Missional Church

Gospel Clarity for Missional Calling

/ Dennis Griffith / 3 Comments

The article below by World Harvest Mission‘s Josiah Bancroft is a tremendously insightful and clear explanation of the relationship of the gospel to culture.  Not only is this an important understanding for the mission field overseas, but Josiah explains why it is essential even within the local church in North America.

The video above is an interview with Josiah by Collin Hansen of The Gospel Coalition.

***

by Josiah Bancroft

How do you keep the gospel clear and focused on missional calling when so many competing forces, influences, and voices speak into your life, ministry, and church? I am learning that gospel clarity is tied in large part to how we understand our cross-cultural mission in very practical ways.

For example, I was picking up a large short-term team outside of Dublin to introduce them to our Irish partners and co-workers. When the jet-lagged U.S. visitors stumbled from the bus, one of the passengers asked to pray and gathered us around her. She thanked God for safe travel, for the opportunity to serve, and then prayed for “all our boys in harms way” and asked God to protect our troops from our enemies.

As soon as she said a tearful and happy amen and walked away, my Irish friends inundated me with questions: Who were “our boys”? Was the church supporting a national war? How were those “our” enemies that the U.S. troops were killing? Of course Ireland was neutral in the war, so their questions were reasonable and predictable. After all, they were Christians, not Americans.

Navigating culture and mission with gospel clarity doesn’t just happen, so how—practically—can we keep clear about the gospel while pursuing our cross-cultural missional calling? We all interpret the world as cultural beings. That’s how God has made us. And yet many American believers have struggled with the basic idea that they are part of a culture or a sub-culture. That is now changing.

With the rapid changes in U.S. culture during recent years, our churches are beginning to see U.S. culture more clearly. Our culture has changed so much and so quickly that the church sometimes struggles to engage. We are hard pressed to maintain the mental and spiritual clarity that can respond powerfully to a such pervasive cultural forces. So what can help us with our struggle? I’d like to make a few suggestions.

1. We Need Clear Kingdom Identity and Allegiance

As missional people we belong to the kingdom of God and live in the United States as strangers and aliens. Keeping my kingdom identity clear as a believer keeps me from identifying completely with this present age. God has given each of us a role in our culture, so we should embrace our lives and do well here. But this present time and place isn’t everything, and this age doesn’t fully define a believer. So while I work to bring all things under the rule of Christ in my life and mission, I do it as an outsider. Where I forget this missional identity, I can confuse my interests and culture with the kingdom of God. Then I lose my gospel clarity and muddle the message with my culture.

Practical Help: Keep the horizon of God’s larger global mission clearly in view even in local ministry work, so that all your concerns are kept in the right perspective for new kingdom people. Without this missional global horizon, local ministry easily appears so large to us that it obscures everything else.

2. We All Answered the Universal Call to Cross-cultural Missional Life

Since we are each part of God’s mission to reach the world, and because we live as strangers and aliens, therefore all of our ministry and mission is necessarily cross-cultural. All church planting is a cross-cultural exercise. All evangelism reaches across cultural boundaries, even in our own families and neighborhoods. The struggles between generations are in part cross-cultural conflicts, because the world has shifted so quickly and radically. Every attempt to reach out or serve in the church must recognize and communicate to our own culture with cross-cultural understanding and sensitivity. All ministry here is cross-cultural.

Practical Help: We need a steady flow of outsiders and missionaries who bring in tales of the kingdom moving and struggles to take the gospel into difficult places. What worked in Congo? What is God doing in Russia? How is the God moving in the Czech Republic? Hearing how culture works and is navigated practically in other places gives us new perspectives on what things belong to the kingdom and what belongs to the culture.

3. We Enter Other Cultures

As a missional people we are responsible to cross the cultural barriers with the gospel rather than wait and require those outside to come and understand. Actually that’s one of the big differences that came with the church in the first century. Everyone doesn’t have to become Jewish to have access to God. Today in the church we must learn the new languages, not the nations . . . remember Pentecost? We adapt rather than require others to “eat kosher.” We go, rather than having everyone come to us. When I bear the weight of reaching out to others, here or in foreign countries, I best imitate Christ who became like us in love and won us with great sacrifice. When the gospel is small in my life, when my flesh and home culture press in, then I am unwilling to change or sacrifice for others to bring them the gospel. Missions pushes me to clarify my commitment to the gospel and to Christ.

