Being missional part 2
Let me summarise from last week, when I use the term “missional” then, it refers to God’s purpose to redeem the world – it is the mission of the Father through the Son and the Holy Spirit that includes the church (Williams, Rick. Uncomfortable Growth (p. 79). Kindle Edition). I presented to you the argument that the attractional church model where the unchurched are brought into our churches because we make our churches appealing is not the model to follow because it currently only attracts other Christians and is making very little or no impact on the unchurched world out there. In the attractional church, staff spend hours during the week on service planning for the weekend experience. The gap between pastoral staff and the congregation grows because the staff are too busy to interact with the congregation. The attractional church has values such as excellence and quality by which the experience will equal the best that churches has to offer.
We instead want to follow a missional church model where we step into the world out there and reach out to the unchurched and as they turn to Christ, the result may be that they never enter our particular church, but we continue to meet with them in our homes, workplaces, places of influences and disciple them there.
The reason for the switch in the model is that the church (in its current form) no longer exercises the dominant influence that it did 15 – 20 years ago in society. People no longer feel the need to attend church or send their children to children’s church or their teenagers to youth. They know little or nothing about the Bible and its grand narratives of redemption. Church buildings are being converted for other purposes. Only some mega churches are still successful because of their slick programmes (worship/children’s church) and their motivational preaching, but they are unfortunately only attracting other Christians at the expense of smaller churches. Churchgoers are treated like customers who can choose between different experiences. The object of worship is not God, but the experience.
DA Carson writes, “What ought to make worship delightful to us is not, in the first instance, its novelty or its aesthetic beauty, but its object: God himself is delightfully wonderful, and we learn to delight in him” (Wilson, Jared C.. The Prodigal Church: A Gentle Manifesto against the Status Quo (p. 58). Crossway. Kindle Edition).
I don’t want you to get the impression that I am knocking the Sunday worship experience – we must the value the weekly worship experience and strive to do it well – but it cannot serve as the “central hope of evangelism and life change”. (Wilson, Jared C.. The Prodigal Church: A Gentle Manifesto against the Status Quo (p. 58). Crossway. Kindle Edition).
So where to from here. The New Testament does not contain a blueprint of how we should do church. We are however admonished to meet together corporately in 1 Cor 14:26 and Heb 10: 24 -25 for our mutual edification as Christians. We need to preach and teach in order to grow up in Christ. We need to do the ordinances of breaking of bread and baptism and we need to be missional (reach out to others, feed the poor, be involved in social justice and evangelise the world).
Missional churches are incarnational – Missional churches are deeply entrenched in their communities. They are not focused on their facilities, but on living, demonstrating, and offering biblical community to a lost world (Stetzer, Ed. Comeback Churches (pp. 5-6). B&H Publishing. Kindle Edition).
Missional churches are indigenous, taking root in the soil of their society and reflecting, appropriately, their culture.
And finally missional churches are intentional – they are intentional about their methodologies.
First and foremost, whether the church is attractional or missional, it has to be spiritual. I am here reminded of Revelation 2:1-7:
“To the angel[a] of the church in Ephesus write:
These are the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands. 2 I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. 3 You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary.
4 Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first.5 Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. 6 But you have this in your favor: You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.
7 Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.
Worship does not consist only of worshipping God during Sunday morning worship time. We must become obsessed with Jesus to the exclusion of other things – that is our starting point in doing things differently as a church.
What was Jesus so upset about? The church had left their “first love.” This statement does not suggest that they no longer had any love for Christ at all. Rather, it means that the quality of their love for Him had weakened. The phrase “first love” holds two meanings: “as you loved me at first” and “my first love.” The first has to do with chronology; the second has to do with priority. (https://bible.org/seriespage/6-you-ve-lost-loving-feeling-revelation-21-7). Both are significant.
