In the News

This is a good reminder not to build your life on shifting sands:

A decade ago, boomers felt they had the map to early, cushy retirement. Then they watched their fortunes die along the side of the road.

We would do well to remember this:

Instruct those who are rich in this present world not to be conceited or to fix their hope on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly supplies us with all things to enjoy. Instruct them to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share,  storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is life indeed (1 Timothy 6:17-19).

And this:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.  But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal;  for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matthew 6:19-21)

Joyced Again

Wow!!! What to say? That’s bizarre beyond any level of rationality.

It’s far worse than the Galarraga perfect game call because the officials had a chance to get it right and still missed it. At least Joyce had no recourse. He would have fixed it if he could have.

This group had that chance, and still missed it.

And unlike Joyce’s blown call, this affected the outcome of the game.

They actually looked at the play, probably several times, and still missed it.

The “process” was over when he came down  in control of the ball, with two feet in bounds, then a third foot down, then fell down on his backside, then rolled over, and then put the ball on the ground.

Anywhere else on the field, that’s a catch.

In fact, if the receiver catches the ball short of the end zone, simply reaches out and breaks the plane of the line, and then has the ball knocked out of his hands, it is a touchdown.

But this isn’t?

That’s simply bizarre.

The Lions don’t need any help to lose.

And they don’t deserve any help to win.

But this one was stolen from them.

What is Missional?

This article, and some to follow, includes excerpts from my paper “Missional Worship in the Gathered Church.” This was originally posted on 9/7/2010 as a prelude to this post on the missional idea, but it disappeared into cyberspace somewhere.

A common buzzword in ecclesiology today is “missional.” You don’t have to read very much to realize that there is a lot packed into this word, but not all agree on what should be packed into it, or more precisely, how it should be played out in the church. Missional involves varying views of the Kingdom of God and varying views of how the church is related to the kingdom. It talks about how God is at work in the world, what God is doing, and how people should be involved in that work.

There is a tendency among some to judge the value of a word or idea by looking at who predominantly uses the word or idea. Some are hesitant to use the word because of who else uses it. In this case, missional is a word frequently used among the emerging type churches and ministries. It is frequently connected with a lack of orthodoxy and a heavy emphasis on social justice. It is also frequently connected to what is known as “incarnational ministry,” that is, that we as believers are to “incarnate” the gospel, just as Jesus did when he came to earth. This makes some wary of the word.

Yet I think that the idea is pretty simple and useful, even if we don’t like the word missional, and even if we do not agree with the doctrinal aberrancies and the social emphases of some who use it.

The idea of missional is based on the idea that God is a missionary God. This incorporates a number of facets that center on the fact that God is active in the world through both his incarnation and his people. Missional thinker Alan Hirsch says “By his very nature God is a ‘sent one’ who takes the initiative to redeem his creation.”[1] Gibbs and Bolger say “God is a God who redeems, a God who seeks and saves … there is only one mission—God’s mission.”[2]

Mission embraces an even larger point. It is not simply that God sends, but that God is at work (on mission) accomplishing his purpose which is to bring glory to himself through the redemption of sinners, the building of his kingdom, and the restoration of creation. In his mission, God has taken the initiative to come to man to reconcile him, and now God calls man to join Him on His mission. “Fundamentally, our mission (if it is biblically informed and validated) means our committed participation as God’s people, at God’s invitation and command, in God’s own mission within the history of God’s word for the redemption of God’s creation.”[3] To be missional means to participate with God in God’s mission.

Mission is closely connected to the biblical theology movement which emphasizes the storyline of the Bible: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration (or sometimes consummation). Since God’s mission is redemption with a view to restoration, the disciple’s mission is to participate in God’s work of redemption in anticipation of the ultimate restoration. In this sense, mission emphasizes the Kingdom of God and is consequently inseparable from eschatology.

