The Relational Mission

I grew up in small church in rural North Texas called Foote Baptist Church. The pictures below depict the actual building restored back to it's early 20th century look. When I say "I grew up" I mean that. I spent a ton of time in that old school house church building. It was just part of my childhood. And listening to sermons was part of my childhood. There was not children's church. That was the day when we sat with the adults. As I've reflected on the sermonizing of my childhood, I realized that there was a basic pattern to them. It went like this: Part 1: The Passage and What it Said—In this part, the pastor would identify the passage and explain what it was about. Part 2: The Meaning of the Passage—Here would come the interpretation. Part 3: Application—Here is where we were challenged to implement the passage to our lives. This approach to sermons was based upon something called decision-based ethics, which assumes that when we hear the truth that we ...

“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit their very self? Whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. " —Luke 9:23-26 My father was a fireman for 32 years in the Dallas suburb of Garland. When he arrived home after his 24-hour shift, I’d ask what went on at work. Did he go and save the day? He’d often respond with something like, “Well, we chased the ambulance on a few calls.” (Firemen would follow the ambulances to assist on many cases.) Or he’d briefly talk about a small house fire or a car accident. On most occasions, he’d say that they didn’t have any runs at all, that they had a few inspections, performed some drills, or...

"Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it” (Matt. 16:17-18). When Jesus spoke these words about how the church would operate, he was reshaping the Jewish picture of what it meant to participate as the people of God. They were looking for a conquering King; he was giving them his presence, which would change how they related to others. N. T. Wright explains, “Jesus ... apparently envisaged that, scattered about Palestine, there would be small groups of people loyal to himself, who would get together to encourage one another, and would act as members of a family, sharing some sort of common life and, in particular, exercising mutual forgiveness.” These scattered small groups would act as kingdom outposts that embodied his presence after his ascension. Later in the development of the church,...

In my first semester of seminary—in Texas—I took church growth evangelism with Calvin Miller. Honestly I was in awe of him, his poetic prowess, his way of turning a phrase, and his wisdom after 30 years of pastoring. It was the early 90s so we were reading stuff by George Barna and talked a ton about the demise of the church and what could be done to turn it around. During that time, I also visited a ton of churches. The homogeneous unit principle was in full force. Church marketing was taking off. I remember one church who tried to set itself apart by saying they were "innovative." A few years later, I finished my masters degree at Regent College—in Vancouver, Canada—and while there I took a class with Eugene Peterson. Again I was in awe of his poetic prowess, his way of turning a phrase, and the fact that he had been a pastor for 30 years. He shared in one class about his concerns about church growth thinking. He told us that he did not want to pastor a church where he co...

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...

Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." —John 14:6 I’m a fan of adventure stories, my favorites being those of J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings . Whether reading the books or watching the movies, I cannot get enough of this grand story. In the opening chapter of The Hobbit , we are introduced to the primary character, Bilbo Baggins, a self-proclaimed risk-avoider who does not go on adventures. In fact, he prides himself on staying to himself, not bothering other hobbits, and living in mediocrity. Bilbo could have written an enlightening book on the art of living a quiet, safe life, one that has very little conflict. The story opens: “This hobbit was a very well to do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighborhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, no only because most of them were rich but also because they never had an...

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...

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...

Are pastors called to minister as Jesus ministered? When this question is raised the answer is not so obvious. We live in different times, in a different culture, with pressures and commitments that Jesus did not have. He never had to deal with committees, managing a building, organizing services, attending denominational meetings, or keeping the deacons or elders happy. It’s easy to preach about the need to follow Jesus in our personal lives, but then the realities of pastoring cause us to just “make the best of it” with the job they have inherited. If Jesus were to become incarnate in twenty-first century North America, how would he minister? Of course, I can only speculate as others have done. For instance, one seminary professor who taught media classes stated that if Jesus were alive today he would use television. Would he? Would he use the written medium? What about the Internet? To tell you the truth, I don’t know what media he would use to share his message with the mass...

As I work with churches, I consistently encounter church leaders not having enough time for relationships. I was sharing the small-group vision of relational ministry with the key pastors of a church of about 5,000. They had small groups and a relatively good structure, but they wanted to take things to the next level. The senior pastor specifically wanted to see his people enter into a radical new kind of life. When I challenged the pastoral team to set the model, the staff—and specifically the senior pastor—looked at me with concern. They performed some quick time calculations and soon realized that their schedules did not allow for relational investment like this. Their lives were already overflowing with commitments and program-related relationships. This problem is not unique to large churches. Often, pastors of small churches feel the pressure in even greater ways. They must lead the church out of being small and this requires all the effort they can muster to make things ...

" Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you, as I promised to Moses" —Joshua 1:3 About 500 years before God spoke these words to Joshua, God promised Abraham that his descendants would possess and inhabit the land of Canaan (see Genesis 17). However, Abraham never saw the fulfillment of this promise, as his family grew from tribal nomads to a slave nation in Egypt. Moses was given the charge of leading the people from slavery into the Promised Land, but they rebelled out of fear, not having enough faith that God would give it to them (see Numbers 13). For 40 years, the Israelites wandered through the wilderness until they were prepared to enter the land. Moses was not able to see the filfillment of the promise, but now Joshua would. As a descendant of Abraham during the years of monadic travel and Egyptian slavery, it would have been easy to give up on the promise of the land. It would be easy to see such promises as wish dreams. It would ...

  John Howard Yoder is most known for his theological work in ethics and non-violence. However, from 1964-1983, Yoder taught a class on theology of mission. This book is a editorial revision of the recorded lectures from that class. While the content pre-dates the current missional conversation initiated by Lesslie Newbigin and furthered by the publication of Missional Church , edited by Darrel Guder, et al., it’s message is a prophetic and welcomed voice to the missional conversation. Yoder’s theology interprets mission through the perspective of what he calls “believer’s church.” As is consistent with the rest of Yoder’s body of work, he works through his chosen topic from an Anabaptistic perspective. His contributions add considerable weight to the conversation of mission in the North American context. Some of these contributions include the following. First, Yoder emphasizes the importance of the dynamics of the church as faithful covenant partners to mission in the world....

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...

I just got the copy edits back for my forthcoming book Leading Small Groups in the Way of Jesus , which will come in out in February 2015. As I read through it again, it caused me to reflect on some of the books that have shaped my imagination in writing this book. It's hard to pinpoint all of the influences of how we think, but here are five books that lie beneath the surface of what I've written: Community and Growth by Jean Vanier reveals the insight gained from leading the l’Arche community, a space where the mentally handicapped and their helpers share life together. The author writes, “Community is a place where people can live truly as human beings.” We all long for this kind of love, but we are all run from it in some way. No one captures the spiritual realities better. Deitrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together defines the center of spiritual community by clarifying that we don’t meet around things like Bible study or fellowship, but around the presence of Jesus. “Chris...

We will trust God to the degree that we see God rightly and are drawn by God's beauty. When we don't image God rightly, we call into question his trustworthiness. To the degree that we view God wrongly, we will mistrust his nature and we then naturally turn toward other things to give us life.  We tend to focus a ton of energy on making sure that we don't get life from idols, that we focus our eyes on God so that we get life from him. However, if our image of God—our picture of who he is, our vision of what God is like—has been skewed by lies, then we will naturally turn away from that picture of God. It's built into who we are. If we see a picture of something repulsive, we turn away from it. But when we see something beautiful, we are drawn into it. How does the old hymn go? "Trust and Obey. For there's no other way, to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey." What kind of God are we trusting? What if the image that we have of God is not "...