Called and Sent

I remember some years ago, as Sunday morning service where
we interviewed, commissioned and prayed for a young family who were heading overseas to serve as missionaries with an aid agency in a difficult cultural setting. We reminded them that we would stand with and encourage them as they went, but, they needed to be mindful of their calling and accountability to the broader church community and to God! They represented Jesus and his Kingdom out there in the world -- and that's not to be taken lightly.

It was a touching service and afterwards one of our church members, a successful local businessman came up to me and asked: 

"How come you don't do that for the rest of us?"

"How do you mean?"

"Well, aren't we all called and sent? Don't we all need prayer and encouragement to serve God out there? Don't I too need to be accountable for how I live my life, use my money and represent Jesus to my colleagues?"

A great question! Why do we single out 'real' missionaries or 'ordained' pastors for call and commissioning - but the rest of the faith community are not held accountable or supported in the same way?

So the very next week we called him and his household up the front, interviewed and commissioned him to be called and sent into his secular workplace!

One underlying quality of all missional churches, is a strong sense of seeing themselves, the whole community, as being called and sent: 

“All the church does and is should live out God’s life in the midst of the world; missional people should practice God’s life before a watching world. This includes worship, preaching, communion, loving one another, social justice, caring for the poor, and sharing Jesus’s gospel. Being missional is about all of it, not part. This is the missional imagination. All of God’s people are on mission to engage their surrounding neighbourhoods, not just a few who are sent outside the church to do something called missions.” (R&B, 54) 

Church conversations should move away from churched-culture assumptions and toward a focus on God’s work in and dream for the world. This is similar to the three-way conversation proposed by missiologist Lesslie Newbigin that considers first the relationship between the gospel and our culture (context), and only then progresses to reflection on issues of church. 

By putting gospel and culture first, it means we shape our 
church out of what God (gospel) is up to in our context (culture). If we start with church, we often end up either ignoring gospel and culture - or trying to force them to fit with our church traditions and structures.  

We no longer live in a Christian context. The western world is now a multicultural, pluralistic marketplace. This requires that we as the church-community follow Jesus, who pitched his tent 'out there', in the village. We too need to dwell in and become aware of our neighbourhoods. We need to be incarnate in our neighbourhoods. “God is only known in the particularity of place and time.” (R&B, 77).  

For us, the world has shifted from the church being on the central platform in society to being on the periphery. Often congregations have responded to this with strategies that operate as if the old church-centred culture were still the reality that we need to somehow get back to. But, we’re not in Kansas anymore. We’re not going back to 1950s Christendom modernity any time soon! The early church too, was powerless and poor and on the periphery of a great multicultural and pluralistic empire - one that was often hostile to these ‘followers of the way.’  

Missional Imagination

I remember some years ago talking to the leadership of a
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. 

While all of these may be legitimate calls when properly understood, they do not individually or collectively capture the essence of the “missional” church.

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) 

The church I mentioned at the start, paused and reflected on it’s journey. Members started reaching out and slowly forming friendships with their new neighbours. Shared food helped form bonds even when language was a bit of an issue. They discovered a real need for people wanting to learn conversational English - so some of them made themselves available to do so at the community centre. 

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.

It's Messy - There's no one model!

I remember some time ago meeting up with a friend who was in an alternative-style faith-community. It did sound cool, but as I ask him about it, he kept telling me what it din't do or believe. They didn't have Bible studies, they didn't meet for worship or sing songs, they didn't have communion services, they didn't pray for each other. 

"So, what do you actually do?" 

"Well, we meet at the pub and enjoy a meal together." 

"Great! And how do you celebrate your faith, do you gather to worship or pray??

"Ah no, we don't really do that."

"Are there any routines or spiritual practices you do?"

"Not really, no."

"What's distinctive about your corporate life of faith?"

"Um, well we're not like those religious types who just 'do' church."

In being open to God’s leading, it doesn’t help to just become anti-everything! There’s been expressions of ‘we’re-not-like-trad-church’, who know amazingly well what they don’t believe or do, but don’t evolve particularly sustainable, life-giving, distinctive models of kingdom community. It's not enough to simply be anti-building, anti-clergy, anti-denomination, anti-megachurch, anti-tradition, or anti-structure.

On the other hand, it doesn't help to hold to over-ambitious utopian and precise images of what the ideal missional congregation should look like. For example, it's risky to try to return to the purity of New Testament patterns of seemingly non-institutional organic church. All gatherings of people eventually organise and even institutionalise at some level (and that’s not all bad). Even the new testament churches had levels of structure to undergird their life together. 

Also, while it is understandable for people to want a model of a church that has everything totes sorted about what it means to be perfectly missional - it’s not going to happen! Don’t try to set in stone what you belief has been vouchsaved to you as the ultimate model! 

The great renewal moments of history discovered they were on a never-ending learning journey! The breathe of the Spirit continues to blow life-giving transformation into people and churches in their ever-changing environment. Practices and patterns that worked so well a while back, may not be helpful for the current time. Nostalgically hanging on to these old wine-skins will mean we lose the newest wine. (See Luke 5:37-39 for the wine metaphor).

“The missional way of life…calls us away from answers with formulas and blueprints. It is an invitation to move out of our comfort zones.” (Roxburgh & Boren 23)*

In the early chapters of Acts, for example, the believers met in the temple and local homes, assuming this to be the definitive model, but then came the persecution mentioned in Acts 8 and the old model came to an end, as they were scattered and left Jerusalem.

So, it’s good to remember:

• There is no one perfect model of how to do church – not cell-church, mega church, seeker-sensitive church, purpose-driven church, house church, multi site church, online church, or even simple church. Each has value, for a particular time or context, but none is the universal model for all time.
• The scriptures do not reveal a secret missional plan or formula that provides us twenty-first century Christians a dead-cert set of instructions for conjuring missional life.
• 
  There is no point in the history of the church that provides uswith just the right pattern and formula for creating missional churches – not the reformation, nor the great awakenings, nor the underground house-churches, nor barista-approved cafe churches. Each of these were (and are) really important and effective for their time and place, and we can learn important principles from them, but they are not the absolute template. (Roxburgh & Boren 24) 

Next we’ll focus on imagination - missional imagination.

* “Introducing the Missional Church: What It Is, Why It Matters, How to Become One.” Alan J. Roxburgh and M. Scott Boren, Baker Books, 2009.

Missional Church - Going to them.

I remember some years ago Googling the word “missional” and discovering one of the first entries was titled: “Guinness… The Missional Drink.” Another page was all about missional fitness and the gym equipment one would need. Another was about missional families and still another was on missional marketing!

So, what do we mean by “missional” church? At a time where churches are in decline and there are so many outreach experiments in play, the term “missional” gets thrown around by just about everyone in ministry. Indeed, if you want to make a new programme sound cool, you tag the adjective “missional” on to the front of the title, as in, for example, “Come join our new missional catering committee!”

I’ve found one of the most helpful books about this to be: “Introducing the Missional Church: What It Is, Why It Matters, How to Become One.” Alan J. Roxburgh and M. Scott Boren, Baker Books, 2009.

GOING RATHER THAN COMING

The first thing to note is this: The adjective “missional” stands in contrast to the word “attractional” — the church growth-oriented approach, as in the approach summarised by: “If you build it, they will come.”

The attractional approach moves churches to provide the best set of spiritual goods and services they can muster, in order to attract outsiders to their menu of activities and their organisation. It’s slowly dawning on us that no matter how well we build it, people are not coming! Church attendance and engagement is at an all time low in most western societies.

Instead of trying to make the church and its programmes bigger and better, to get more people to come, maybe the contrasting approach is for a faith community to attune itself to God’s mission out there in the world. As Rowan Williams, former archbishop of Canterbury, puts it: “It is not the church of God that has a mission. It’s the God of mission that has a church.”

Rather than getting more people interested in what we are doing, what if we circulate in our neighbourhoods watching in order to discern what God, (already on mission ahead of us) is doing in our local contexts. We then align ourselves with that, and become participants in God’s redemptive work. We go to our communities as God’s hands and feet rather than expecting them to come to us - we view life through “missional” lenses. 

If the neighbours in our street are holding a Christmas BBQ, maybe, just maybe,  getting involved with that and enjoying long leisurely conversation with them is preferable to all the energy and effort put into marketing and managing a church based extravaganza.

Going to our communities means being intentional and positive, but also being open to it being messy rather than having a pre-set. You're going to be building the boat as you're sailing it! 

More about that next time.

Leading in Transition

Walter Brueggemann describes our era as one in which an old imagined world is lost, although still powerfully cherished. It is a time of bewilderment and fear because there’s no clear understanding of how to order our common imagination differently or better. He writes:

I believe we are in a season of transition, when we are watching the collapse of the world as we have known it . . . the value systems and the shapes of knowledge through which we have controlled life are now in great jeopardy. One can paint the picture in very large scope, but the issues do not present themselves to pastors as global issues. They appear as local, even personal, issues, but they are nonetheless pieces of a very large picture. When the fear and anger are immediate and acute, we do not stop to notice how much of our own crisis is a part of the larger one, but it is." (Walter Brueggemann, Hopeful Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 45-46.)

