"The missional church is a community where all members are learning what it means to be disciples of Jesus." (Guder)
I have come to the conviction that we will not have a missional church unless we are intentional about making missional disciples. A missional church is one where its members are serious about following Jesus. Dallas Willard has said that our churches are full of converts who do not intend to become disciples. This is not a missional church.
In our training we ask the question "How will we measure success?" The institutional church measures success with the 3 "B's": bodies, budgets, and buildings. The missional church measures success by how well we are making and sending real disciples! The missional church does not measure success by its capacity to retain, but by its capacity to release. Are we developing mature disciples who can be released to impact their world in real ways?
Most evangelical churches take the Bible somewhat seriously. But not all Bible study is missional! In fact, it is possible to be biblically centered, to expect and to experience biblical preaching, and not to be a church that acknowledges, much less practices, its missional calling. (Guder) Discipling in the North American church is rarely focused on mission.
For most Western Christians the church is a "free-time activity." It exists to serve its members, so members come and go as they "have need." Even when we attend Bible studies, we usually approach them with a self-gratifying agenda. The missional formation of a congregation is directly related to the value they place on the Bible AND the way in which the Bible shapes the community of faith.
How do we read and hear the Bible? Our engagement with it is always defined by the questions we bring to it. For most Western Christians the question we bring is "What can I get out of this?"
Where missional development is happening, different kinds of questions are brought to the Bible. Congregations are open to being challenged, to looking hard at their deeply ingrained attitudes and expectations. The missional disciple asks "How does God's Word call, shape, transform, and send me/us?" Missional formation results as we allow the Bible to transform and send us! That's how we must measure success. What do you think?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
6 comments:
Amen! The presbytery of New Covenant is taking on our new vision of "growing churches that passionately engage their community to make disciples." We are spending a great deal of time at our next meeting talking about what it means to be a disciple, not just a member of a church.
I think most of our churches were built with a maintenance mission. Just keep the institution well maintained and the instution will maintain our "Christian" culture. That's what we thought ... but the reality now is that the Christian culture we were maintaining is not missional at all. It's just about maintaining status quo ...
Good stuff. I have an ever growing conviction that church leaders, especially those who biblically fill the role of pastor and deacon, must share life's path with new believers, modeling what it means to simultaneously live and pursue a Jesus-following life. As we shepherd, we must have several goals in mind, and high on that list is seeing those we shepherd arrive at a place where they stand on their own two sanctified feet and strive out into the world, resting on Jesus and extending the work which God used to draw them in...missional Christianity - Christianity. I argue it's a Biblical conclusion that if one claims to follow Jesus, yet is not missional, it is evidence to the contrary. If we are not missional, we are not following Jesus. We may be thinking a lot about him. We may be praying a lot to him. We may be stirring up a lot of dust where he once stood...but we're not following him.
Rock on Glenn. I love this stuff.
Hey Glenn, I agree completely! I believe our personal bias and self absorption is much larger than any of us care to recognize. When Me rather than Mission becomes the focus the direction of church, Christianity, faith and Bible studies is inward rather than outward. At that moment a movement slows way down. Do we have any authentic missional disciple making models today?
Hey Glenn, I agree completely! I believe our personal bias and self absorption is much larger than any of us care to recognize. When Me rather than Mission becomes the focus the direction of church, Christianity, faith and Bible studies is inward rather than outward. At that moment a movement slows way down. Do we have any authentic missional disciple making models today?
Your comments are right on. A couple of things I might add:
(1) We need a new word, a better word than "missional" which carries so much baggage.
(2) We need to consider the possibility that "church" is not the agent for mission in the 21st century. Or at least not "church" as we know it.
Tom and Robert's comments are dead on. In my own experience coming from a massively heathen lifestyle to being immersed in the Bible Belt, having it modeled is what God used to really open my eyes to being missional. I don't think we can teach missional life verbally. We can preach ABOUT it, but seeing it modeled, seeing another (hopefully many) Christian actually live it out puts meat on it. Preaching/teaching missionality (is that a word?) is necessary, but modeling it takes a subjective ideal and makes it objectively identifiable.
Are there historical 'modeling' models for discipleship?
Post a Comment