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.
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.
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.
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?
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…)
We’re beginning to unpack the primary concepts that separate the Institutional Church and the Missional Church. The key? Centralization.
The Institutional Church is a centralized church. Everything must flow through the internal structure of the church. That is to say, it flows through the organizational structure of church leadership. Over the years, we’ve built quite an infrastructure within the church. In fact, most churches would be happy to “plug-in” every single person that attends the church. It’s sort of the goal of the Institutional Church to get everyone at least some responsibility within the church because that would then make them faithful attenders and givers - or so they hope.
I said before that any idea or initiative has to run through the processes of leadership. Let me give you an example. If you know, for instance, that someone in your office is having financial problems due to circumstances beyond their control, the centralized response is to bring the need to the Pastor/Staff as a personal request. The staff person then finds someone on the Benevolence Committee (preferably the chair) who will then contact the rest of the committee who will discuss it. Of course, they are governed by several factors. Their internal guidelines allow them to give only a certain amount as a maximum to prevent anyone from taking too much advantage. Further, they may not have enough money in the account right now to make a significant impact on the situation, even if they really wanted to do so. A really dismal situation would be if the committee was not disposed to help the person because they don’t attend the church. I’ve seen that happen over the years.
This is not the only example we could use, but it’s handy. Generally speaking, if an individual at the “bottom” of the structure has an idea, everything has to flow up and back down the structure of the church. If you have a great idea, you take it to the committee who talks it to death, and then, if it doesn’t die in committee, it gets sent to the relevant staff member (assuming you have more than one) who takes it to staff meeting (again assuming you have more than one staff member). In some Baptist churches, the deacons are in there somewhere. They could possibly be between the committee and staff or they could be over the staff. I’ve served in a church that required the staff to present their ideas to the deacons, who then discussed, changed and often shut down initiatives that would have changed the church’s current practices.
The upshot of this is that the Institutional Church becomes more and more immobile and the congregation becomes mostly sedentary. Their thoughts and ideas rarely survive the process. Their church will not survive their immobility and sedentary nature.
The only ones that can really accomplish much in this scenario are the Staff, by virtue of their position and the “top” of the structure. They become the “doers,” but to “do” anything, they have to enlist the appropriate committee and get them on board as well as clear other governing leadership, if the initiative is too far outside the norm. Thus the Institutional Church becomes a struggle to advance, with Pastors and Staff being yoked to a barely moving wagon full of people telling them which way to go and how. This is your typical smaller (Institutional) church.
There is a divergence here, though. Not all Institutional Churches struggle with systems of control as bulky as that. They have become large enough that the structure actually becomes more simple. The Staff are at the top, they mobilize the appropriate committee, who seeks to mobilize a broader section of the church. However, while a more efficient structure, it is still an inefficient method of engaging the world. The ideas here flow from the top down, so the pool of creativity is slim. Also, because they don’t have much input, most of the people simply attend and are not very involved. The staff and volunteer leaders are the ones that work and everyone else simply shows up on Sunday. This is your typical large (Institutional) church.
While they have more attending on a weekly basis, their impact on the world is often not significantly different than the smaller (Institutional) church. They do more, to be sure, but that is simply based on volume. The ratio of Christians engaging their world to those that simply attend services is not that much different regardless of the size.
The Missional Church, in contrast and as I said before, is concerned with mobilizing the individual. As such, the method of engagement is empowerment of the individual church member to act on what they see as a need. Rather than finding an co-worker with a financial need and returning with that need to the church, the individual reaches into their pocket and pulls out some money and hands it over, in the Name of Christ. If they can’t do it alone, they might call on some other Christians, maybe in their small group, maybe in the church, maybe someone that goes to a different church or (could it actually be?) from another denomination. Even more radical, they might ask non-Christians to help. Maybe they make it an office project, but not a local church project.
Could it be that making such a thing an office project is considered a ministry oriented and Christian thing to do? Don’t we have to tie such things, if not to the Denomination or even the church, at least to the Kingdom? I would submit to you, that by involving the office, the Christian office worker has actually spread the Kingdom to many more than would ever have been reached by running it back though the Benevolence Committee. All of those involved, both giving and receiving, see Christ at work in the organizer. It makes a larger “splash” though not as overt.
Given our culture, though, overt is just the kind of thing that would alienate the rest of the office if they are not already a part of a church. They would perceive the action as being done to “get something” - notoriety and recognition.
You might wonder what keeps Christians from doing this kind of thing now. I wonder the same thing. I was asked on Sunday, as I explained the differences between the Institutional and Missional Church to our Search Committees, if this was not mostly a mindset. The short answer is, “Yes.” While the structures of the church have to be simplified to keep things from being killed by bureaucracy, the heart of the matter is a mindset.
The Missional individual in a Missional Church recognizes that they are the church. They are the body of Christ. They are the one that God has placed strategically in position to minister in His Name.