Practical Help: Get a larger heart for the world by spending time with others who love their enemies. That love is what motivated Christ to do the work of incarnation. Roll up your sleeves and find a place to sacrifice time, work, and money for the expansion of the kingdom in places you will never see as well as in your hometown. Turn every group in the church outward with a cross-cultural eye to be true missional communities.

4. We Go

We know the gospel is how we enter the kingdom. The gospel promises are also how we live daily before God in repentance and faith. And the gospel is the central message of the church as we go into the world. This might seem obvious, but it is so easy to mix cultural pieces into our speaking about Christ that we need to be clear. Paul tells Titus in his church planting and leadership to emphasize—even insist on—and confidently affirm the gospel as the life and message of the church (Titus 3:8).

Practical Help: Get involved in short-term missions and create a global missional team to find those in your fellowship who need to go. Join with cross-cultural workers who have more experience so that you can learn from them. The New Testament way requires us to listen to these cross-cultural workers. Of course the greatest was Christ. But Paul also qualifies, and as a cross-cultural missionary he was wonderfully equipped to lead churches and planting in various places without confusing his culture or Roman culture with the call of the kingdom. I would love for our churches to find his gospel clarity and passion renewing us all for global missions and partnership in new ways.

Perhaps there is another way to say all of this simply. The gospel always leads us believers to a global vision and a heart willing to sacrifice for a lost world. That’s what it means to follow our Savior. And learning to keep our vision clear, listening to others engaged in that same struggle, and feeding your heart with the gospel promises and the kingdom calling from Scripture are all essential to keep our missional calling centered on the gospel.

***

Both the article and the video first appeared on The Gospel Coalition blog.

Lessons from The Externally Focused Church

/ Dennis Griffith / 2 Comments

 

 Although everyone outside the Church is a potential ministry focus, the Externally Focused  Church moves intentionally toward two groups:

  1. Those on the margins
  2. The City

– from Externally Focused Church 

These are important points to remember when designing an outreach strategy for the local church.  The first, people on the margins of society, probably needs no explanation.  The second, while in some ways obvious, may be helpful to explain, at least a little. 

The focus on the city does not necessarily mean our focus must be on the mega metropolitan areas throughout the country and around the world.  While no doubt those places are important, when you think of “city” think simply of “places where people gather”.  Externally Focused Churches work to benefit the common good more than create places to which Christians withdraw from others.  (Jeremiah 29.7)

Total Church

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

I have recently been listening to Tim Chester and Steve Timmis speak about Total Church. I appreciate their emphasis that two key principles should shape church life: gospel and community.

As Tim Chester writes:

Christians are called to a dual fidelity: fidelity to the core content of the gospel and fidelity to the primary context of a believing community.

Wondering about what I would consider an important, really an essential, third spoke, Mission, Chester elaborates:

Whether we are thinking about evangelism, social involvement, pastoral care, apologetics, discipleship or teaching, the content is consistently the Christian gospel and the context is consistently the Christian community. What we do is always defined by the gospel and the context is always our belonging in the church. Our identity as Christians is defined by the gospel and the community.

Timmis and Chester suggest “Being gospel-centered actually involves two things”  So really we have three principles at work.  Christian practice must be:

1.Gospel-centered

  • gospel-centered in the sense of being Word-centered
  • gospel-centered in the sense of being mission-centered (or what I would call being gospel-driven)

2. Community-centered (or what I would call a gospel-formed community)

Here’s how it fleshes out. Contrasting the common polemic nature within much of Christianity, Chester says:

In practice conservative evangelicals often place a proper emphasis on the gospel or on the word. Meanwhile others, like those who belong to the so-called emerging church, may emphasize the importance of community. The emerging church is a loose movement of people who are exploring new forms of church. Each group suspects the others are weak where they are strong. Conservatives worry that the emerging church is soft on truth, too influenced by postmodernism. The emerging church accuses traditional churches of being too institutional, too program-oriented, often loveless and sometimes harsh.

So let us nail our colors to the mast. We agree with the conservatives that the emerging church is too often soft on truth. But we do not think the answer is to be suspicious of community. Indeed we think that often conservatives do not ‘do truth’ well because they neglect community. Because people are not sharing their lives, truth is not applied and lived out.

