Friday’s Missional Training was really good, so I thought I’d do the Christian thing and share. No live blogging because the church wi-fi where we met was locked, and because I mostly find live blogging annoying and reflective summaries useful, which is what I intend this to be. I’m just going to list the pertinent content pretty much straight out of my notes, and I’ll do some thinking about it at the bottom of the post.
Notes
We began with a meditation on Ephesians 4:1-16, with special attention to vv11-13.
After this we looked at the different ways people are responding to the rapid and discontinuous change that marks this time in world history. Almost everybody is willing to admit that the church isn’t getting the job done the way we’d like, but people are responding different ways. Here are a few.
- Return- A longing for a return to the days of Christendom, when the church commanded respect and wielded political and monetary power.
- Revival- The “spiritual” answer. The task is so great that there is very little we can do but pray and wait.
- Evangelism- The best solution is to become more intentionally evangelistic. Often the response of Evangelical churches (thus the name).
- New forms- New ways of doing and being the church are the answer. Community and authenticity are buzz words that typically accompany this view. Indicative of the emerging church.
- Renewed theological vision- The least sexy sounding of all the options, but the one that best defines the missional church.
We were asked to discuss this statement from a news article.
These days a church has to decide how it’s going to serve it’s congregation.
My answer: To the world, on a platter.
Dave was thoroughly impressed, and he adds some much more insightful thinking to this pithy statement in his review.
Three questions for a church to ask are:
- What is the gospel?
- What’s going on in the culture?
- What does this mean for the church?
We looked at this definition of missional church. I think it’s from Ringma, but I didn’t write that down.
A biblical and theological re-centering of the church as sign, sacrament, and servant of the Kingdom.
Not bad if you’re looking for brevity. I like sacrament if it means a foretaste of what is to come, but I don’t like it if it means the church mediates between the world and the Kingdom, as that would stand in opposition to the essential theology of Missio Dei. Mike Frost has done a great job of defining missional church, which I’ve already posted on.
Since the pizza hadn’t come yet, we went ahead and defined it in more detail. Here are some more marks of a missional church.
- Members have an awareness of the purpose and nature of the church.
- It’s small – This stuff is hard to do with churches larger than 200 people.
- Great thought and effort is put into worship.
- Preaching focuses less on application points and more on who God is, what His mission is, and what we are to be and do.
- Clarity about identity and purpose and a knowledge about the neighbourhood and subculture to which you are sent.
- All members are part of ministry and mission.
- Acceptance of and active identification with a marginalized position in the world.
- Regular tension between resisting and embracing culture.
- Focus on spiritual formation and discipleship, often via practices.
- Community/neighbourhood transformation. The world outside the church is changed by their presence.
A lively theological discussion on missional church then broke out. Alan Hirsch (he wasn’t there) says we do things christology->missiology->ecclesiology. Cam Roxburgh (he was there) pushed for theology->missiology->ecclesiology. Anthony mentioned missiology->theology->ecclesiology, because everything we know about theology is the direct result of God’s mission in the world. I understand Cam’s point, that there is more to the Trinity than Christ, but I also understand Alan’s, that as Christians, everything we know about the Godhead must be filtered through the person of Jesus. Right now I think theology might be the technically correct answer, but christology might communicate better what it is we’re really getting at.
We’ve got 5 more meetings left. We spent this one looking at what it means to be missional. The next 5 months we’ll look at:
- Passionate spirituality
- Incarnational living
- Intentional community
- Transformational discipleship
- Radical stewardship
This event is not, of course, the end all and be all of our missional journeys, so at the close authors and websites were recommended.
- Elton Trueblood
- Snyder
- Guder
- David Fitch
- Van Gelder
- Michael Frost
- Alan Hirsch
- Charles Ringma
- MTN
- Gospel in Our Culture
- The Center for Parish Development
- And, of course, Symbiosis
Oh, and we got homework.
Reflection
I’m really enjoying missional church thinking. I like a lot of things about the emerging church, but it’s a big umbrella, and there are enough people/things wearing the label that make me doctrinally uncomfortable to keep me from identifying with it fully. Acts 29 is doing some great stuff when it comes to intersecting culture, but I was not predestined to be reformed, and they tend to favor (or at least hold up as models) mega-church and multi-site churches. Missional church embraces what I like about both these things (new forms of church and evangelism), and rolls them all up into a renewed theological vision that is essential.
Sitting in a room with a bunch of practitioners was also great. Everyone there is attempting missional church right here in Calgary. We’ve all read the books and put some thinking into this already, but none of this is merely theory for anyone in the room. We’re trying stuff, finding out what works, and often what doesn’t, all in varying contexts in and around the same city.
Maybe that’s why this lacks the negativism of many others who are pushing for change. The church today in North America reminds me of Pigpen from the Peanuts cartoon: a cloud follows it wherever it goes. We don’t like ourselves, we’re often perceived negatively from outside, and what you end up with is a lot of people who know what they’re against, without knowing what they’re for. As we worked our way through the issues at hand, I was reminded that I really do love the church. That’s part of why I’m doing this. The conversation was full of hope, purpose, and the conviction that we’re not trying to get church right so much as to change the world by following the way of Jesus. We really can do this. Jesus Himself said that God delights to give us the Kingdom.
