12 Witnesses

As we seek to be Missional, our responsibility is to engage people in every arena, whether near or far, to which God gives us access.  God has opened a door for us to be such in Vietnam.  Here are a vew of my favorite pics.

You can see these and more at my photoblog or flickr account.

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In the Institutional Church, Small Groups are often used for discipleship (with a little fellowship on the side) - and it works.  I am not convinced that many who do use Small Groups really understand why they are effective.  It has been my experience that they do it because it works elsewhere and are content to do what is “new” and works.

And that’s a real shame, because Small Groups can be so much more than that.

When Small Groups are simply discipleship oriented, as they are in a typically Institutional Church, they are merely extensions of the center serving as a program of the church.

A centralized Institutional Church is one that may do small groups.

A de-centralized Missional Church is one that is small groups.

And those Small Groups take on more than discipleship adding evangelism, fellowship - worship, to some degree - and, most importantly… ministry.  And remember, ministry is evangelism, especially in our culture.

Small Groups in a Missional Church become Missional fellowships that work together as its individuals mobilize and recruit one another to projects and relationships.  This makes group ministry lean and mean, fighting against bureaucratic sluggishness and excess.

Moreover, these Small Groups are much more accessible to those outside the church, building the sphere of influence.  This allows for some level of attractionality to work starting first with the individual as they invite friends into the Small Group.

So then, the ministry and evangelism breakdown is this:  the individual is primary in service, relationships and the spread of the Gospel across every possible avenue; the small group follows in service, relationships and the spread of the Gospel in more narrow avenues, but ones that are more than the large institution can accomplish effectively; followed finally by the larger body that streamlines its programs in order to stay as lean as possible and do whatever it chooses to do as well as it possibly can be done.

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Walking through the hall the other day I found some cards in a card rack.  Apparently, I had missed them over the last two years, but others had been missing them for the last 30… maybe 40 years?  I scanned them and here they are.

Enjoy.

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The job of Missional Pastors is to facilitate the function of the church.  If a high ratio of the mobile individual is the chief structural difference between the Institutional and Missional Church, then the it is the job of the church’s Pastor(s) to exemplify, encourage, direct, instruct and get out of the way of the people so that they can do just that.

One of our church’s homegrown Pastors, Michael Harrison, who is now in Virginia was in town recently and spoke to us of the church plant he now pastors.  In that talk, he mentioned that many churches do so many things that they don’t do any of them well.  At his church, they focus on just a few group projects and try to do them with excellence.

This illustrates the problem we have with over programmed churches, typical of the Institutional model.  There are so many things that require workers and then they require participants, you lock up the people within the Institution and they have no time nor energy to mobilize themselves in the world.  They are too obligated to the overgrown structure.

Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger hit on this in their book, Simple Church.

Simplification of our programming, reducing it, is a great example of us getting out of the way of the individual, which helps us to become a more Missional congregation.

In the front window of our church’s library, are these books:  The Missional Leader, A Man’s Guide to the Spiritual Disciplines, Glocalization, UnChristian, The Divine Conspiracy, Simple Church, To The Ends of the Earth and Journeys.  Most of these I have referenced from the pulpit.  This is just one attempt to facilitate the growth and mobilization of our individuals.

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Concluding the major layout of the differences between the Institutional Church and the Missional Church is the discussion of the inherent natural paths of the individual structures.  That is to say, let’s look at the way each church structure goes about its business, which is dictated by its structure.

As a primarily centralized structure and primarily attractional in nature, the Institutional Church is forced to operate in a centrifugal fashion.  In other words, the church gathered in the facility is the way the church thinks of itself as the church.  Therefore, when it disperses, its chief goal is always to come back to the center.  This is also why the Institutional church seeks to have as many opportunities to gather as it possibly can.  When it is not succeeding in gathering and the numbers of those gathered decline, it feels that it is failing and attempts to be more attractive to increase the number of those gathered.

Institutional Church

As the Institutional Church disperses, the individuals frequently take the church’s barriers with them and stay separated from the world around them until they can get back to the gathering.  When they do engage those who are outside of the church structure, the typical engagement is to simply invite the person to come to the centralized gathering - which I have noted is not that attractive to those already outside the structure, so it often fails.

I never will forget the time in Kentucky when some of the county’s smaller churches decided that what our community needed was an association wide tent revival.  They loved it.  All the local gatherings joining for one big central gathering.  The fact that it brought back memories of their heyday, complete with numerous joint choir specials, old time Gospel hymns and a screaming preacher didn’t hurt their enthusiasm, either.