We also agree with the emerging church movement that often conservative evangelicals are bad at community. The emerging church is a broad category and an ‘emerging’ one at that with no agreed theology or methodology. It means generalizations about emerging church are far from straight-forward. But many within the movement seem to downplay the central importance of objective, divinely-revealed, absolute truth. This may not be a hard conviction, but it is a trajectory. Others argue that more visual media (images, symbols, alternative worship) should compliment or replace an emphasis on the word. We do not think this is the answer. Indeed we think emerging church can sometimes be bad at community because it neglects the truth. It is not governed by truth as it should be, so its community is too whimsical or too indulgent. It is often me and my mates talking about God – church for the Friends generation – middle-class twenty and thirty-somethings church. Only the truth of the gospel reaches across barriers of age, race and class.

If this all sounds a little too radical, to me it sounds a lot like what Francis Schaeffer trumpeted a generation ago.  Check out Schaeffer’s Two Contents, Two Realities.  What Chester and Timmis advocate seems to be two of the principles Schaeffer emphasized: Sound Doctrine and the Beauty of Human Relationships.  Listen to what they say:

We often meet people reacting against an experience of conservative churches which has been institutional, inauthentic and rigidly programmed. For them the emerging church appears to be the only other option. We also meet people within more traditional churches who recognise the need for change, but fear the relativism they see in the emerging church. For them existing models seem to be the only option. We believe there is an alternative.

We want to argue that we need to be enthusiastic about truth and mission and we need to be enthusiastic about relationships and community.

And finally Timmis & Chester offer a warning notice:

[WARNING:] Rigorously applying these principles has the potential to lead to some fundamental and thoroughgoing changes in the way we do church. The theology that matters is not the theology we profess, but the theology we practice.

As John Stott says:

“…our static, inflexible, self-centered structures are ‘heretical structures’ because they embody a heretical doctrine of the church. If our structure has become an end in itself, not a means of saving the world it is a heretical structure.”

Moving Toward Missional

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

Some questions I have wrestled with over time:

Can someone live missionally without a conscious embracing of missionalism?

  • I suspect “No”.
  • It is possible to engage in activities, but without a conscious approach there is no “mission”.
  • Such a life is more frenetic, aimless, and haphazard.
  • Mission requires intentionally carrying out a preconceived plan and/or purpose.

Can a church move toward missional without everyone necessarily understanding and embracing a missional mindset?

  • I think “Yes”.
  • Studies of transitions from traditional to missional by the Gospel & Our Culture Network do not offer a positive picture.  It is not an easy road. Many long held notions must be reconsidered.
  • Still, I think a congregation can move toward becoming missional as long as the Leadership is intentionally missional and is directing the church.
  • First it may require simply moving toward being Outwardly-Focused.  An outwardly-focused church will carry many of the same marks as being an evangelistic church.  In some respects an outwardly-focused church merely does what churches that want to think of themselves as evangelistic talk about doing or assume they do (when in fact, they do not).
  • An Outwardly-Focused Church moves from being ingrown, but may not necessarily require every member, or even most of the membership, to be intentionally missional. It does not require the mindset change, only faithful activity.
  • But as more people are encouraged to engage the community and are released to serve in various capacities, as leaders show how learning to understand the values and mindsets of the peoples in the community is simply a tangible  expression of “loving you neighbor”, more and more people will move toward a missional mindset.

Missional Shift

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

In his book The Present Future, Reggie McNeal reveals and contrasts different ways leaders can think about the church and its ministry. McNeal reflects upon the different paradigms that pastors can have as they lead and conduct ministry in the church.

Being missional is a shift in thinking about the nature of the church. Once a missional understanding is adopted, the way we do church begins to change.

A missional church stresses:

  • community transformation over growing the church
  • turning members into missionaries over turning members into ministers
  • and recovering Christian mission over doing church better.

No Need to Reinvent the Church

/ Dennis Griffith / 2 Comments

Let me just say it straight, up front: I see no need to reinvent the church. What I do see is the need for God’s People to act more faithfully as Christ’s Church.

I like what Kevin DeYoung has to say in the Introduction to his book, The Good News We Almost Forgot:

No doubt the church in the West has many new things to learn. But for the most part, everything we need to learn is what we’ve already forgotten. The chief theological task now facing the Western church is not to reinvent or to be relevant but to remember. We must remember the old, old, story. We must remember the faith once delivered to the saints. We must remember the truths that spark reformation, revival, and regeneration.

So, again, despite the assertions of the Emergents and Seekers and cutting-edge tweekers, I see no need to reinvent the church. God is still at work, just as he has been at work through the ages.

We would, however, be wise to remember what the Reformers of the 16th Century pointed out:

The Church is constantly in need of reforming itself to become more conformed to Scripture.

