Category: Missional Church

4 Ways Church Planting Training Must Change

Posted on December 8, 2010

With missional ecclesiology in full swing, many of the current missional training structures are becoming outdated. If church planting networks and organizations are going to continue to stimulate deep, sustained mission to all kinds of peoples, then some our training structures will have to change.

1. We need to offer both information and experience-based training. Much of the church planting training today is based on theological and missional podcasts, talks, and breakouts. If we are to train a new generation of missional leaders that dive deeply into the 100s of American subcultures, training will have to be based in an experience of their missionfields. We need to offer training that sends church planters into their fields during their training. For instance:

  • Half a day is spent learning principles and half a day is spent in coffee shops and clubs getting to know the values, beliefs, and culture of hipsters
  • Half a day in a immigrant neighborhood knowing on doors, visiting ethnic restaurants, to learn values, beliefs, and objections to Christianity among ethnics groups
  • Half day spending time downtown among professionals, going to happy hour, and attending their power lunches to understand the demands, aspirations, and values of professional life.

2. We need to train planters on both traditional “core teams” and non-traditional missional teams. If we are to reach the increasingly divided people of America, we will need not just missional core teams that gather in living rooms to train, but missional teams that start workshops for the poor, new music venues among artists, new buisness ventures among professionals. Missional teams that create value, good will, and community around the felt and exisiting needs and working places of unreached peoples in the U.S. In some cases, it will be better to “launch” a business or venue before “launching a church.” For example:

  • Starting a workshop to train homeless in microfinance and job skills
  • Starting a music venue to engage musicians and artists
  • Starting a thinktank discussion group to address neighborhood issues

3. We need to equip planters to preach and to cultivate gospel-renewing environments. We need to think through how we not only launch services and small communities, but also how we sustain those people over a lifetime of suffering, adversity and change. This will require a depth of understanding in how the gospel addresses their whole human experience–family, vocation, stage of life. We will need gospel-shaped environments that foster personal and communal renewal over a lifetime not just over a meal or a meeting.

4. We need to cast vision for planters who plant not isolated churches but networked churches that partner for regional and urban renewal. Church planters need to mobilized to think beyond “their church” in order truly plant, multiply, and grow God’s church. If church plants are to effectively renew cities, they must think and plan well beyond their own borders. They will need to partner with other churches in order to effectively address the whole of city and region needs. Urban renewal will not happen one church at a time, but many churches working together at a time. Only then, collectively, can we leave an indelible gospel mark in history for the good of our cities.

Transitioning to Missional Church (Pt 3)

Posted on November 22, 2010

See Part 1 & Part 2 of the series Transitioning to Missional Church.

In Part 2, we considered why missional church is theological not methodological, followed by some reflection on the challenges of transitioning to a missional church. In this third and final part of the series, we will offer some guidelines in becoming a more intuitive church, an organism with missional intuition, as opposed to an institution with some programs for mission.

Intuitive Missional Church

In order to avoid being a church with a mission and to become churches as mission, it is important that we cultivate a new intuition. Intuition is the ability to perceive something without having to reason through it. It is reflexive behavior, a way of living that is natural. If a people develop a missional intuition, then they will act missionally without having to reason through it. Mission becomes a way of living, not a project they execute or process they reason through. Here are a few ways to make disciples, lead, plant, and grow churches, for whom mission is intuitive.

  • Intuitive mission relies on Spirit-led prayer and repentance that begins with repentance over the sins of institutional, individualistic Christianity. Cultivate a community that sees repentance as good news not bad news. That sees turning away from sin and turning to Jesus as an everyday pattern. This can’t happen apart from a culture of prayer. Prayer isn’t an early morning event; it is every moment existence. Paul Miller notes that: “Jesus most dependent human that ever lived.” People who live prayerfully, dependently, will be more prone to repent and turn to Christ, as opposed to tack mission on as a work.
  • Intuitive mission discerns missional leadership patterns from Scripture instead of uncritically implementing business models of leadership. It’s not about getting the wrong people off the bus and right people on. We are all on the bus of mission, just arrange the seats with wisdom. Pastor your communities with wisdom and thoughtful reflection. Get leadership moorings from the gifts of the Spirit and offices of leadership in Ephesians 4. Don’t create programmatic position descriptions and build people around a ministry; build ministry around people.
  • Intuitive mission cultivates missional DNA through personal and communal forms of training instead of relying primarily upon professional, monological communication. Don’t just talk. Listen. Listen as a disciple, coach, teacher, & pastor to how and why mission is a challenge for your people. Some of our best changes have come from listening closely such as Shared Leadership, 3 Marks of Missional Community.
  • Intuitive mission spends lots of time with people not programs, so that we have networks of relationships in which we can authenticate the gospel we preach.
  • Intuitive mission does “everyday things with gospel intentionality”, instead of seeing mission as either an evangelistic or social justice event.

    • Transitioning to Missional Church (Pt 2)

    Posted on November 17, 2010

    See Part 1 of the series Transitioning to Missional Church.

    In Part 1 of this series, we established the difference between a church with a mission and church as mission. A Missional Church is church as mission not church with a mission. Missional is its nature not just its vocation.

    Why Mission is the Nature of the Church

    Why is missional the nature of the church? Because it is the nature God. Mission is not only an action of God; it is an attribute of God. God is a missionary God. That’s what the term Missio Dei means “the Sent God.” God has always been on a mission for his glory, that self-glorifying mission breaks out into creation, thru the fall, in redemption unto New Creation. In particular, we see the missionary nature of God in his sentness. Father sends the Son, Son sends the Spirit, Spirit sends the Church. The church is cut from the cloth of the missionary God. We have a family resemblance. We have a missionary nature because we have a missionary Father.

