Not everything the church does in the
name of mission or outreach is missional. A group of friends and I
recently brainstormed a top-ten list of things churches think are
missional but actually aren't:
10 - Outdoor worship services
9 – Ecumenical worship services
8 – Prayer walks
7 – Serving a meal to the homeless
6 – MCC school kits and relief kits
5 – Community fundraisers
4 - Small groups
3 – Contemporary worship
2 – Handing out
tracts
1 – Inviting people to church.
“What!?!,” you may ask. “How is
inviting someone to church not missional? And what do you have
against small groups?” I in no way mean to suggest these aren't
good or important things. I for one love the way our congregation
collects school kits for MCC every year. I further agree that many
of the things on this list are ways of offering care to those in
need. Many of these things represent a service to others. Many of
these things show Christ-like love and compassion. Some of these
things are even done in public. It doesn't mean they are missional.
To be missional is about recognizing
what God is up to in our lives and in our communities, and then
responding in faith to the movement of God's Spirit. To be
missional requires that in order for our light to shine our hearts
and habits must be transformed more and more to be like Jesus. In
its very essence, to be missional is to intentionally make disciples
of ourselves and our neighbors.
In the book The Patient Ferment of
the Early Church, the late
Mennonite missiologist and seminary professor Alan Kreider paints a
picture of the early church that is virtually the exact opposite of
many churches today. Kreider documents how the early church's
mission focused on making disciples. New believers attracted to
Jesus or to the church went through a lengthy multi-year process of
chatechesis and character formation. The goal of this process was
for candidates to undergo a transformation that resulted in new
habits and dispositions. Only then was a person baptized and
admitted into the worship life of the church. The effect of this
approach was that it cultivated a culture of discipleship that
ensured robust witness to the reign of God in Christ. That's
missional.
My, how times have
changed. Many churches today are concerned primarily and sometimes
solely with how to get more people to attend worship. They think
about ways to make their worship services attractional,
seeker-sensitive, family friendly, contemporary, relevant, or any
other of a host of buzz words. I don't think any of those words could
be used to describe the early church, and yet its growth and witness
was phenomenal.
Many churches today
simply want to get people in the doors, or get more young people to
serve on committees, in the hopes that they will develop into mature
disciples of Jesus. But as Alan Hirsch warns, “If you start with
mission, you get the church. But if you start with the church you
don't always get mission.”
It's not that the
top ten things I listed at the beginning are bad, or that they can't
be missional. But often it requires some important shifts in how we
approach them. Are your small groups really deepening discipleship
and drawing others in? Or are they a platform for friends to eat and
pray together? (again, not a bad thing, just not missional.) Does
your volunteering at the local food pantry or homeless shelter result
in the spiritual transformation of both served and server? If so,
praise God! If not, then we should acknowledge that it is an
important act of charity, but not missional. Does your worship form
patient, loving, kind, and joyful people in a world of outrage and
hostility? Or does your worship merely cater to the consumeristic
patterns of empire?
Taking
a hard and honest look at those questions is one of the first
necessary steps on the road to becoming missional.