To do this we  need to be aware of:

  • What God says in Scripture His Church is to be
  • What God has done through history to build His Church

But while I do not believe we need to reinvent the church, I do believe we must always contextualize the ministry of our congregations to be relevant to the cultures where we live; and to be relevant to any cultures in which we may minister.

Consider what missiologist Lesslie Newbigin observed:

If the gospel is to be understood… if it is to be received as something which communicates the Truth about the real human situation, if it is as we say “to make sense”, it has to be communicated in the language of those to whom it is addressed and it has to be clothed in symbols which are meaningful to them.  Those to whom it is addressed must be able to say: “Yes, I see.”

The desire for Relevance does not necessarily change or minimize the Truths of our Faith.  Instead it is an attempt to express and communicate the historic Biblical Truths in ways that are meaningful and applicable to contemporary and changing contexts.

In other words, we want to embrace and embody the historic Christian faith in ways that are relevant to the culture(s) in which we live & minister.

Just as a missionary going to a foreign country would be expected to adopt the language, dress, and appropriate customs & mannerisms of that culture, so we ought to be sensitive to our culture (and various sub-cultures). We use our freedom in Christ to adjust & adopt appropriate forms that will enable us to speak clearly to the people of the glory of Christ, and of the eternal truth of the gospel.

But while we must be contextual, we must be contextual without negating or neglecting  the foundations laid by our forefathers in the Faith.

This is what the LORD says: “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’   – Jeremiah 6.16

Do not move an ancient boundary stone set up by your forefathers.   – Proverbs 22.28

Here are some practical principles:

  • I affirm God has worked through His church throughout history, and that the church is God’s primary mission agency.  Much wisdom has been gained through the ages, and we are wise to learn from those who have come before us.
  • Therefore we must be committed to doing ministry & theology, with intentional continuity with the Historic Christian Faith, under the authority of God’s Word.
  • At the same time, we must seek to be sensitive to our culture and contextualize our ministry accordingly. We must also be careful not to fall into the traps of syncretism or cultural accommodation, or any other practice that compromises the gospel of Jesus Christ.
  • Relevance also means that we should be sensitive to specific (sometimes unique) issues facing our contemporary culture(s), and the context in which we live and serve, and to speak prophetically to those issues in accordance with faithful Biblical theology.

In short, we are informed by the past, and we should be connected to our heritage, but we must be a living community of learners, willing to adapt and change in order to be both more faithful to Christ and more effective for the sake of His Kingdom.

And rather than reinventing, and becoming like the Emergents, we can adopt convergence.  Convergence means that we take the best practices and resources of the past and integrate them with contemporary expressions in the context of our community.

This is, in large part, what it means to be Missional. And being missional does not require reinventing, just a little recovering and a little sensitivity and a lot of application.

Every Church Missional

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

Every church is called to be a “missional church”. The fact that we have turned the word mission into an adjective testifies to the American church’s frayed ecclesiology. A non-missional church is not a church in the first place, but in a culture largely devoid of theological vocabulary, this language has become necessary to remind us that the church exists not for ourselves, but for the world.

– Kenda Creasy Dean, in Almost Christian

The Calling of the Church

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

The calling of the church in every culture is to be mission. That is, the work of the church is not to be an agent or servant of the culture. The churches’ business is not to maintain freedom or to promote wealth or to help a political party or to serve as the moral guide to culture. The church’s mission is to be the presence of the kingdom…  The church’s mission is to show the world what it looks like when a community of people live under the reign of God.

– Robert Webber, The Younger Evangelicals

To Be Or Not To Be Missional

/ Dennis Griffith / 4 Comments

Dave Harvey is an expert church planter and an astute observer of trends in church leadership.  At the Spring 2007 Leadership Conference of Sovereign Grace Ministries Harvey assessed the strengths and weakness of the missional movement in an address titled Watch Your Mission: To Be or Not to Be Missional.

One observation Harvey offers is that sometimes missional practitioners muddy the Cross-centered focus of the Church. 

Here is a sketch outline of Harvey’s message:

What are the Strengths of Missional Churches?

  • Missional Churches Have a Commendable Passion for Evangelism.
  • Missional Churches Have a Laudable Commitment to Engaging Culture.
  • Missional Churches Have a Profitable Impulse for Reexamining Church Tradition.
  • Missional Churches Possess an Admirable Devotion to Social Impact.

What are the Weaknesses of  [Some] Missional Churches?

