much these blessings of Jesus stand in stark contrast to how we commonly talk about blessings today. As a part of my research, I've done some reading on how church leaders talk about the "blessings of God" on our lives. I've looked at themes like "the goodness of God," "the best life that we can have now," and even those who explicitly write about "the blessed life." (I'll refrain from actually naming books because I'm not here to critique any specific author. Instead, I'm looking at a trend.) In almost every case the focus of the teaching relates to how we can have financial success, how we can have a positive attitude and how we can be winners in this life, which is u...
Read more