But that’s not the story.  The real story was when the Director of Missions (the head of our local Baptist association of churches, for those non-Baptists out there), a local Minister of Music and I were playing golf on Thursday (my day out of the office at the time).  We ran across a young man who was playing alone and picked him up as part of our group.  Turned out that he was a newly imported Assistant Manager at our local Wal-Mart.  He was from Ohio.  After a couple of holes, I asked him where he worked and he told me and then reciprocated by asking us where we worked.  When he found out that we were ministers, he kind of raised an eyebrow and started watching us a little differently.  As we drew close to the parting of the ways, just a couple of holes later, our DOM decided that he didn’t want to let the opportunity pass, so he told our new friend about the big tent revival we were having and invited him to come out the next week, if he could make it at all.  “You’ll hear some good sangin’ and some good preechin’.  Y’ought to come on out.”

At this, my heart sank, and the look on this young man’s face told the whole story.  Not only would he be avoiding that tent like the plague, he’d be avoiding us on the golf course as well.  I looked him up in the store and had a couple of golf conversations with him, trying to reestablish that connection on a more common ground.  I even played with him again during the next year, but I just couldn’t get past the damage done on the 8th green (we were playing the front nine last, for you golfers out there).

In contrast to this, the Missional Church considers itself the church even when it is reduced in number to the individual.  This is the primary concept behind trying to mobilize every individual and the great barrier to transitioning from Institutional to Missional.  As the Institutional Church thinks of itself as the church when it is gathered it thinks of itself as tied to its location and the times that it gathers.  The individuals of the Missional Church would think of themselves as the church (incarnational) at all times and therefore, at all places.

Missional Church

This brings the church to thinking of itself as existing primarily among society which facilitates engagements with what Bob Roberts calls the “domains” of society.  Examples of domains are:  Medical, the Arts, Politics, Education, Infrastructure, Social Work, etc.  Within all of these domains are infinite numbers of sub-domains that are more specific, such as Pediatrics and Geriatrics being part of the Medical domain.  They also cross over to the Social Work domain to some degree (more so in Vietnam where indigent elderly are housed in the same facility as orphans).

The upshot of this is that the Gospel is spread among relationships that exist as natural consequences when the Missional individual perceives himself/herself as the church wherever and whenever they are.  The nurse is a missionary to her patients, patient’s families, fellow nurses, doctors and even the odd Hospital Administrator.  In this way, the church exists in society and can become a change agent, much more easily than the church that seeks to woo uninterested and disconnected people from afar.

The gathering of the Missional church, then, is seen by its members as a centripetal force.  As they exist primarily across the infrastructure of society, they are periodically drawn together for corporate worship, fellowship, larger service projects, discipleship to some degree and even evangelism.

Because the Missional Church is not driven to build the centralized gathering, it is comfortable gathering in various places and times as well as in gathering in a variety of sizes:  two or three for accountability, 6-12 for a home group Bible Study, several home groups for a larger project, etc.

At every level, the barriers to the unchurched are smaller than at the next largest level simply because of size.  Therefore, as people come in contact with the individual and have multiple conversations that are bent toward the Gospel, the Missional Church, though not primarily attractional, becomes more attractive at various points.

The end of all of this is not that the Missional Church does so many different things than the Institutional Church, but that it does similar things with a different mindset, and, therefore, does them differently.  It also does them more effectively.

To synopsize, the Institutional Church meets as often as it can with the goal of increasing the number of its participants in the centralized meeting.  When it goes out, it has the goal of returning with more participants.  Our society doesn’t really want to particpate in this function and so the Institutional church is in decline.

The Missional Church is driven to meet by the draw of the Holy Spirit toward other believers, but sees its primary task as the relationship with those around each individual.  Their sphere of influence is used by God to draw the unchurched in to Himself and then the church, using the individual’s sphere of influence.

I got a new lens for my camera.  I’m shooting with a Canon Rebel xti, digital slr and have been using the original lens that came with it - an 18-55mm “zoom/wide angle” which does not zoom, really and the wide angle, though fair is not very wide - and an old Canon 80-200mm zoom lens that I had from 20 years ago when I was using the original Canon EOS that came out when I was in college.

I’ve been scrounging my pennies and just bought a Sigma 10-20mm wide angle lens that is truly wide angle.

Here are my first pics with the lens, taken at St. Francis Hospital in Tulsa:

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If you like these, you can see more of my pictures on my photoblog or on my flickr account.

