12 Witnesses

click on logo for IVM page

I know, dear reader, that I have been woefully negligent in my blogging.  Even after I promised that I would return with passion loaded, I found myself awake at midnight on Sunday evening and not having written for the day or week ahead.  At all.

It was not a matter of not caring, either.  Rather, I found myself consumed by responsibilities in ministry, family and even simply personal.  Yet, I had one of the most profound weeks last week, in spite of its demands.

Though it is all still in process, I think I have finally adopted a Missional philosophy that I can call my own.  It’s two, four, ten and thirty years in the making, depending on your starting point of choice.  Nevertheless, it has finally gelled.

What’s more, I think that I am mostly unique in my thinking.  A long conversation, Providentially arranged, helped me to realize that my core values and theories of efficiency are moderately distinct from many other leaders in the Missional movement, though similar to a minority.

Well, more on that later in the series.

Right now I simply want to lay the foundation of the entire thought of reformatting the church structure:  The Individual.

The Missional Church is, fascinatingly, made up of missional individuals.  I know.  Shocker.

Suffice it to say that the thing that sets the Missional Church apart has to be the goal of mobilizing the individual to engage people living apart from God.

Then to address structure, the Missional church has to be one that facilitates the efficiency of individual mobilization.

The rest of the series is intended to discuss the structural details, so I will not start that here.  I will simply say that the primary issue of the shift between what I call the “Institutional Church” structure and the Missional Church structure is the removal of barriers that inhibit the personal engagement of the individual.  Ok.  More on that later.

Speaking to the issue of motivation, the Institutional church - that is the church that runs everything through the structure of the Church, from evangelism to discipleship to fellowships to worship to ministry opportunities - de-motivates its congregants with the provision of, and reliance on, the structure of the church.  The “outreach” is done (poorly) by a handful of people on a given night of the week by knocking on doors (which is unwelcome in today’s American culture) and going through a scripted presentation of the Gospel - if the people will let them in.  This creates, in the minds of everyone else, that the “outreach” is taken care of and they don’t have to particpate or even worry about it.

For the Missional church, the primary motivator for individual engagement is teaching God’s Word, which is full of the Missio Dei - the sending of God, or the Mission of God.  As Milfred Minitrea said, the church doesn’t have a mission.  It’s God’s Mission.  To make it ours is to make it small.

The combination of teaching and opportunity will, prayerfully, create engagement.  When opportunity is taken by the individual, when they participate in God’s Mission of redemption toward His creation, the experience becomes its own fuel.  How many times have you seen someone share Christ for the first time and become absolutely addicted to the experience?  How many “Mission Trips” have you seen revolutionize the lives of the teenagers who are its participants?

So I had been teaching for a while that we were all “Missionaries.”  Then it hit me one day after returning from Vietnam.  We’ve got to quit using the word, “Missionary.”   I had been with a former IMB Missionary, now heading up Northwood Church’s NGO:  Glocal Ventures, Inc.   We had discussed how, through the years, we had been taught that Missionaries were the top tier of holy servants of God.  Pastors were next, followed by secondary staff and then the deacons, Sunday School teachers, Nursery workers and various and sundry other servants in some miscellaneous hodge podge of lesser Christians.  Also, the culture there prohibited us proclaiming the “M” word as it was a barrier to us engaging those living there.

I began to think that the same word was a barrier to us here - both for those in the church (because we have “them” on an unrealistic pedestal) as well as those out of it (because of its “churchified” lingo).

So, one day I announced that we weren’t going to call ourselves “Missionaries” any more, even though I had been saying that we would for about a year.  Rather, I said, we will now call ourselves “servant messengers.”  The sermon, as you might surmize, was on the value of serving people as a door to personal engagement.

Afterward, one of our senior adult ladies came up to me and said, “You know, Pastor, you kept saying that we should all consider ourselves as missionaries, and I just couldn’t picture myself like that.  But then today you said that we were servant messengers and I thought, ‘Now I can do that!’”

I wish I could tell you all of the stories of people who are beginning to engage the world around them.  I’ve already made this article longer than it should be, so I won’t.  Let me just say that the reason I couldn’t sleep is because I got a call at 9:10 pm tonight telling me of how one of our Youth Workers saw some Hispanic kids playing soccer on our church grounds tonight and, prompted by the Holy Spirit, she walked over and started talking to them, shaped the conversation toward God and shared the Gospel.  She also invited them to participate in some of our stuff and told them that they were welcome any time.  Of course, we are not stopping there in God’s pursuit of them, but the point is she saw the oppotunity and, following the Holy Spirit, she let God use her in His Mission.

Structurally speaking, we have not really made any changes yet.  Two years in, and we are just getting started, but at least in theory, I think I understand where we are going.  As I said before, more on that later.  Nevertheless, the motivation is taking root and God is on the move.

Posts with related content

• September 6, 2008 -- God rocks our Block Party (1)
• August 19, 2008 -- Institutional v. Missional Church: Can Mega Be Missional? (2)
• August 18, 2008 -- Institutional v. Missional Church: Serving Community (0)
• August 15, 2008 -- Phriday foto: 08-15-08 (0)
• August 14, 2008 -- Institutional v. Missional Church: Small Groups (0)

Church, General Christian, Missional

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response.