Once again, I have demonstrated that my discipline when it comes to blogging, is definitely not what it should be. On the other hand, I have a perfectly good excuse: I was without my computer from Sunday through Wednesday, although it pains me to tell you why: I simply forgot to it!
On Sunday, I drove to Winston-Salem for a conference at my good friend Fr. Steve Rice's church on what it means to be a “missional church”. Frankly, this concept is not so much a new idea or a new way of how to do ministry, or even another church growth scheme. Instead, it's a concept that has been employed through the ages whenever and wherever the Church has flourished and society has been impacted through taking the gospel into the world and living it out among the people.
As a United Methodist, it makes me proud when John Wesley and the Methodist movement are pointed to as prime examples of what “missional church” looks like. On the other hand, it saddens me when it is also pointed out (and I honestly acknowledge) that the People called Methodists aren't living up to their heritage today. Which is why I am so intrigued by this topic and why I went to the conference.
One of the presenters at the conference was the Rt. Rev. Hector Monterosso, the Episcopal bishop of Costa Rica. Aside from being an amazingly approachable, personable and genuinely kind person, he left us with perhaps the easiest and most succinct definition of what the term “missional church” means: “Instead of 'come and see', we should 'go and be.' This, of course, was the great genius of the Wesley brothers and the Methodist revival. They were concerned that the established church was not doing anything to reach out to the lost, the poor, the hungry, the oppressed, the marginalized or the troubled. The church, it seemed to them, only cared about the status quo and not about changing lives and changing society. It seemed to the Wesleys that the etablished church operated under the principle that, if folks wanted what the church had to offer, they should come to the church, but the church was not going to make any concerted effort to reach out to them. This concept, as the Wesleys knew well and as Bishop Monterosso pointed out, is fully contrary to the way Jesus “did business” and how he taught his disciples to “do business”.
Certainly, God's grace and love are found “in” and “at” church, when we use the term to describe the actual building or house of worship. But did not our Lord command us to “go out into the world” and take his grace with us? According to Bishop Monterosso and the early Methodists, he most certainly did. Which is why Wesley took the gospel to the fields, the mines, to the villages, and instructed his circuit-riding preachers to do the same as they "spread scriptural holiness" across the land.
“Jesus told us to go into all the world and be his ambassadors,” reads a great definition of 'missional church', “but many churches today have inadvertently changed the "go and be" command to a "come and see" appeal. We have grown attached to buildings, programs, staff and a wide variety of goods and services designed to attract and entertain people. 'Missional' is a helpful term used to describe what happens when you and I replace the "come to us" invitations with a "go to them" life. A life where "the way of Jesus" informs and radically transforms our existence to one wholly focused on sacrificially living for him and others and where we adopt a missionary stance in relation to our culture. It speaks of the very nature of the Jesus follower."
It's a great challenge. And it no doubt means doing things differently than we've done them for decades. But if we ever hope to see the church grow, the Kingdom come, (and, of course, scriptural holiness spread across the land), then its a challenge we must embrace.
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