Missional and Emergent, Part 5

When I try to explain missional church to people, I often begin with the distinction between church as a place where things happen and church as a people sent on a mission. Often, this description evokes the response, "Oh, then we're already missional." Indeed.

Here mission is typically being understood as "outreach," or any activity or program the church does outside its own walls. And many churches do impressive things in their neighborhoods and communities. This, however, in and of itself does not indicate that they are missional.

First, a missional church understands all of its life as mission, not just those things that typically count as "outreach." That is, a church's primary horizon of interpretation is the world, not the congregation or the interior life of the individual. This horizon applies even to those things the church does "within." For example, when worship maintains this public horizon, it participates in God's mission for the sake of the world. When congregations practice simplicity in the name of Jesus, they resist the spiritual power of consumerism that dominates our culture. This is mission as well. These are aspects of its sent life that typically get privatized or individualized.

The missional impulse is a synergistic impulse. It moves toward a holism, seeing all the aspects of a congregation's life as being intimately interrelated around mission. A congregation that has banners in its auditorium that distinguish mission, worship, and fellowship as separate categories in the congregation's life, do not yet possess a missional imagination.

Second, most churches see outreach in fairly paternal terms. It is something we do to or for others. Often, we view outreach service primarily as a door to possible evangelism or church recruitment. This turns others into prospects, people who exist only at the end of our agenda for them. Even when, however, we see outreach as an end in itself, it can still be paternalistic. We represent God and they represent those in need of God. We have the goods, they have the need. We are still seeing mission as something we do for or to others. This is different than seeing mission as something we do with others.

To see mission as a partnership with others, we have to believe that God is active outside of the church. We have to believe that the Kingdom is bigger than our institutional advancement. We have to believe that there are others who serve the interests of the Kingdom without having pledged their lives to that Kingdom. We have to believe that the Spirit of God proceeds us into the world, so that it is possible that we might truly discover something about God with others. We have to believe that we need the other to know God, even others who do not honor or worship God. In this sense, mission is not taking God to others, but finding God with and among others.

Third, and related to number two, churches invest a lot of imagination in figuring out exactly how to get new people to belong to them. I am currently working with a church who think of themselves as possessing a wonderfully thick community life. And they do. No doubt about it. They can tell story after story about how amazing their congregation is. Who wouldn't want to be a part of them? They can't figure out, in light of this, why they are declining. They're scared to death that in a few years they might not exist. This is not an unreasonable fear.

Truth is, we live in a culture where "becoming one of us" is an increasingly difficult thing to do. First, the "if we build it they will come days" are long gone. With a few exceptions, using an attractional strategy for church growth simply will not work. But even more fundamentally, in a culture that is no longer steeped in the grammar of Christianity, becoming a Christian is truly a cross-cultural enterprise. In most cases, we simply aren't equipped to help people do what is necessary to cross the ever-widening cultural gulf.

But even if we could come up with better assimilation processes (and we must), we still expect the persons least likely to do so to do all the boundary crossing. The question, "how can we get them to belong to us?" needs to be traded for the mission question, "how is it in the name of Jesus that we belong to them?"

Most churches haven't a clue about their neighbors. They haven't even begun to ask the question, "how in Jesus' name do we belong to these people?" They may have all kinds of outreach programs aimed at people like so many targets. But they have little idea how God might be calling them to give up their sense of privilege, cross cultural boundaries, and find themselves in mission with new partners.

This is the beginning of missional wisdom.