    In other words, mission is the breath of the missional church. Mission is not a tack-on to your life; it is your life. You exhale mission because you inhale gospel. The gospel flows through you, pulsing at various strengths but pulsing, in order to pump the blood of Jesus through the body of Christ so that it can exhale the hope of mission. This missional breath affects everything—how we check the mail, how we structure our week, how we relate to neighbors, how we do our work, how we read the Bible, where we live, how we live, how we make your everyday decisions. Missional is radical, like taking up your cross and following Jesus. Missional church is a gathering of cross-bearing, Jesus-following disciples who are committed to his mission.

    Missional church requires nothing less than a rethinking of our identity and our practice, of who we are and what we do. Therefore, in order to effectively embrace the challenge of moving from church with a mission to church as mission, new ecclesiastical structures are absolutely essential. The old church structures support mission as a task but not as an identity. They promote mission as an event but not as disciple-making, reducing mission to an option for the elite not essential for everyone.

    Challenges in Transitioning to Missional

    One of the greatest challenges in transitioning to a true missional church is syncretistic missional ecclesiology (SME). Syncretistic Missional Ecclesiology is the fusion of missional church values with institutional church structures. Many churches that attempt to make this transition, try to insert missional values into non-missional church structures. Leadership, decision-making, community structures all remain somewhat the same, while the leaders beat the drum of mission. At best, this will create more mission works but will fail to make missional disciples.

    The nature of missional church requires more than cosmetic adjustments to our inherited forms of church. Missional ecclesiology requires an entirely new way of thinking about church, from the bottom up. Church plants and established churches have failed to recognize this important point. As a result, they have blended institutional church with missional church. This syncretism is both theologically and practically defective.

    • Institutional mission relies on preaching, teaching, and writing to implement missional ecclesiology. Missional Church relies not only on a Sunday ministry of Word, but promotes a rest of week ministry of the word that is carried out by a speaking-the-truth-in-love community.
    • Institutional mission adopts a program of mission during a set season of the year to implement missional ecclesiology. Missional Church does not see mission as a tack-on to your life; it is your life. You inhale gospel and exhale mission through ordinary rhythms of life.
    • Institutional mission sees mission as the responsibility of a select group of people not the whole church including staff. Missional Church requires pastors and staff to live a missional life making disciples and redeeming social ill. It equips ordinary people to do ordinary things with gospel intentionality.

    Transitioning to Missional Church (Pt 1)

    Posted on November 16, 2010

    Missional Church has been quite the buzz in the evangelical church world. As with any buzz, it has a polarizing effect. People often adopt or reject the concept before they have properly understood it. This creates a bandwagon effect, uncritical early adopters who adopt an idea, jump on the bandwagon, without depth of understanding of what they have committed themselves to. Alternatively, there are the hypercritical naysayers, who naysay missional church as a fading fad. Ironically, the hypercritical naysayers commit the same error as the uncritical early adopters. Both responses fail to adequately investigate just what “missional church” is. This three part series will address the dangers in transitioning to missional church, either as a new church plant or an existing church.

    Clarifying Missional Church

    The missional church is not a church with a mission. All churches have a mission. Stated or unstated, all churches practice some kind of mission. It may be keep to the immoral out, to keep sound doctrine in, to pray for revival, or to send missionaries to the nations. Each of these churches is an example of church with a mission. The missional church, however is church as mission. In the words of Darrell Guder, the challenge “is to move from a church with mission to a missional church.”[1]
     In light of this important distinction, it is critical that transitioning churches understand the difference between church with a mission versus church as mission. To clarify the difference, consider the following chart:

    Church WITH a Mission                                                Church AS a Mission

    What You Do         (Task) Who You Are       (Identity)
    Optional                  (Elective) Essential               (Core)
    Extraordinary       (Elitist) Ordinary               (Everyone)
    Project Focus        (Event) People Focus       (Disciple)

    Traditional churches view the church as a church with a mission, at best. This mission may be sending missionaries to the nations, transforming the church neighborhood, or guarding and promoting sound doctrine. While all worthy missions, these are all examples of church with a mission. They focus on a task to be performed not and identity of the church. As a result, the mission of the church becomes optional not essential, creating a first and second tier Christianity comprised of ordinary and extraordinary Christians who do mission. At best, this accomplishes some mission but often remains very project focused not disciple-making driven.

    What then is a missional church? Guder writes: “With the term missional we emphasize the essential vocation and nature of the church as God’s called and sent people.”[2] Missional churches are missional in nature and vocation. Missional is who they are, and as a result, mission is what they do. It is not simply a both/and. If mission as nature does not precede mission as vocation, mission-as-identity before mission-as-task, then churches that attempt to become or transition into missional church will either fail or fall into syncretistic missional ecclesiology. A depth of understanding that mission is what we are before it is what we do will be absolutely essential to planting or transitioning a missional church.

    This post is adapted from my recent talk Why Missional Church Doesn’t Have a Shelf Life

    [1] Darrell Guder ed., The Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America, 6. This was a landmark book for the missional church movement in North America. Many missional leaders and organizations can trace their roots to Guder’s seminal influence on American ecclesiology.

    [2] Guder, The Missional Church, 11.