Ed Stetzer and Mike Dodson surveyed 324 churches in their book Comeback Churches and found the following factors crucial to the revival of a church:
- Renewed belief in Jesus Christ and the mission of the church,
- Renewed attitude for servanthood including serving our communities, and
This reminds of me 1 Cor 9: 19-23 19 Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. 20 To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. 21 To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. 22 To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. 23 I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.
- More strategic prayer effort (Stetzer, Ed. Comeback Churches (p. 55). B&H Publishing. Kindle Edition).
John Ortberg says in the Life you have always wanted, “Prayer is learned behaviour. Nobody is born an expert at it. No one ever masters prayer.”
So the question is how can we as City Bowl Church become more missional? So there is this idea of missional communities, but I must emphasize that this only an idea at this stage. We will spend more time in congregational conversations to increase awareness, understand and evaluate such an idea.
Missional communities are about learning to have a missional lifestyle together. The idea is sharing the good news of Jesus and making disciples among the people of a specific neighbourhood or network of relationships. It is not meant to be a worship service with all its planning involved, but follow the rhythms of a family having a lifestyle together and not attending a series of events. It is lead by a leader who is accountable and supported by church leadership. They are not church plants – they continue to be part of a church where they receive training and support. It has a low control, high accountability dynamic. Vision for the group comes from the leader and the group. Missional communities still attend weekly services (or at least monthly depending when their community meets – some communities can meet on the weekends).
MCs centre their rhythms on growing in relationship with God (UP), with one another (IN), and with those they are reaching out to (OUT) (Breen, Mike. Leading Missional Communities (Kindle Locations 221-222). 3DM. Kindle Edition).
First requirement for MC’s is discipleship. Discipleship, as Dallas Willard has noted, is simply being with Jesus to learn from Jesus how to be like Jesus. This works best in community where we spend time with others who demonstrate who Jesus is and we do the things that Jesus did together with the rest of our community.
This reminds me of 1 Cor 4:14-16 – I am writing this not to shame you but to warn you as my dear children. 15 Even if you had ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel. 16 Therefore I urge you to imitate me.
Second requirement is a simple, common language to discipleship (the IN/UP/OUT scenario used previously).
Third requirement for a MC is common rhythms – predictable patterns used by the group that promote the ethos of an extended family.
Fourth requirement is that the leader is a disciple maker not an events organiser.
Finally MC’s need to have a deep understanding of the gospel.
“The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.”
— C.S. Lewis (Breen, Mike. Leading Missional Communities (Kindle Locations 368-369). 3DM. Kindle Edition.)
MC’s can take the form of monastic communities – modern day monasteries where a group of people live together and take on a particular rule of life (simple living, hospitality, justice).
New monasticism is really all about being a new kind of monk in the twenty-first century, a person who chooses to live in a Christian community with a focus on service, especially with the poor and marginalized (Heath, Elaine A.. Missional. Monastic. Mainline.: A Guide to Starting Missional Micro-Communities in Historically Mainline Traditions (p. 33). Cascade Books—An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition).
I close with the following quote: “In an attractional church the assumption is that discipleship happens when people are faithful participants in programs that take place in the church building. Ministry is led by professionals. It is important to make the church as likeable as possible so that as many outsiders as possible will come in.
A Jesus-like church that is missional is attractive to people who want to experience God and help bring about transformation of a broken world. It is very attractive to people who believe the church should be radically inclusive, a healing place, and a place where people figure out their unique call in life so that they can live missionally in their neighbourhood. It is attractive to the same kind of motley crew today that was attracted into the original church on the day of Pentecost. There were 120 men and women gathered together, filled with the Holy Spirit and sent out to change the world. The space they were in was borrowed and mostly irrelevant, an anonymous upper room. The attraction was all about God and people in relationship, on mission with good news (Heath, Elaine A.. Missional. Monastic. Mainline.: A Guide to Starting Missional Micro-Communities in Historically Mainline Traditions (p. 42). Cascade Books—An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition).