This topic has been bothering me for a while. Recently the Leadership at Northwest has decided to become a Missional Church. This means we are going to become a church that reaches people who are far from God, people who are lost.
From the reaction of some, you would have thought that we have become a group of heretics. We have the greatest message of hope in all the world (I am not talking about Obama here). The message is simple. The message is about Jesus. His death, burial, resurrection and what it means for you and me.
The criticism that I have heard lately is that we are talking to much about being on mission and reaching out. The problem with that statement is that if you are one of the people who believe this, you may have a problem with what Jesus teaches and the New Testament. It is all about making disciples and discipling people to disciple.
If you have a problem with being missional and reaching out, then why not stick to the Old Testament, living under the law. But, you will find in the Old Testament as well a story about a God who is providing a way for the Messiah to come and restore people into an authentic relationship with Him.
So you can't get away from it. It is everywhere!
Then there are some who see that being a missional church is very Biblical, but they still want to hold on to some of the same things they have always done. They either do it from ignorance or personal incentive. They may not know how do anything different. They have lived under the attractional or traditional model of church for so long, that is all they know how to produce. If this is you, there are plenty of resources out there to bring you up to speed with the missional church.
Then there is personal incentive. There are people who just like things their own way. When it is different it takes them out of their comfort zone. They want what they once had, even if it means their children, grandchildren, neighbor or co-worker may spend eternity in hell. The desire to continue to produce a church that is no longer relevant and no longer connects people to the real message of hope is dangerous to the spiritual welfare of so many people.
So what happens in the case of both these groups is they begin to work hard to justify what they have always done as being missional. Even if it has not worked before saying it is missional changes everything. Right? No! If it did nothing to connect people to Jesus before why would it connect people to Jesus now just because you deem it as missional? That is crazy logic!
Over the next several post, I am going to talk about the Missional church in relation to the model we have in the book of Acts. It was the first missional church, established by Jesus and carried on by His followers. So my question is, where did we go wrong?
1 comment:
Scott
I think it is extremely difficult to get an existing church to cultivate a missional mindset. Unfortunately it runs against what most churches have been taught and practiced for all their lives. They have been "conditioned" to be the provider of "reglious goods and services." I think that in most cases the best we can hope for is to help existing churches "reallocate" resources such as prayer, time, people, facilities, money, etc. in a missional direction. And I think the best way to do that is to teach it, model it, and story it. In other words teach on the missionary nature of God, begin to model what it looks like to live missionally, and then tell great stories of what others are doing to connect/impact their communities through missional living. Good luck bro!
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