  • Missional Churches Tend to Be Mission-Centered Rather Than Gospel-Centered.
  • Missional Churches Tend to Have a Reductionistic Ecclesiology.
  • Missional Churches Tend to Confuse Culture Engagement with Cultural Immersion.
  • Missional Churches Tend to Downplay the Institutional and Organizational Nature of the Church.
  • Missional Churches Tend to Have an Insufficient Understanding of Apostolic Ministry.

As one who desires to be both Gospel-centered and Misisonal, I take Harvey’s cautions seriously. I think he has a valid point. I would say that while being Missional does not inherently make one guilty of this, I would have to concede that many who are Missional are guilty of this. 

I suspect this results from an imbalance with the Prophet, Priest, and King tri-perspective. Too much emphasis is placed on the role and influence of the King.  This seems only to be natural since, afterall, one of the important principles recovered by the missional movement is that our mission matters; our mission is as much an expression of who we are as is our theology.

So what is the solution?  Uncompromising Tri-Perspectivalism.

Read Harvey’s full outline here; Download the mp3 for FREE and listen to the audio here.

Note: Thanks to Tony Reinke of Miscellanies for the links.

Community is Identity

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

From Tim Chester:

The church is not a building you enter. Nor is it a meeting your attend. It is not what you do on a Sunday. To be a Christian is to be part of God’s people and to express that in your life through belonging to a local Christian community.

Our Belonging

We belong to one another (Romans 12:5). If a car belongs to me then I am responsible for it and I decide how it should be used. If a person belongs to me them I am responsible for them and I am involved in their decisions.

Our Home

Peter says Christians are ‘foreigners’ = ‘without home’ in the world (1 Peter 2:11). But we are being built into an alternative ‘home’ (1 Peter 2:5).

Our Family

Families eat together, play together, cry together, laugh together, raise child together provide for one another. Families argue and fight, but they do not stop being families and they don’t join other families because they have different tastes in music or reading. With family you can take off your shoes and put your feet on the sofa. They provide identity and a place of belonging.

Family is one of the most common New Testament images for the church. So try re-reading the paragraph above, substituting the word ‘church’ for ‘family’…

Our Community

The New Testament word for community is used to describe sharing lives (1 Thessalonians 2:8), sharing property (Acts 4:32), sharing in the gospel (Philippians 1:5; Philemon 6) and sharing in Christ’s suffering and glory (2 Corinthians 1:6-7; 1 Peter 4:13). Helping poor Christians is an act of ‘community’ (Romans 15:26; 2 Corinthians 9:13). Christians are people who share their lives with one another.

Our Joy

How would you answer this question: ‘For what is our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ when he comes?’ Paul says to the church in Thessalonica, ‘Is it not you?’ (1 Thessalonians 2:19)

Implication: ‘We’ not ‘I’

We need to say not ‘I am planning to …’ or ‘this is my ministry’, but ‘we are planning to …’ and ‘this is our ministry’. We need to say not ‘you need to … or ‘the church doesn’t meet my needs’, but ‘we need to …’ and ‘why don’t we do this’.

Externally Focused Quest

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

Most churches have a subtle, perhaps even unspoken, objective.  It is driven by the question:

“How can we be the best church in our community?”

How a church answers that question determines the approach to membership, staffing, budget, etc.

In a book I am now reading, Externally Focused Quest, authors Eric Swanson & Rick Rusaw ask an entirely different, more poignant, question:

“How can we be the best church for our community?’

The difference between the two questions dramatically influences the way we approach ministry,  approach our community, and relate to other churches.  Those driven by this question are inclined to be highly attractional, may tend to view neighbors as being placed by God so that they can be harvested for the growth and benefit of the church.  And while many people would be gracious enough to realize that there are enough people to go around, and that no one church can monopolize all the people in an area, this question inherently promotes a sense of competion between churches.

Perhaps even more significant, the differences between these two questions radically reveals our view of God and what we believe to be God’s purpose for the church.  The church that wants to know how they can be the best for the community understands that God is on a mission and invites us – even demnds for us – to engage in it.  It is a church that recognizes God has placed His church in the community primarily to benefit the city and it’s people (see Jeremiah 29.7 & Proverbs 11.10), and consequently to draw people to himself.  While some may ask this question and still posess an unhealthy competitiveness, the question itself does not inherently demand competiton.  To be the best for the community means to play the roles needed in the community.  There is room for more than one church to play various roles.