Yet at the same time, missional thinking does not demand a particular eschatological view. Though most missional thinkers embrace some form of the “already/not yet,” virtually all agree that the church is living in and speaking to the “not yet.”

This is seen in the common theme that exists in missional writing of living in a post-Christian era—a time and culture in which the Christian worldview is no longer dominant. This is often traced to Leslie Newbigen who returned to England after years of missionary work in India to find that British culture had changed drastically. This change meant that now Christians must be missionaries to their own cultures, just as “foreign missionaries” who went to a new country, learned a new language, new customs, and a new culture, and then preached the gospel into that culture in a way that it could be understood.

Christians are therefore to live in their culture as a missionary redeemed by God and sent by God to that particular historical and geographical context to be used by God in his work of redeeming and restoring his fallen creation to himself. In this, everything that the Christian does is a part of mission. For the believer, to live is to live on mission for God and the gospel. The church is to equip and encourage believers to live on mission, doing life together in the mission of God for the sake of the “not yet” by which they are surrounded.

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[1]Alan Hirsch, “Defining Missional,” Leadership Journal (Fall 2008), http://www.christianitytoday.com/ le/2007/winter/2.34.html?start=1, accessed 6 June 2010.

[2]Eddie Gibbs and Ryan K. Bolger, Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), p. 50.

[3]Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God (Downer’s Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006), p. 23.

Key Ideas about Missional - Mission

Note: This post actually follows this introductory post.

One of the key issues in the missional conversation is the idea of mission itself. In fact, it is probably the key idea. And simply put, it means “going out.”

The problem is that missional means different things to different people. Missiologist Ed Stetzer likens it to a Rorshach test (you know, the one where they show you a random inkblot image and ask what you see in it). As Stetzer says, what you see in missional depends on your theological commitments. It is, in some strange irony, the hermeneutical union of authorial intention with postmodernity. When someone says, “I’m missional,” I ask “What does that mean to you?” or “What do you mean by that?”

Stetzer divides the idea into high missional, mid missional, and low missional. These divisions have to do, primarily as I understand them, with the relationship of the church to the Kingdom of God (KoG). Is the KoG coextensive with the church in this age? Does it overlap with the church in this age? Is it completely outside the church in this age? Evangelicals tend towards the first (low), while mainliners tends towards the last (high).

Almost all who use the word missional use it with reference to the missio Dei, the mission of God. (I say “almost all” because there are probably some who just see certain big names using it and jump on the bandwagon with no clue of what it actually means; but it sounds cool.) Some see the missio Dei as predominantly social in nature—the reformation of societal structures of injustice, oppression, and poverty. For them, this is largely unconnected to the church and the “word of the gospel” (as opposed to the supposed living out of the gospel through working for societal change). For them, this is the working out of the KoG apart from the church. They emphasize the horizontal relationships. They see salvation as more corporate than personal , the redemption of societal structures that reconcile people to each other rather than the redemption and reconciliation of lost sinners to God through Jesus (e.g., Brian McLaren).

Others see this as primarily (or at least equally) proclamational in nature, that the gospel must be proclaimed, not just lived. They would reject the saying, “Preach the gospel; use words if necessary.” They would say, “If you haven’t preached the gospel, then you haven’t preached the gospel.” Words, the message of salvation in Jesus alone, is inseparable from the mission. Most would quickly add that words alone are insufficient for the gospel, by which they would point to hypocrisy—that preaching the love of Jesus to the lost without living the love of Jesus around the lost is hypocritical and is not missional living (e.g., Mark Driscoll, Tim Keller). Such living ultimately hampers the proclamation.

For all, mission is a way of life. It is not something we do so much as something we are.

