Missional philosophy is all well and good, but as the great prophet Duke Ellington said, "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." (Doo wop doo wop doo wop.) There are a whole lot of churches and ministries "doing missions," implementing mission efforts in the ministry of their communities, but in the missional movement's greater focus on embodying the missio dei, the work of missions becomes less and less compartmentalized, less and less partitioned off from the things the church "normally" does. First and foremost, missional is not something we do; it is something we are.
But of course you gotta have that swing. What does a missional church look like?
I believe it begins with Jesus. If we are to take the Great Commission seriously, the last directive Jesus gave his followers, it means we must engage in the ongoing work of Jesus. To reframe: How can "going into all the world, teaching all that he has commanded and making disciples of all men" be Jesus-shaped (to borrow a quite good phrase from my friend the Internet Monk)?
In other words, how did Jesus do this? What was his mission? He tells us plainly it is to seek and save the lost (Luke 19:10).
I cannot testify to how most or many communities that self-describe as "missional" go about seeking and saving the lost, but I can speak for my own (it's called Element, and our cultural context is Nashville, Tennessee). And it just so happens I think what we do should be done by others. (I'm kinda arrogant that way.)
What does our missional community do?
1. We treasure the gospel of the atonement.
The old school, out of fashion, grace-for-sin gospel. Paul said he wasn't ashamed of it (Rom. 1:16) because it is awesomely powerful. I don't know why so many pastors think it's okay to leave it out or Trojan horse it in -- actually, I do; they don't want to hurt anyone's feelings or be thought intolerant -- but we believe that anyone who claims to value authenticity and honesty and truthfulness but won't be authentic and honest and truthful about what's really wrong with all of us – namely, sin – is not really helping anyone. Jesus went around preaching the arrival of the kingdom of God, which is incredible news only when you get the gravity of what happened way back in Genesis 3. This is why the sharp edge of Jesus' mission to the poor and sick and hungry is "Repent and believe."
A missional church proclaims and embodies the goodness of Jesus and the power of his redeeming work. Paul said this was of "first importance" (1 Cor. 15:3), and the reason we are strong and firm and joyous about the historical fact of Jesus' actual atoning sacrifice and his glorious bodily resurrection is because fallenness is a historical fact. How much comfort can a symbolic atonement and a metaphorical resurrection be to someone whose abusive childhood was not symbolic and whose cancer is not metaphorical?
Caring for the least of these is life or death stuff, and so is the gospel.
2. We live the gospel of the kingdom.
This means, essentially, that a healthy church is a living portrait of the kingdom of God. Read Jesus' Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7) to see what the kingdom looks like. Kingdom living is countercultural living: it involves giving up revenge, forgiving enemies, walking the extra mile, etc. The values of the kingdom turns the world's values upside down, which is to say, from God's perspective, rightside up. The Sermon's Beatitudes are the primary picture. All those who are thought inconvenient or who are marginalized in the world – the mourners, the poor, the hungry, the peacemakers, et.al. – are valued and "at home" in the kingdom.
How is this missional, exactly? It's being, as Jesus said to be, a city on a hill, being salt and light. It's being a bright shining light, illuminating the radical goodness of the good news of Jesus. This is missional because it is an intentional and aggressive declaration of the gospel, particularly and especially if the community is doing all of this, as Jesus did, while on the move. Trying to be salt and light for the world inside a church building for one hour a week is really hard. I've tried it; it doesn't work.
What we are doing, basically, is living the life of new creation as a way of spreading the news that Jesus has redeemed fallenness. And if you revisit the story of the fall you will see this is about the entrance of sin into our hearts, yes, but is about more than that. It's about chaos corrupting God's creational order. Not only are we broken; the world is broken. So the kingdom's heralding means first and foremost that we can be made right with God (by grace through faith in Christ) but also and importantly that the fallen world is being set back to right. By living like the gospel is true – again, check out the countercultural blueprint of the Sermon on the Mount – we are shouting, "Behold! He is making all things new" (Rev. 21:5).
3. We embody the gospel of reconciliation.
This is huge. Our missionary God, as I argued last time, is on the move. And while many so-called "missional" churches today have failed to embrace our first characteristic, "Treasuring the gospel of the atonement," the pendulum swing reaction of these churches is in response to many churches having failed to embrace this third characteristic. If we engage in missions, it is as a program. But one of the sins of the evangelical church is its relegating mission to the periphery. (I'm going to expand on this problem next week.)
But if Jesus came to seek and save that which is lost, and if the Church is the Body of Christ, shouldn't we be doing what the physical body of Christ did when he was with us? We have no problem preaching "Repent and believe" based on his example. Based on his example, why aren't we caring for "the least of these" (Matt. 25:45) with the selfless regard of the incarnational mission?
Jesus said the greatest commandment is to love God with all we have and to love our neighbor at least as much as we love ourselves. This was not a suggestion or a sentiment. It was a command.
When the world fell, enmity divided Adam and Eve from God. But the fall also created enmity between Adam and Eve, and so therefore the great work of the gospel seeks to reconcile not just man to God by proclaiming the substitutionary atonement, it seeks to reconcile man to man. We do this by cultivating communities that thrive on grace – grace with each other and grace abundantly poured out on our neighbors.