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Institutional Church

In the Institutional Church, we see that barriers that are erected around the church are also carried with the Christians as they leave the church facility.  When the Institutional Christian exits the facility, they carry much of what makes them unattractive to the world with them in their predispositions and behavior.  How many times have you seen Christians piously look down at the behavior of co-workers who are not believers?  Or use churchified lingo around people who are anything but churched?  Or blare their “Christian” radio station/music for others to hear in an effort to “be a light to the world?”

Right.  They’re actually creating a backlash and feeding the stereotype that Christians, and by extension God and Christ, are at least pious if not morons.

Missional Church

Missional Christians are extensions of their church philosophy, tearing down as many barriers to conversation as is possible.  This is not to say that Christians are to be sinful in their behavior, but that they would need to understand the world around them and go to it, rather than asking the world to come to their churched culture and conform - which is not going to happen.

Rather than thinking of their Christian walk in terms of the church facility and the people gathered there, the Missional Christian focuses their life on the domain of society in which they live in an effort to exert their sphere of influence.  As Bob Roberts explains in Glocalization, it is through the infrastructure that already exists in society that we connect with those upon whom we will have the ultimate influence.

Meaning that the Furniture Salesman connects with customers, co-workers, furniture reps, etc.  All of the people that exist in that realm of society and with whom he comes in contact are his infrastructure.  The Dentist has office workers, patients and drug reps.  Add to this the infrastructure that is represented by the hobbies and pastimes we enjoy and you get relationships that revolve around photography, Little League baseball, or even the morning celebration of java at Starbucks.

That is to say, random conversations with strangers and home invasion visitation strategies that expect an immediate conversion experience are expressions of an Institutional mindset.  This mindset calls on whomever to simply conform to the Institutional Christians belief system and behavioral standards over a structured conversation that is really more of a sales pitch.  I’m not saying it doesn’t happen.  I’m just saying it isn’t keeping up with the growth of our global or even American population.  This means that we had better do something different and do it quickly or the church in the west will become inert if not extinct.

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Short post today, but more tomorrow on using the structure of society to make our connections to those apart from God.

If the Institutional Christian is able to begin a conversation about Christ with someone living apart from God, it is typically a programmed sales pitch.  The mindset is that of drawing (attractional) the person into a system of beliefs and behaviors.  Tragically, this is not often well received and is increasingly rejected by those who are “targets” of such conversations.

The Missional Christian is one who will seek to start the conversation in a non-verbal way as an act of service.  By living a servant natured lifestyle, the Missional Christian invites those around him/her to appreciate something about them and accept them on a basic level, before a word is ever spoken about Christ.  Later, as the conversation becomes an exchange of ideas, the other person learns that the source of this behavior is that the Christian is modeling the behavior of Jesus Christ, who came to serve.

[edit]

I need to add that I don’t think that this necessarily takes that long.  In fact, a Missional Christian could be into the discussion of the Gospel in a substantive way in minutes, depending on the situation.  It could happen much faster than the programmed approach.  On the other hand it could not.  The difference here is “control.”  In the Institutional model, the “control” of the conversation is intended to be almost absolute.  There is no variance in tracts, EE or CWT outlines.  In the Missional model, the Christian is still seeking to move the conversation toward God, but in a more organic way.  A conversation that relates to the other person in it rather than demanding they follow a logical progression ending in their surrender to an outside belief system.  I want to note here that I believe the Holy spirit uses this method, just not very often.  I think He wants us to do it better.  More like He did it when He came to us in the first place.

[/edit]

The Missional Church is one that facilitates the individual members living incarnational service outside its walls.

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Along the theme of the Missional Church being one that is efficient in mobilizing the individual in engaging his/her social context…

Joe Thorn gives a great article on the ability of a Christian to transition a conversation about something else to one whose subject is the gospel.

Great thought:

To state it simply, the better you understand the gospel the easier the transitions become. If you are trying to share the gospel you will still sometimes make huge leaps that do not work. Sometimes the conversation will only connect to the Christian faith in part, without getting directly to the gospel. Sometimes it will all come together the way you imagine. The more you know the gospel (its essence and effects) and the more you practice this discipline the easier making comfortable transitions to the gospel will become.

Which is why making disciples of our believers really matters and the failure to effectively do that over the last several decades is a factor in the decline of the church in America, as I see it.

Gospel Connections in Suburbia : subtext.

