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.
  

How we introduce the church to people has a lot to do with how they interpret church. We introduce the church poorly to people when we leave “church” out of our weekday conversations. We introduce the church poorly when we just tell people “how to get there” on a website. How we introduce people to the church, especially on Sundays, is important if we want to re-arrange their expectations around a gospel view of the church.

Here are a few ways we’ve done it. I’m not being dogmatic, just suggestive. I think this is important, but I also think you should introduce people both theologically and contextually. In other words, rearrange their view of the church around the gospel, but do it in language that is true to your vision and your context.

Introducing Church on Sundays

Over the past couple of years we’ve changed the way we introduce people to the church on a Sunday morning, but all in all we’ve had minor variations. We used to say stuff like:

“If you’re visiting today, we’re so glad you came. We hope this is the last time you come to church, because this building isn’t the church. These people are.“

Early on this certainly weeded out the consumer, but probably also ran off a few potential disciples. With time we softened our introduction to tell people that:

“The best way you can get to know the church is to visit a City Group, where the church is the church to one another and the city.”

This was more welcoming and still community affirming. It mixed more grace into the welcome. However, as we continued to reflect on this introduction, we still felt like it was, at times, intimidating for front door visitors. Why? Because we pushed City Groups so hard. You’re bound to feel out of place if you aren’t in one, especially since the majority of our church is. We wanted to relieve the person who unreligously visited out Sunday gatherings once every 4-5 weeks, while remaining true to our vision of the church.

So we went this this, roughly. People laugh every time they hear it (the bold part), but I can tell they love it. They tell me so.

Welcome to Austin City Life. My name is ____, and I am one of the Partners with our church. If you’re visiting, we�re really glad you found us. We would love to meet you, so hang around afterwards over coffee, join us for lunch, or fill out a visitor form on a lap top.

You should know up front that we are a very imperfect church. We will disappoint you, but we�ll do our best to point you to a perfect Savior. That�s the Gospel, and we believe it converts us to Christ, to Church and to Mission. It�s why we�re here, to be the church to one another and to the city. To be in the city and for the city, redemptively engaging peoples and cultures.

The best place to figure this all out is in our City Groups, gospel communities that serve one another and our city. You can check them out right here by hanging around afterward and chatting in the back, by our sign, or learn more online at austincitylife.org.

Introducing Church on Websites

Your introduction to the Church on Sundays should resonate with what you say on your website and, most importantly, your small group/missional community experience. We’ve changed our web wording to reflect our actual gathering, keeping the non-Christian in mind.

Sundays Gatherings are an important part of being the church at Austin City Life. Although we want to avoid the mistake of seeing Sunday as “the Church”, we believe it is important to gather every Sunday for worship, preaching, communion, and community.

On Sundays you’ll find an interesting juxtaposition of theological depth and cultural expression. We are in line with historic, orthodox Christianity, but express that Christian faith progressively, in a venue on Austin’s renown 6th Street.

What is Sunday Like?
We gather every Sunday at The Parish, one of the best music venues on 6th, where you’ll hear our musicians play rich, stirring, God-focused music, not as a performance but as an act of worship. You’ll also hear substantive gospel messages that regularly engage cultural issues. Best of all, you’ll get to meet a community gathered around Jesus that loves our city.

These people are like you in many ways. They are citizens, creatives, moms, dads, young marrieds, professionals, college students, and singles. They are Christian and not Christian. We are all imperfect people looking to a perfect Christ.

This certainly isn’t the last “word”, and introducing people to the church is so much more than what you say. But what you say also affects how you live.

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)

Brad Brisco is a thoughtful academic and practitioner and author of Missional Church Network. He is graciously giving us free previews of his doctral work on Missional Ecclesiology.