I can speak to what this means for my missional community. For Element, this means that those within the community are trained to think of themselves as missionaries to their work, school, families – to their tribes. The church isn't conceived as the community center where they bring "seekers" to get evangelized in-house. Element can and does do that, but it is not our priority. Instead we expect missionary work to take place outside the church walls, as our community members proclaim and embody the gospel of the kingdom out in the world that Jesus told us to go into.
It also means that for us, missions isn't a program, but a priority. We employ a simple church structure consisting of exactly 3 regular ministries: a worship service, community groups, and service projects. Our community group meets not in a church building and not in a living room, but in a local grocery store café. This puts our group in the marketplace, discussing Scripture, breaking bread together, praying together, etc. It's a great way for community members to introduce friends to the Element way in a neutral third place and it's a visible witness to our neighbors.
By conducting regular service projects – working the homeless shelter, serving at the after-school inner city ministry, supporting new ministries and church plants, Habitat homebuilding, etc. – we embody the gospel and also communicate to our members that this is of utmost importance to us; indeed, it is who we are. Recently our community has also agreed to implement a church budget plan that calls for giving 60% of our offerings away to those in need. This is a way for us to love others more than ourselves with our finances.
This is just a nutshell (although a rather big one) of what a missional community is on mission to do. In the coming weeks I'll continue to unpack the qualities and characteristics and implications of what it means for the evangelical church to become more missional.
Jared Wilson is the pastor and co-founder of Element, a missional Christian community in
Nashville, Tennessee, and an award-winning writer whose articles, essays, and
short stories have appeared in numerous publications.
Jared's first book, The Unvarnished Jesus, releases Fall 2009 from Kregel.
A graduate of Middle Tennessee State University, he lives outside
Nashville with his wife and two daughters.
Encounter Jared's passion for the ongoing reformation of the evangelical church
almost daily at www.gospeldrivenchurch.com.
Healthy church is a living portrait of the kingdom of God. "You shall know them by what they have done or failed to do'. The fruits of their labor, their love of neighbor, period. Good job. Is not the wheat being separated from the shaft?
Hi Jared, this was a great explanation. Well laid out and Biblical. A true book of "Acts" church. The church is not the building, it is the people as Jesus said, wherever two or more are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them. Our little church in my town lives by these same concepts. And it works! When hearts are on fire for the Lord and do not compromise the word of God, they live a life of love that others are attracted to. True, there are those who do not like hearing about sin, but you cannot preach Jesus, without it, because he did the same.
I look forward to reading more. I appreciate your laying out your belief system and explaining your meaning of Biblical terms, it really helps, because as we talked about briefly before, not every one who professes Christ, agrees with biblical teaching.
» left by Rich Shipe from Virginia (127 days 7 hours ago.)
Hey Jared,
Thanks so much for your writing and web ministry to me. I'm an associate pastor of a small/medium church in Virginia. We've got a lot of young families with young kids and I'm trying to imagine my small group meeting in a "public place." How exactly would that work with young kids? I'm thinking about my situation a couple of years ago when my three girls were ages one, two, and three. We were deep in the heart of the trench warfare of parenthood! Babysitters aren't always an option for everyone all the time. How does one do community groups under those circumstances? I have some ideas but was interested in your thoughts. Thanks!
I have small children myself (5 and 7), so I understand the babysitting dilemma relating to small groups. How do you currently handle this? Do the children of adults attend home small groups with their parents? If not, I don't see why a change of location for the adults would affect sitting.
But if families are attending group together, here are some options I can think of offhand that might help you rethink:
- Instead of a restaurant or coffee shop, is there a mall or community center in your area with a playground or play area? One church I know locally has a women's Bible study that meets a local mall with a "sunken playground" inside. They can sit and chat and discuss while still able to keep an eye on their kids.
- What if you did some rethinking of the small group purpose? Maybe eating together and just talking and praying with all the families is a viable alternative to in-depth study. Eating and sharing is certainly a biblical mode of "group meetings."
- Maybe you could have each pair of parents agree to sit all the kids during a small group meeting and make all the parents rotate. If you have, say, 4 pairs of parents, each pair would only miss group once a month.
- You could have your church establish a young adult or college student small group specifically to serve other members by sitting their kids during their small group. A great way for members to serve others, solve the babysitting dilemma, and have the young adults learn good hands-on parenting skills.
Those are just some ideas. I hope nobody understood my description of Element's small group as a prescription of The Way. We will likely have living room and all kinds of other groups in the future. We like to be flexible and intuitive that way, not bound to a particular model or blueprint. It is much easier for our group to commit to this because they are mostly single adults in their mid-20s with no children.
» left by Rich Shipe from Virginia (125 days 22 hours ago.)
To answer your questions...
The group that I lead provides child care. A couple of the folks in our group sponsor the babysitters. Everyone brings their kids and the babysitters manage the kids in a different room so the parents can focus without distraction. I suppose we could drop the kids at a home and then go to a community place.
Also, I didn't understand your description as The Way but rather as you meant it. I was just interested in your perspective based on a group with folks in different life stages.
Thanks for your answer and I look forward to reading the rest of the series.
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