15 If a brother or sister is without clothes and lacks daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,” but you don’t give them what the body needs, what good is it? 17 In the same way faith, if it doesn’t have works, is dead by itself. - James 2:15-17 (HCSB)
11 And He personally gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, 12for the training of the saints in the work of ministry, to build up the body of Christ, 13 until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of God’s Son, [growing] into a mature man with a stature measured by Christ’s fullness. - Ephesians 4:11-13 [emphasis mine]
Mr. Missional, Alan Hirsch, is blogging, at the exact same time as I am, about institutional churches. As Charlie Brown would say, “AAAAUUUUUUGGGGGHHHHHH!”
Not really.
Although I had no idea that he was going to do this, I actually think it is quite Providential. It gives a different (much better? more clear?) insight into the exact same thing that I am trying to say and does so from a much more respected voice. Check this out:
Since we have been talking about the transition of the Institutional Church into the Missional Church, and music has been one of the primary issues churches are struggling with through the process, I thought you might find this article interesting.
Of particular interest to me were the two letters quoted complaining about the new songs being sung in the worship service. Without any further ado…
From Dan Kimball’s blog, Vintage Faith, comes the story of the organ as it is has been used throughout the life of the church. Turns out the organ saw controversy 1,500 years ago as well.
[For those in our Search Committee meeting yesterday, you may note that I have updated the article slightly and refreshed the diagram of the Missional Church in several ways.]
At this point, I think it is going to be easiest to lay out the structural differences between the Institutional and Missional Church and then unpack the details. If you’ve not read the preceding posts on the Individual and on Culture, I urge you to do so. Also, for additional flavor, You can check out a couple of Movie Quotes I’ve posted that relate. One is on being Institutionalized and the other is on Hope.
Here are the two structures as represented by diagrams, according to my understanding:
Institutional Church
Missional Church
It’ll take a while, several posts at least, to unpack just what you see. That doesn’t include some of the stuff that is implied but not represented by iconography.
We’ll start with concepts that characterize each:
The concepts that we will unpack for the Institutional Church are centrifugal, centralized, primarily attractional, culturally secluded, controlled, staff dependent and facility dependent.
The concepts to unpack for the Missional Church, obviously contrasting are centripetal, de-centralized, primarily going, culturally engaged, released, individually mobile and dependent on societal infrastructure.
[Note: There is no significance to the number of those living apart from God, dechurched or Christians or the ratios between them.]
[Please note: I know this article is even longer than its predecessor. If you don't want to read it all, I completely understand, but if you would skip to the concluding 1/3 of the article, you will find the overall point laid out there. Obviously, the groundwork is important in my mind, but having become a skimmer of blogs I understand that you may not care to go that far. If you are a member of Skelly Drive Baptist Church, particularly if you are in leadership or on a Search Committee, please try to wade through it all. Thanks!]
I’ve decided to work through some more prolegomena* before running through the structural descriptions and illustrations. I think this background will help with the overall picture as we progress.
Today, the subject is culture. I think the word “culture” is often problematic because because it is accurately used in such divergent ways. I hear and read traditionalists often use the word to refer to what the Apostle John called “the world” when he wrote:
15 Do not love the world or the things that belong to the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him. Because everything that belongs to the world— 16 the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride in one’s lifestyle—is not from the Father, but is from the world. 17 And the world with its lust is passing away, but the one who does God’s will remains forever. - 1 John 2:15-17 (HCSB)
Which is different from the way he uses it earlier in the chapter:
1 My little children, I am writing you these things so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ the righteous One. 2 He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for those of the whole world. - 1 John 2:1-2 (HCSB)
Again, the use of the word “culture” in this way is not “wrong,” but it is a limited scope of the use that I will make of it. So let me explain what culture is for our discussion.
I confess that the term was mostly abstract to me until this year. When talking about culture, I thought of traditions and ways of doing things that are different from me. Which is correct, but shallow. For the greater part, I viewed culture as a matter of perspective. You just see things a little differently than I do. Also correct. Kind of.
Perspective is actually more a result of culture, rather than the essence of culture. You see things the way you do as a result of the culture into which you are immersed. It is not the culture itself.
I didn’t really understand culture until February of this year. In fact, unless you have had a similar experience, my description of this transformational moment may fail to help you grasp what I finally caught standing on the street in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Hanoi, like many places around the world, has a unique traffic … er … situation. You see, the traffic in Hanoi has very little regulation. The entirety of the city, at a population of 6.2 million (including outlying metro areas after an official merger in just a couple of weeks, which will double the official city population, according to wikipedia), has only a handful of stoplights, which have only recently been installed and to which only the majority of the population adheres, most of whom do so from the back of a scooter. In other words, stoplights in Hanoi are just a suggestion to many, when they exist at all.
The entire flow of traffic is governed by a chaos theory that seems also to govern the flight of flocks of birds and schools of small fish that flow and turn together as both individuals and collective. Well, it might help you to better see it in action, so here is a little YouTube video to help you get a sense of it.