Brueggemann describes this transition as a troubling place to dwell, but it is exactly where we must dwell. There is no other time or place to which God has called us to live but this one.

Mary Jo Leddy describes it as a period when the great tapestry of religious life woven in Western Culture over several hundred years has unravelled and lies in tatters on the floor of our culture. She explains:

"We are living through one of those historical in-between times when a former model of religious life (either traditional or liberal) is fading away and a future model has not yet become clear. One could be tempted to flee from the dilemmas of this moment to some more secure past, to the surface of the present, or to some arbitrary resolution of the future. These are real temptations and they can be met only with the faith that this is our hour, our kairos [Greek for “season” or “time”]. This is the only time and place we are called to become followers of Jesus Christ; there is no better time or place for us to live out the mysteries of creation, incarnation, and redemption. These are our times and, in the end, God’s time." (Mary Jo Leddy, Reweaving the Religious Life (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1990), 

This is our time. It is not a place for simplistic, dualistic, us-versus-them thinking. We are leaving the era of modernity behind, and we find ourselves in a place so unlike the ethos, experiences, values, and attitudes of the last half of the twentieth century. It has been said that we find ourselves not in an era of change, but in a change of era. The generations that led in the previous era are passing, but still many leaders and organisations work with all the assumptions, skills, and frameworks of that passing era. The generations which will discover and cultivate God’s future are just emerging. Will they find the courage to explore possible new paradigms, or will the gravity of the past pull them back down?

Sharing at Church Sunday 26 March 2023

 

Come join us Sundays at Diamond Valley Baptist Church

The times they are a-changing! Part: 2

Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon begin their book Resident Aliens (1989) with a story from their youth: “Sometime between 1960 and 1980, an old, inadequately conceived world ended, and a fresh, new world began. . . . When and how did we change? Although it may sound trivial, one of us is tempted to date the shift sometime on a Sunday evening in 1963. Then, in Greenville, South Carolina, in defiance of the state’s time-honored blue laws, the Fox Theater opened on Sunday. Seven of us — regular attenders of the Methodist Youth Fellowship at Buncombe Street Church — made a pact to enter the front door of the church, be seen, then quietly slip out the back door and join John Wayne at the Fox. That evening has come to represent a watershed in the history of Christendom, South Carolina style. On that night, Greenville, South Carolina — the last pocket of resistance to secularity in the Western world — served notice that it would no longer be a prop for the church. There would be no more free passes for the church, no more free rides. The Fox Theater went head to head with the church over who would provide the world view for the young. 

That night in 1963, the Fox Theater won the opening skirmish. You see, our parents never worried about whether we would grow up Christian. The church was the only show in town. . . . Church, home and state formed a national consortium that worked together to instill ‘Christian values.’ People grew up Christian simply by being lucky enough to be born in places like Greenville, South Carolina, or Pleasant Grove, Texas. . . . A few years ago, the two of us awoke and realized that, whether or not our parents were justified in believing this about the world and the Christian faith, nobody believed it today. At least, almost nobody. . . . All sorts of Christians are waking up and realizing that it is no longer ‘our world’ — if it ever was.”

It is obvious to anyone paying much attention that we are no longer a “Christian nation” — if we ever were. There are a many different world-views and culture 'shapers' amongst a wide variety of people groups, ethnicities and neighbourhoods. Most people no longer have a vague lingering loyalty to the faith of their grandparents' or their church. As Alan Roxburgh writes in The Sky is Falling (2005):  “We need a movement of God’s people into neighbourhoods, to live out and be the new future of Christ. It must be a movement that demonstrates how the people of God have a vision and the power to transform our world. …” 

2018 Innovate Launch

Exponential 2011 - Reggie McNeil: "Don't plant 'a' church!"

Alan Hirsch - What Is A Missional Church?

Michael Frost - Adopt a Posture of Listening

What does it mean to adopt a posture of listening in our community?

Could this be the future of Church as we know it?

The Western church still puts a huge amount of effort into its central programmes, particularly the Sunday Worship Service. Yet the question needs to be asked why we do that. If our calling is to go and live out the good news, sharing our lives in our neighbourhoods building friendships, being community -  then why do we expect that in a post-Christian world, that bringing people to a big event in a building is the 'core' activity?

What does it mean to live as 'families' on mission? To be communities of disciples that connect deeply with the many who have a spiritual hunger but are deeply suspicious of 'religion.'

This is a cool video - the story of a worship leader who began asking deep questions ... 



Source:  http://www.thedesertbloomsproject.com

"And the Year is ...2020!"