Some of the historic evangelism conferences of the 20th century addressed this issue of the relationship of the church and the KoG. Here is a brief summary of some of these conferences. Let me pick just one example from this chapter. At Madras in 1938, there was a strong emphasis that “church and mission are inseparable.” Missionary E. Stanley Jones objected to this on the grounds that it removed an “absolute conception” from which to live and serve in the world. For him, the KoG was absolute (perhaps ultimate) and the church was relative. The usefulness of this in understanding the issue is that most missional thinkers see the KoG as having priority over the church. The church is the sign or the instrument of the KoG (cf. Stetzer). It is not an end unto itself. It is a tool for something bigger.

I say that to say that a large part of “missional” deals with the conception of the KoG. In this sense, missional thinking is very similar to (though, IMO, not identical to) incarnational ministry: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

Missional thinkers typically look to Jesus as the model for ministry (an idea that IMO is significantly flawed, which I will argue for later). We are at work in the world with God (on mission with God) to bring about the KoG just like Jesus. The mission is to work with God to bring about the Kingdom in some limited or small way now, looking for the consummation when God finishes the job, so to speak.

Thus, we are to live in the world like Jesus did, “showing and sharing” the love of God like Jesus did in his ministry. This incarnational focus becomes one of the driving forces of missional for many people.

The difficulty that we will address later is in properly assessing the present nature of the KoG and its relationship to the church.

So let me go back to the beginning of this post. To be missional is to be sent. I think that is an entirely biblical concept—that the church has been sent into the world to preach the gospel so that the church is built of the people who Jesus purchased with his blood. The reason that the church must go to all nations is because Jesus purchased people from all nations (cf. Matt 28:18-20; Rev 5:9).

But let me just jump to the end for a moment: The irony is that missional thinking is “new,” but in some ways really isn’t all that different from what many believe the church is supposed to be: a group of believers that comes together for worship, instruction, fellowship and scatters for evangelism.

Missional thinkers typically reject seeker driven models of ministry. The contrast they draw is between attractional and missional. The church, they believe, should be missional—going out to them; not attractional—asking them to come to us.

Alan Hirsch says it this way:

Missional represents a significant shift in the way we think about the church. As the people of a missionary God, we ought to engage the world the same way he does—by going out rather than just reaching out.

Quick Hits From the Mail

From a flyer advertising a worship seminar:

The average person in our society laughs 7 times per day. The average person attending this seminar will laugh than 30 times.

I suppose that is one reason to attend a worship conference.

Perhaps that says more than it intends. Maybe the reason people take worship so lightly is because it is a laughing matter to them.

On another note, the recent Baptist Bible Tribune has its regular article by Charles Lyons, pastor of Armitage Baptist Church in Chicago. In it, he talks about how we have taken baptism—the public confession of Christ—and turned it into a private affair. He says,

We know baptism is to be the public declaration of Jesus’ lordship and attachment to His local body, but in reality we’ve taken the route of convenience. We schedule baptism in hidden, walled, sequestered pools, often in front of the smallest audience of the week.

So what did they do? They took their baptisms to a local park named the Humboldt Park Lagoon and they do it publicly—not like in front of the church public, but open air public. And baptismal candidates take the mic  and give their testimony of faith before being baptized. One lady recently baptized was, in her words “right over there, hiding behind that tree” at the previous year’s baptism. This particular year, because of that, she was the one publicly confessing her faith in Christ.

I like it. I am not sure how practical it is for some, including us. But it is worth giving some thought to, in my opinion.

As a related side note, this past January, on my trip to India I was sitting in the Mumbai airport during an overnight layover. My my friend Ken and I were chatting with an older couple who we had seen having a gospel conversation with another person. Turns out the gentleman was a retired British pastor who was a Sovereign Grace Baptist in England.

During that conversation I noticed a young lady sitting just to my right on the row that backed up to ours. She was clearly eavesdropping. So I started talking to her. Turns out she is a member of Armitage Baptist Church where Charles Lyons (the author of this article) pastors. She was in India for a wedding. I told her that her pastor’s regular article in the Baptist Bible Tribune was the only article I read in in the Tribune. We later boarded the same plane for our common destination.

Small world.