Ran across this video interview of Tim Keller where he gives his comments on what a missional church is. (4+ minutes.) The interview is part of a series of interviews that he did (in the same sitting). They are posted at John Piper’s Desiring God website. They are all good.
If you enjoy Keller’s teaching you will be excited to know of this link to a plethora of all things Keller.
I ran across this article from Allelon which highlighted tension points as the church attempts to engage and relate to Western culture today. The article was prompted by recent work/statistics from the Barna Group as well as observations from a book entitled, “Jim and Casper Go to Church.” (the observations of and conversations with Matt Casper the friendly atheist as they visit churches across the U.S.)
What are the challenges facing the church in our culture? The article lists:
I think this is a useful, though certainly not comprehensive, list.
Another key book for our current time is Transforming Mission - Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, by David Bosch. Beginning on page 50, he begins a discussion entitled, “Where the Early Church Failed.” He begins by reminding readers that despite the growth and all the incredible things that were occuring in and at the hands of the early church, there were shortcomings.
For one, Bosch suggests that Jesus had no intention of creating a new religion. Those that followed him generally formed a counter-cultural community that existed for the sake of others. They had no name until they were first called Christians at Antioch. But this was not maintained for long:
Already at a very early stage Christians tended to be more aware of what distinguished them from others than of their calling and responsibility toward those others. Their survival as a separate religious group, rather than their commitment to the reign of God, began to preoccupy them…In the course of time, the Jesus community simply became a new religion. P. 50
Run to this website and download the pdf entitled: “What is Missional Church: An Introduction to the Missional Church Conversation.” You’ll may need to log in (free) to get the file. Once logging in, at the same page you will find a workshop entitled, “Understanding the Missional Church: An Introductory Workshop.” Download both the participant and presenter workbook.
The presenter workbook looks great and I can’t wait to use it. I can see it being used in a church or bible study to introduce people to the Kingdom and Missional conversation. It is interactive, has lots of scripture and great questions.
You’ll remember this post where I talked about the fuzziness of defining “missional.” I was pleased to note in the workship that they also noted the difficulty of defining the term.
My friend Eric Marsh of Long Beach pointed me to a piece called “Missional Buzz,” written by Tim Conder that is in the winter issue of Leadership. It deals with the word, “Missional.” I agree with him that it has reached the status of buzz word with many churches, parachurches, cell groups and home fellowships calling themselves missional.
He offers a few common commitments of missional churches:
- They align themselves holistically with God’s theme of redemption.
- Programming and finances are directed outward.
- They are discontent with spiritiual formation as primarily cognitive assent.
- Embrace ethnic and social diversities of local communities is becoming a moral expectation.
- They are passionate activists when they find the pathways and trajectories of God’s redemptive presence.
I like the list and agree with it in many places, yet I’ve noticed that everytime someone creates a list in an effort to define what “missional” is, it differ from others. Here is a brief list from a paper by Tim Keller entitled, “The Missional Church,” dated June 2001 and found in an older version of the Gospel and Heart course used by Redeemer at some point in their ministry.
- Discourse in the vernacular - the missional church avoids “tribal” language, stylized prayer language and pious “jargon.” The missional church avoids ever talking as if non-believering people are not present.
- Enter and re-tell the culture’s stories with the gospel - To engage is to show sympathy toward and deep acquaintance with the literature, music, theater, etc. of the existing culture’s hopes, dreams, ‘heroic’ narratives, fears. To re-tell means to show how the gospel engages that human drama offering freedom. (or something like that.)
- Theologically train lay people for public life and vocation - training lay people how to renew and transform the culture through all vocations (callings.)
- Create Christian Community that is counter-cultural and counter-intuitive - Christian fellowship must be more than just friendly supportive relationships, but must also embody a ‘counter-culture,’ showing the world how radically different a Christian society is with regard to issues like sex, money, and power.
- Practice Christian unity as much as possible on the local level - We should have a bias of cooperation in support of other congregations. In-fighting plays in to the common ‘defeater’ that Christians are all intolerant.
Other useful books include Darrell Guder’s, “Missional Church,” in which you won’t find a nice and tidy list defining missional. Ed Stetzer has a great book called, “Breaking the Missional Code.” It also avoids a neat list, but has tremendous insight on the shift of the church from our focus from Church Growth to Church Health, and now Missional Church. (found on p. 48-49 of his book.)
What can we conclude about what it means to be missional? Perhaps it is one of those things that is OK to leave in postmodern ambiguity. Maybe we should be talking about missional fuzziness. I’ve got my eyes looking for everyone elses definitions. I suspect over time I’ll get a clearer sense of all the many facets of what it means to be missional, but in the mean time, all of the above pieces work for me.If I’m pressed into a corner, I use the distinction I first picked up from Frost and Hirsh in “The Shaping of Things to Come.” There “missional” is held in contrast to “attractional” which was the standard paradigm the church employed during Christendom, but is no longer as useful in today’s context. Read the book.