smaller inner city church. In the 1950’s they had been a large vibrant congregation with a huge Sunday School that brought in all manner of kids from the neighbourhoods, and in time their parents too.
So in an attempt to reboot what was an old (dying) church they had employed a person to be two day a week Sunday School superintendent and spent a mint marketing the re-birthed Sunday School (same in format to the wonderful 1950s one).
They were sharing with me how sad and confused they were because no one had showed up. “People just don’t care about God’s ways anymore,” said one. “We should have prayed them in harder,” said another. “We even spent big bucks fixing the old pipe-organ, ready to sound out the great revival hymns!”
Trouble was no one had noticed that the church was now in the midst of a vastly changed suburb. Most of the first-generation locals actually spoke English. They couldn’t actually read the flyers distributed door to door. Most were of other faiths. Most were struggling with migration issues and putting food on the table. Many were at the bustling Sunday morning farmers’ market getting supplies and meeting up with friends. And - had any of them wandered in to the old church, well, pipe-organ music really wasn’t there thing.
In the last article we concluded by saying that there is no point in the history of the church that provides us with just the right pattern and formula for creating missional churches. We can’t just go back to doing it the way “they” did it!
Each meaningful fresh expression of church that has emerged was really important and effective for its time and place, and we can learn important principles from each of them, but they are not the absolute template. for all time.
Instead, as Alan Roxburgh & Scott Boren put it: “Those on the missional journey are wanderers, and we need to develop skills for reading the winds of the Spirit, testing the waters of the culture, and running with the currents of God’s call so that we are not lost on the journey. To some it might look like we are lost when we cannot point to a model that can be easily applied anywhere. Instead we are participants on a journey in which we have to learn from one another as we move toward becoming God’s missional people." [Introducing the Missional Church: What It Is, Why It Matters, How to Become One. Alan J. Roxburgh & M. Scott Boren, Baker Books, 2009. P. 25]
The phrase: “missional imagination” is a good way to describe the posture — a transformed way of seeing the world. That’s better than trying for a cut-and-dried dictionary definition of missional church. It’s more elusive than that.
It might actually be easier describing what missional church isn’t!
- It is not a label to describe churches that do cross-cultural missions.
- It is not a label used to describe churches with a suite of local outreach programs.
- It is not another label for church growth and effectiveness.
- It is not a label for churches that are effective in doing evangelism.
- It is not a label to describe churches that have developed a crisp mission statement with a vision and a purpose for their existence.
- It is not a way of turning around ineffective or outdated forms so they can display relevance in the wider culture.
- It is not a label that points to a primitive or ancient way of being the church.
- It is not a label describing new formats of church that reach demographics outside traditional church structures.
When you think about all the many metaphors, similes, images, pictures, stories, and parables about the kingdom of God in Gospels, it’s actually pretty hard to read them and distil down one clear definition. “How do you write a definition of the kingdom when Jesus tells us it’s about mustard seeds and vineyards and cheating servants?” (R&B, 35)
Maybe a better picture is to imagine is of a great river to represent the flow of God’s work happening in the world down through history.
Roxburgh & Boren suggest that to be part of the kingdom, is to enter the flow of this 'missional' river with its many twists and turns and to align ourselves with three powerful currents moving through the rive: They call these currents: Mystery, Memory, and Mission.
Mystery – Why did God choose us? This is always “an irreducible mystery, a surpassing wonder.” Thus, “to participate in the missional journey is to embrace this mystery and allow this reality to overwhelm and supersede the pressing matters of being a successful church or growing church, which seem to dominate our imaginations.” (R&B, 42)
Memory – Biblically, memory is the “reliving and reenacting of past events in the present because these events continue to have power and are the primary shapers of life.” Passover and the Lord’s Supper are examples. Yet, in the age of modernity, participation in these events “limits the Lord’s Supper to a memorial – a modern remembering of a past event.” Yet, biblically, “memory forms us into the people of God who live an alternative story whose power shapes the present. As such, this community formed in the mystery of God’s choosing is being shaped as a parallel culture because it is grasped by a present, lived memory of the story.” To be re-membered is the opposite of being dis-membered — it is to be made whole.(R&B, 44)
Mission – Mission grows out of mystery and memory, It’s an extension of our being. Roxburgh & Boren: “Mission is the outgrowth of mystery and memory. …Mission is not an action or program but an essence the pervades all the church is. God calls the church to be the demonstration of what all creation is to be. Likewise, the church is the new Israel (Luke 12:32; 1 Peter 2:9-10), called for the sake of the world. Mission is not something the church does as an activity; it is what the church is through the mystery of its formation and memory of its calling. The church is God’s missionary people. There is no participation in Christ without participation in God’s mission in the world. The church in North America [sic] to a large extent has lost his memory to the point that mission is but a single element in multifaceted, programmatic congregations serving the needs of its members. The gospel is not a religious message that meets the needs of self-actualizing individuals. But the North American [sic] church is being invited by the boundary-breaking Spirit to discover once again its nature as God’s missionary people. This will mean going against the stream of most church life at this moment in time.” (R&B, 45)
That means we can’t reduce mission to a formula: “… missional church cannot be codified in a simple definition. It is more than a new word for evangelism, church planting, or meeting someone in a coffee shop for conversation. It is not about restricting or a new program. Missonal church is about an alternative imagination for being the church. It is about this transformation toward a church that is shaped by mystery, memory, and mission.” (R&B,45)
That means we can’t reduce mission to a formula: “… missional church cannot be codified in a simple definition. It is more than a new word for evangelism, church planting, or meeting someone in a coffee shop for conversation. It is not about restricting or a new program. Missonal church is about an alternative imagination for being the church. It is about this transformation toward a church that is shaped by mystery, memory, and mission.” (R&B,45)
They provided assistance in helping locals understand complex
welfare and migration paperwork, they helped find housing and food, they joined in celebrating cultural festivals, they eventually facilitated a non-english speaking gathering. Their imagination’ and their lenses became missional and they built genuine relationships that led to authentic conversation and wellbeing in their community.
The journey along the missional river is expressed in many different forms, traditions, structures, and sizes. The forms might be emergent churches, traditional churches, rural congregations, megachurches, and denominations. The structure is less important than the posture.
“… the missional conversation has entered almost every stream of the church. The Spirit of God is moving in the church in creative, generative ways that call the people of God to engage their neighbourhoods and display God’s kingdom in everyday life.” (R&B, 52)
More about that next time.
