Some churches emphasize parntership/membership in the New Year, so I thought I would update on our material for our Partners on Mission class. The material previously listed under Tools for Missional Church is outdated, so I’ve updated that link. All material is under a Creative Commons License, which means use it, adapt it, but give credit. Merry Christmas!
ACL Partners Class Teaching Notes
Smay and Halter are releasing a new book on missional church, AND, aimed at equipping all sizes of churches to engage unchurched people.
AND helps you—whether you are a mega-church, traditional, contemporary, or organic church leader—focus on the vast majority of unchurched Christians and non-believers who are not moving toward any form of church. You will learn how to value existing church forms—attracting people to a physical church and releasing people into hands-on ministry … bringing together the very best of the attractional and missional models for church ministry.
Some of you may have read the beginning of this series, How Not to Be a Missional Church, on my blog. I’ve pushed the series to Resurgence, where it will be running all week, and will conclude with the Evangelism-Driven critique. Others of you are reading some of this for the first time. As each post goes up this week, I will post some further commentary for explanation and interaction.
Event-Driven Missional Church:
I am not saying events are bad, but that event-driven churches miss the mark of missional church. If we put all our eggs in the basket of out-reach events, in the name of mission, we have misunderstood the purpose and nature of the missional church. The missional church is a Jesus-centered community that redemptively engages peoples and cultures. It’s not a switch you turn on or off, a date on the calendar, or an item we tick off the list. Mission is our identity, because we have be rescued by a missionary God and placed in his missionary family.We live missionary lives, doing everyday things with gospel intentionality.
At Austin City Life, we do events. We baptize, we preach, we gather on Sundays, we do fund-raising garage sales for Operation Turkey, we clean apartments for homeless women and kids, we visit nursing homes, we do Teen Therapy Room Renovations. One difference, however, is that these missional events are typically linked to a greater community over time. They are done with non-Christians, for non-Christians, to address real needs in the context of a long-term relationship. I like to call them strategic social partnerships (in-house language), to convey the importance of missional churches/communities making a long-term social, cultural, and relational impact through gospel witness. Events aren’t bad, but when we mistake event for missional church we get off track. People will see it as just another program, which it is, unless we explain to them that mission is our identity, responsibility, gifting, and joy. (scroll through to our mission series for more)
Just how global does the North American missional church need to be? After all, the center of global Christianity is no longer in the West. Should we rely on receiving missionaries from Africa and Asia for a season, instead of pouring out resources beyond our boundaries?
Shockingly, 80% of deployed missionaries are sent to already evangelized areas. Roughly 30% of the global population is unevangelized and largely untargeted by so-called missional churches. This amounts to about 1.6 billion people not hearing the gospel in 38 different nations. There are still at least 13,000 unreached people groups and millions of people who have not heard a first proclamation of the gospel. In light of these statistics, just how missional is the missional church movement? Can you be a missional church and not engage the global missionfield?