I’ll follow this up with a couple of pictures I’ve produced here before of the exact same intersection:
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Now I know that you are already thinking about my last post concerning the individual and are speculating about how I am going to say that the Missional Church needs to act in a similar fashion with the individuals in fluid motion inside the whole - all moving together to accomplish the goal. Great thinking!
But, no.
The revelatory experience as I observed the traffic in Hanoi was about the saturating nature of culture within society. How do you learn to drive in such an environment? You are immersed in it. Everyone teaches you through trial and error (hopefully not critical error) and you learn.
Here’s the big point: Culture is something that everyone in the society agrees upon as commonly accepted behavior. You learn it as you go because everyone in the entire society teaches it to you. No matter where you are, if you break the boundaries of what is commonly accepted, you will be corrected by those around you. That correction may be verbal, hostile, kind, a gesture or something else. It may come from relative, friend or stranger. Nevertheless, everyone in society holds everyone else accountable for their cultural standards.
The results of which are key.
It is incredibly difficult, once something is ingrained in a culture, to remove it. Look at tobacco in America. There has never been such a targeted campaign to rid a culture of anything that has been sustained and fueled like the campaign to rid America of tobacco. You could count prohibition, but I would argue that the majority of influential society was not actually on board with that campaign like the support the anti-tobacco campaign has.
Nevertheless, tobacco still survives the crippling lawsuits and picks up new converts daily.
Another result of the saturation of culture, is that churches have a culture of their own, and that culture has some specific elements to the local church, but also participates in concentric and overlapping circles of culture that radiate out through the local context, denominational influences and even the churched society of America inclusive of all denominations over the last 50, 100, 350 years. As a matter of fact, most of the “decline of the American culture” emails, rants, sermons… even songs, that I pick up on are really decrying the fact that American culture doesn’t reflect the church culture the way it once did. It is not that American culture is dead. We still have national values. Those values just don’t reflect the values of the people in church.
For evidence of this, look at the recent move toward conservationism and the typical response of the evangelical community. America values “eco-friendly” lifestyles, but the church doesn’t. In broad terms, anyway. Read this article on the Eco-Justice Blog for a brief example.
Now, as it relates to Missional and Institutional Church structures, there are a few consequences of church culture. Of course, it means that the church has to work to understand the culture it is trying to reach - Breaking the Missional Code - so to speak. That’s the easy part. Or, at least, the point most obvious to those interested in Missionality.
The more difficult part is deciphering your own church culture, or at even getting the church to realize that it has its own culture.
Because culture is saturation, most people assume that the way they think is “normal.” It is, for their context, but what they don’t realize is that they are a part of a commonly agreed upon system of values that has them convinced that those values are “RIGHT” and violation of those values is “WRONG.”
For those saturated in the church culture, it means that certain songs, worship styles, modes of dress, lingo and even the evaluation of staff (”working” in the office during office hours, as opposed to being in the community, for instance) becomes something that is “right” because it is what they have always seen and done. This is most humorously and sadly seen in the comment, “We’ve never done it that way before…” in response to a desire to make a change in any process of the church.
For the individuals and the church as a whole to accept the fact that the things that they have learned from each other and held as valuable are not necessarily right but just what they are used to doing is probably the most significant yet overlooked step in getting a church and its individuals mobilized in the community.
The failure to identify church culture is a de-motivator as well as a barrier to missional engagement. It sucks away motivation because individuals look at those outside the church as living “wrongly” and their solution is to simply tell them that they need to get into the church and live “rightly.” This mires the church and the individual into an attractional mode, at best, and can trend to move the church and individual into a judgmental attitude. This creates an almost impenetrable barrier between the church and its internal culture and the unchurched and their culture, with very little national or local culture to act as a common bond between them and no motivation by either to break through that barrier.
Thus, the best, first thing that a church can do is identify and then evaluate its own internal culture and see what things might need to be excised from itself. As I mentioned with the tobacco issue in America, simply identifying the ingrained value as needing to be gone is not enough. It takes time, teaching and will sometimes take the absence of those unwilling to see beyond their raising before the culture becomes able to embrace a new system of values. We see this taking place in the Exodus as the adults of Israel, despite the plagues, despite the pillar of smoke/fire (glory of God’s personal presence), the protection against the armies of Egypt by the separation of the two by the pillar/presence of God still complained that they would rather be slaves. After the Red Sea and the destruction of the Egyptian armies, they still refused to take the promised land even with God as their head, and so, ultimately, God had to allow those who were saturated with the slave culture to die off and raise up a generation who were saturated with a culture that depended daily on Him for their very provision, via manna, quail, water, etc.
Sadly, churches in transition may well have to experience similar absence of those who can not introspectively evaluate their own church culture.
Still, the first major undertaking is personal self evaluation and the comparison of that which is demanded of God to that which is normative for us as dictated by that in which we were raised.
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*prolegomena - For Vicki and Tiffany, this word means “stuff you have to talk about so that the stuff you are going to talk about later makes sense.” By defining the individual previously and culture now, it will be easier to understand the conversation about transitioning between structures later.
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.
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