The Relational Mission

Groups are the most important aspect of the life of your church!  Overstatement? Well maybe. But one could easily make the argument that groups will make or break a church as much as any other aspect of a church’s life. After all groups are the web that links people in the church together. They are not simply a strategy of a church. They pervade every aspect of a church, whether there is an explicit group strategy or not. I make this claim because churches—as with all other organizations—do life as an organization of sub-groups. In many cases these are formal groups: leadership teams, worship teams, Sunday school classes, home small groups, youth groups, etc. But there are also other kinds of groups, informal connections of people who naturally gather and talk with one another in a way that they don’t talk with others. Just look around before or after a worship service and you will see the groups happen. It’s only natural that churches would get stuff done in groups as they...

There is an ancient Latin rule of the church that reads: lex orandi lex credendi , "the law of praying is the law of believing." Or to put it into a slightly different vernacular, "the way that we pray is the way that we believe." In other words, our theology is not merely a confession of agreement with an orthodox list of beliefs. Our beliefs about God are manifest and even cultivated by our communion with God. So often theology is used as a kind of litmus test that we pass in order to get to the place of doing something for God. So if we believe the right things about God, then we are qualified to work for him. And as a result, it seems that theology has little to do with what we do in the church outside of that which we preach or teach. In other words, theology is foundational to things like leadership and the running of the church, but we don't see how it is relevant to what we do when we walk into the church office on Monday morning or what we do as...

Over the last couple of posts, I’ve been talking about the rhythms of the Jesus way. In the first, I proposed the rhythm of communion with the Father . The second introduced the rhythm of relating to one another . Here I want to introduce the rhythm of engagement with the other. In Life Together , Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s masterpiece on Christian community, he opens with words about mission: Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. In the end 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, their work. The way of Jesus is found in diasporatic community, not cloistered community. Diaspora is the Greek word used to describe the scattered nature of God’s people throughout the world. And it implies that Christian comm...