Some Missional thoughts from David Phillips
Oct 7th, 2008 | By art rogers | Category: Church, Link Load, MissionalI have a friend named David Phillips who is a pastor in Delaware. Among other things, David is a truly Missional thinker and has a great many thoughts worth your attention, and I want to recommend a couple of short posts to you.
The first post is the one in which he coins his church structural concept, MIROR, which is a spin off of Len Sweet’s MRI construct. MIROR stands for Missional, Incarnational, Relational, Organic and Reproducable. You can read more in his post, The Trinity: Foundations for Missional Theology.
His most recent effort is The MIROR, Missional and Releasing Your People.
I was really struck by his last post and the simple concept of releasing your people. We understand that Missional is sending. God is a sending God. The Father sent the Son, sent the Holy Spirit. We are sent in the Great Commission and Acts 1:8.
Sending, however, is not always releasing. There arise in our culture numerous examples of a desire to control those who are sent out. People get tied to policies and procedures that keep them from acting independently. It is a centralized mindset, rather than a de-centralized one. It steals initiative and creativity from the individual. [As I read this, it occurs to me that some people will think I am referring to our Southern Baptist Mission Boards. I'm not. I may address that further one day, but I doubt it.]
I think that the failure to release is actually a failure to send. It looks like sending, but it’s more like annexing. Not the same.
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“I think that the failure to release is actually a failure to send. It looks like sending, but it’s more like annexing. Not the same.”
Art… Bingo!
David Phillipss last blog post..The MIROR, Missional, and Releasing Your People
This is one of those things that you go “all in” abstractly, then when you start living the reality, you begin to wonder if this is what you really believe.
64K question: Where does your responsibility as an overseer start and end in the act of releasing?
Mike,
I don’t have many problems living it out. I have problems getting others in my church to live it out, sometimes.
Strike that. I did spend about 3 days mourning the recent departure of a family that moved from our church. Then I realized that as much as I loved and appreciated them, there was nothing I could do and that where they were was between them and God.
As for my role as overseer, I challenge them to live Biblically, but otherwise I realize that they are not under my “control.” I don’t have rights over the people of my congregation, rather, I am there to serve them.