This was an article I wrote for a panel discussion back in 2007. We were imagining the trends and the changes that might be emerging around us. Ridiculous, at one level, because the future always surprises us when it does arrive! But it was a helpful exercise in learning to observe and interpret more carefully what is happening around you. I wonder what would you add or subtract to this list? I think if I were re-writing it now, almost eight years on, I'd add in something about:

- The 'inter-culturalisation' of the Aussie church.

- An increase in many challenging and varied shapes and expressions of Kingdom community.

- A healthier fusion of proclamation and action.

- The rise of a more contemplative mainstream spirituality.

- An increasing ability to engage diversity without abandoning one's own framework.

- The return to a form of  local parish community and neighbourhood.

***   ***   ***

"And the Year is ...2020!"

OK! I admit it; I love Dr Who! I just love the idea that I can hop into the Tardis and instantly jump into the future ten thousand years or even a leisurely ten million years or so. ‘Trouble is that that’s easy compared with gazing a measly TEN years forward!

Last year, I was invited to be part of a panel discussion given the topic: “What will Church be like in 2020.” That’s a tough one! I’ll be getting close to retirement! Hopefully Collingwood will still be getting the ‘wobbles in September! The Olympics will be on! There will be a U.S. Presidential election. But what will be happening in our so-called ‘post-Christian’ western world? I wonder what we dream God will be doing? Here’s some of my wonderings: 

1. Twenty-Four Seven Discipleship 

The church of 2020 will have realized that powerful testimony comes from personal transformation! They will realize that our focus should not be about programs, but principles. As we live as disciples ‘obeying all I have commanded you’ so we incarnate the Gospel into our world. The church of 2020 will not focus on getting the vision and strategy right; and making the people fit into it. Rather they will understand that obedient consistent ‘holy’ living will mark a ‘culture’ that fascinates people to faith.

THRIVING CHURCHES | PART 4 | VISION

Q 3  | HOW CLEAR IS OUR VISION?

Our future will not be about duplicating the thing we’ve done for the last few hundred years. Reggie McNeal makes the point that he gets very nervous if someone says to him: “I’m called to plant a church.”  

The reason is that because alongside our other social silos like politics, commerce, sport, home, justice, education and so on, Christians tend to add a new silo called ‘Church.’ This is where people go to ‘get’ personal religion;  ‘do’ worship and ‘find’ religious succour. What would it look like to re-envision our role as being salt and light across all the other silos rather than just becoming a new and separate silo? 

THRIVING CHURCHES | PART 3 | BIBLICAL FRAMEWORK

2 | WHAT'S OUR BIBLICAL FRAMEWORK FOR MISSION?

As well as a team of Christians with ‘missionary-DNA’ we need to ensure that the theology 'underneath' the new mission-project is coherent and understood by the key leaders. Our belief-system shape our values and therefore our practises and choices. That means the team-leader (or minister) needs to be a person who is well-grounded in the Scriptures and can teach with some depth and help others to engage and interpret the scriptures. It is vital that the team-leader is released to keep learning, stretching, reading, teaching, mentoring and speaking forth prophetically.

Why the missional movement will fail...

This is a thought provoking article by Mike Breen originally posted HERE 12 Sept 2011

It’s time we start being brutally honest about the missional movement that has emerged in the last 10-15 years: Chances are better than not it’s going to fail.

That may seem cynical, but I’m being realistic. There is a reason so many movements in the Western church have failed in the past century: They are a car without an engine. A missional church or a missional community or a missional small group is the new car that everyone is talking about right now, but no matter how beautiful or shiny the vehicle, without an engine, it won’t go anywhere.

So what is the engine of the church? Discipleship. I’ve said it many times: If you make disciples, you will always get the church. But if you try to build the church, you will rarely get disciples.

TRAVELLING!

Hey everyone, 

I'll be away from: Wednesday 5th of June and back on deck Wed 3rd of July 2013!

I will be in the U.K. with Esmae and our daughter Caity.

I will be involved in three 'ministry' related activities:

• The 3DM Pilgrimage Conference  10 - 14  June 2013 in  Sheffield.

• Conversations with a number of church leaders whose congregations have been on transformative journeys.

• The 3DM Senior Leaders and Spouses Retreat  24 - 26 June 2013, Oxfordshire.

In the meantime, Esmae and Caity, with a lamentable lack of commitment will be taking in the sights on our road trip, and taking no notes on missional church stuff! It will be a great blend of time connecting with some very insightful mission and ministry practitioners as well as travelling with my two favourite girls!

I am hoping to journal some of my learnings and reflections. So if these sort of themes interest you - stay tuned! 

Cheers,

Martin