1. Missional churches operate out of a different theological paradigm than traditional evangelical and liberal churches. No church should think that they can merely add being missional to their already existing theological framework. Being missional flows from a particular understanding of things like God, gospel, salvation, Scripture, the church, discipleship, etc. Please do not think that you can truly be in any sense missional if you are unwilling to revisit your understandings of these things.

2. Because missional churches appreciate the intrinsic link between theology and mission, they are incredibly intentional about the methods and mediums they employ to communicate the gospel message. Here’s a test, if you read that lest sentence and understood “communicate” as verbal, you probably don’t get what it means to be missional. No church should refer to itself as missional unless they can make a case for how the way they communicate the message of the gospel is in keeping with the gospel itself (this is further complicated by the first point – needing to rethink the gospel).

3. Missional churches are willing to say they are sorry. Because missional churches understand themselves as a sign of and witness to the reign of God in the world, they are desperately concerned that they be faithful to that calling. And what being faithful to that calling means is not being perfect, but being transparent and repentant. Churches who come to understand that being missional is by God’s design, and who haven’t lived that way previously, cannot simply move toward it without asking for forgiveness from their congregations and communities. Churches who are unwilling to say, “We are sorry that we haven’t been faithful to God’s calling for us as a people,” cannot ever be missional churches.

I apologize myself if any of this seems harsh or overly critical. If it is, or if I am, I hope it is in the same spirit as Jesus’ dealings with the Pharisees. These were people that should have known better, but they were blind guides who didn’t realize they couldn’t see. There problem was not necessarily that they were above repentance, just that they didn’t realize what they truly needed to repent of – their theology and consequent way of being and living. In Paul, Jesus ended up using one Pharisee in particular in a historic and monumental way. Likewise, I would love nothing more than for the bride of Christ in western culture to embrace its missional calling. It’s just that we need to be radically true to that calling if we are to avoid doing more damage to the church’s reputation by being faddish, trendy, or worse, unrepentant.

Related posts:

1. Toward A Missional Vision of Theological Education: Contextual Training
2. Toward A Missional Vision of Theological Education: Cultural Pioneering
3. Toward A Missional Vision of Theological Education: Conviction Shaping

I finished my last post by saying that suburban contexts pose a unique challenge to church communities in terms of their having any sort of public witness with their gatherings.  The reason for this challenge is that suburbs have various segments for housing, offices, shopping, schools, etc., and that cars are necessary to travel from place to place.  Not so in urban contexts.  Here, space is mixed, and people generally walk or utilize public transportation to get around.  Consequenty, people are more aware of where and when Christians gather as they walk by church buildings as a normal part of their day.  When they gather, churches may open their doors so that passers-by may see and hear what is happening.  In this way, urban churches more easily have public-witness or at least a public-presence dimension to them.  The question then, if we agree that this dimension is a good one for churches to have, is how to give it life in suburban contexts.

The way suburban churches typically remedy this problem is through advertising and marketing.  Since people are forced to use cars to travel between the sorts of zones I mentioned above, churches need to give people a reason to travel to them.  Sadly, this technique perpetuates an unhealthy bent toward consumerism and individualism.  Advertising and marketing, to be successful, need to be demographicaly targeted and we wind up focusing on one group to the exclusion of others.  We also allow people to believe that the church is a vendor of religious goods and services and that they would be better off at our place than the other.  We need to find a different way.  I will offer 2 suggestions and I invite others.

One way to go is to decentralize (not abandon) the corporate gathering in favor of emphasizing the primacy of smaller groups which meet in homes.  Meeting in homes makes the church’s gathering public to those who live in the neighborhood by localiizing it where people live, where they walk, and where they play.  Here, neighbors can talk to neighbors, they can see who comes and goes, they notice if there is something happeing on a regular basis.  Where a church community gathers is no longer an arbitrary space or building, but the place where people live, where lives happen, and where life is more naturally shared.  If these communities who meet in homes managed to maintain a focus on the community in which they were gathering, and not merely on themselves, I think there would be great potential for recapturing the helpful dimension of a public witness/presence as the church gathers for worship.

Another possibility would be to choose as a location for corporate worship a place central to where people gather.  This may look different from location to location, but what remains the same is being deliberate about choosing times and places to worship so that others take note by virtue of the fact that they are there anyway.  Imagine a church community who rented space at a strip mall and decided to hold their corporate worhip gathering at a time when people would most likely be there and take note (granted, this has the potential to revert to sending an unintended consumeristic message). 

The point I am trying to make is this – the synagogues of Jesus’ day, where people came to worship, were public fixtures, people had the chance to see and hear what was happening as Christians gathered for worship.  Similarly, the church communities Paul established were publically visible (hence all the trouble they got in).  Urban contexts lend themselves to continuing this dimension of christian presence, but suburban contexts do not.  It will take some creativity on our part, then, if we are ever to see suburban churches cause any kind of buzz within their communities merely because of the manner in which they gather.

Related posts:

1. A Great Beginning, but…
2. Bi-Vocational Ministry & Spiritual Formation
3. Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education: The Fruit of the Problem

In speaking of salvation, James McClendon says, “…the doctrines and languages of a community are necessarily understood in terms of its practices.  I take this to mean then that if Christians practice gathering together for times of worship, celebration, and whatever else may constitue a church gathering, then they understand this practice to be part of their understanding of what it means to be saved. 

McClendon goes on to say, “Talk of Christian salvation without Christian practices and Christian convictions is like talk of a fire that consumes no oxygen and releases no heat, like talk of a society that has no members and remembers no history.”  Without these things, practices and convictions, Christian salvation loses its incarnational and missional form and therefore ceases to be in any biblical sense, Christian (Christ-like).

Do you have to go to church every Sunday to be a Christian?  In so many ways (and this is not a reflection on the conversation which I wasn’t a part of!) this question misses the point.  First, it assumes that church is primarily a place and/or event and not a people.  Second, it assumes there is something unique about the 24 hours we call Sunday.  And finally, it presumes that we are entitled to the name, “Christian,” primarily by virtue of what we do.

On the other hand, this question leads us to a very fruitful line of thinking.  What is the relationship between Christian meetings and our underdstanding of salvation?  How might one (or a community) be affected if meeting together regularly was taken lightly (Heb. 10:25)?  How should people be affected by virtue of gathering regularly as a Christian practice?

If McClendon is right, then, for Christians, the practice of gathering regularly is imperative both for our undersanding of and participation in the salvation of God, as well as for our missional witness in the world.

Related posts:

1. Bi-Vocational Ministry & the Missional Church
2. Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation
3. Dancing Salvation

It wasn’t until I moved to LA to go to Fuller that I really started thinking seriously about the concept of cities and how different they are than suburbs and rural areas. It was at Fuller that I was awakened to the whole idea that while God’s action in the world began in a garden, it ends in a city. I think those metaphors have a lot to teach us. In fact, I wrote about it and you can read what I wrote here. Also, I would highly recommend this message from Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer church in NYC.

Related posts:

1. A Theology Of Culture for Misintry
2. Narrative Theology
3. The Theology of Linkin Park