Alan Hirsch follows up his first article on the Institutional Church [thanks again for backing me up on this, Alan... ]

The Problem of institutions (part ii) : The Forgotten Ways

Les Puryear has linked to a paper from Tim Keller on the variances of Church Culture as it relates to the size of the church.  Obviously, this matters because you have to understand your church culture if you want to remove barriers between it and the culture outside the church.  The first time I heard this concept was in seminary and I have to say it was eye opening for me - I admit I was a bit naive.  That’s what Seminary is for, isn’t it?  To knock the naivitee off of you?

Process Managing Church Growth

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The church as an institution has long held a “ya’ll come” attitude toward the world, which is necessitated as a centralized church.  We want people to come to the center:  attend our church, get plugged into our programs and pay our light bills.

It’s deeper than that, though.  The “ya’ll come” attitude runs well beyond attendance to behavior, dress and other general conformities to which we would like for people to come in and adapt themselves.  I have often said that I thought that the church would be satisfied if the people of America would attend half of the time, tithe, dress nice and behave in a way that would not cause us any undue discomfort.  Note that this does not have the people of America coming to know or love God.  Just acting “right.”

Because of this, and although we have primarily operated in an attractional context, we aren’t very good at it.  To put it another way, we just aren’t that attractive and for people who base their “survival” on attraction, it is no wonder the church in America is in sharp decline.  People living apart from God do not value the things we value and have no desire to be a part of an organization that makes no sense to them.  Further, we have maintained some values in our church culture that are not Biblical and have not been passed on to subsequent generations.  As a result, the Institutional Church is often not very attractive to its own offspring.

Which brings us to the new generation of churches on the horizon.  Over the last decade or two, churches have been planted with less barriers, but are still attractional.  Let’s discuss barriers for just a minute and then I’ll unpack that last sentence.

In this diagram of the Institutional Church, the box around the facility and the Christians gathered therein represents barriers that we erect that keep people out.  Note, please, that I did not say that they were erected in order to keep people out.  Not all barriers are there with the intent of keeping people out.  I think all barriers are there to protect the comfort of those within.  I would guess that most are simple comforts to those inside that aren’t comfortable to those on the outside, and therefore become barriers.

Institutional Church

The simple barriers consist of music, dress, “churchified” lingo and things of that nature.  The more destructive barriers range from  “holier than thou” attitudes to racial discrimination.

The more modern church does quite a bit to eliminate the barriers between itself and the culture by delving into multimedia (we’re in a multimedia age, after all), singing more contemporary music, dressing more casually, being more welcoming and less judgmental, as well as relishing a racially diverse congregation.

But they are still attractional.

There are a good many churches that have torn down as many barriers as they possibly can, but they are still focused on getting the people into the church structure, program and culture.  They also tend to grow - for now.  They reach their fair share of people, but they also receive the transfer of those stuck in more Institutional Churches that don’t want to tear down those comfortable walls.  As a result, those smaller churches get smaller and, though they say they want young people to come, they can’t understand why they aren’t growing and may not survive.

Meanwhile, the Contemporary Institutional Churches grow primarily by transfer, and the transfers bring with them the attractional attitude that will one day seal their own demise if they continue to adhere to it.  Why?  Because one of these days, their kids are going to want to worship with a different sound and dress even more differently than their parents.  Those barriers will again do their work, though no one noticed them going up.

A Missional church needs to do everything it can to take down the cultural barriers that keep people away, but it needs also to go further.  In the illustration of the Missional Church, you will note that the barriers have been replaced by spheres of influence.  I am not naive enough to think that all barriers will come down for every one or every church, but it is the goal.

Missional Church

Also, please don’t misunderstand that the Missional Church has no Attractional qualities.  It does.  It should.

In fact, these diagrams are really the absolutes on a spectrum.  No church is completely Missional, nor is any church completely Attractional.  However, I would argue that the middle ground between these two representations is not nearly so Missional as we need to be.  We need to trend as close to the latter as we can get.

We as Kingdom people need to be a going people.  God is a going God, a sending God.  While He did say,

32 As for Me, if I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all [people] to Myself. - John 12:32 [HCSB]

and

44 No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day.- John 6:44 [HCSB]

he also said,

18 Then Jesus came near and said to them, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. 19 Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you. - Matthew 28:18-19 [HCSB]

and

8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. - Acts 1:8 [HCSB]

[edit] Let me add here that in the above Scriptures, although there is the “drawing” of people, only God is doing it, because only God can do it.  It is impossible for churches or individual Christians to “draw” a person.  the best we can do is eliminate as many barriers as possible.  In other words, we need to get out of God’s way within the church and be salt and light outside the church. [/edit]

Up next:  Mimicking God’s Missionality - Incarnational Servanthood.  (That’s not the title, but the subject…)