Part I

Part II

Neil Cole’s new book Organic Leadership is insightful, provocative, and prophetic. The first section of the book points out the weeds growing in the soil of the American church. One particular weed is the parasitical effect of parachurch ministries. To be sure, Cole does not view all parachurch organizations as an impediment to the church; however, he prophetically points out how the parachurch has assumed the role and mission of the church leaving her weak and anemic. Consider these areas of capitulation:

• Her leadership development has been assumed by colleges, seminaries, and Bible institutes.
• Her compassion and social justice have been given over to nonprofit charitable organizations.
• Her global mission has been relinquished to mission agencies.
• Church government and decision making have often been forfeited to denominational offices.
• Her prophetic voice has been replaced by publishing houses, self-help gurus, and futurist authors.
• Her emotional and spiritual health has been taken over by psychologists, psychiatrists, and family counseling services.

The Anemic Church

Now, before you react let this settle. Detect the truth in these statements. Where can your church recover certain elements, perhaps not in totality but in measure? Cole is not sweeping all parachurches aside. Rather, he is pointing out the professionalization and specialization of the church into ministries that have left the church anemic. We have capitulated to this fragmentation of the church. Cole notes:

The world today looks at the church wondering what relevance she has. The only use they see for the church is performing the sacerdotal duties of preaching, marrying, burying, baptizing, and passing around wafers and grape juice. The church was once a catalyst for artistic expression, social change, and the founding of hospitals, schools, and missionary enterprise, but today she has settled for providing a one-hour-a-week worship concert, an offering place, and a sermon. (116)

Ralph Winter: Sodality and Modality

Cole is careful to note the distinctions made by Ralph Winter regarding sodalities and modalities. Winter’s helpful article emphasizes the more apostolic, missionary nature of certain entities like Paul’s roving, planting, missionary bands. These are sodalities. These sodalities don’t do everything that the church is responsible for, instead they specialize. Modalities, on the other hand, are a little more static though missional and are churches. The church is a modality because it is given the responsibility to do everything that God has commanded us to do (feed the poor, disciple, translate the bible, etc.). A church is modality and parachurch sodality. Sodalities can weaken or strengthen churches.

Cole affirms the need for both modalities and sodalities but contests these distinctions as a point of division between church and parachurch. He writes: “both modality and sodality are part of God’s redemptive purpose. Both are the church in the eyes of Paul. I do no think he saw himself as at all separate from the church…” (122).

What do you think? Where has your church capitulated to the parasitical parachurch? Is there a way forward? And what of the modality sodality distinction? Are both mission agencies and local churches together the church? Much more could be said on these matters.

The Austin Stone and Acts 29 are hosting a Missional Community Leadership Conference on Feb 6-7 at Great Hills Baptist. This is the kind of conference that is long overdue and will deliver on Gospel, Community, and Mission for the practitioner.

Main Speakers:
Matt Carter: Leading your Community to spiritual health
Darrin Patrick: Leading your Community to gospel repentance
Alan Hirsch: Leading your Community to missional discipleship

Breakouts:

There are too many to list, but include topics like Missional Leadership, City-wide Networking, Discipleship, Communication & Conflict.

More Info here. Register there.

The audio is up for my recent talk at Acts 29 Dallas Bootcamp on Spirit-led Ecclesiology: Following the Spirit thru Church Planting. This talk explores how planters lean away from the Spirit-led center of church planting and addresses how they can practically apply a biblical theology of the Spirit to the challenges of unplanned change in planting churches. Perhaps a timely topic given the buzz over renaming church planting to gospel planting.

A couple of weeks ago Acts 29 hosted a Church Planting Bootcamp in Dallas, hosted by the Village Church. The aim of these bootcamps is to assess, equip, and release church planters into planting gospel-centered, missional churches that plant more churches. The theme of the Dallas Bootcamp was Depth.

The were a number of plenary speakers and a variety of breakout sessions (see schedule here). Audio and electronic resources are being released as they are ready (I am trying to figure out how to upload my audio to wordpress). Mark Driscoll’s talk on the Mission and Vision of Acts 29 includes a clear and compelling vision for a church planting movement that keeps Christ at the center and takes the gospel to periphery of the world. My session was Spirit-led Ecclesiology: Following the Spirit thru Church Planting, which critically examined motives and methods of church planters that lean away from the Spirit-led center of church planting. This was followed by a brief biblical theology of the Spirit and practical reflections on how we can follow the Spirit through unplanned change, resistance and barriers. In short, it was a plea to not replace the Spirit with the gospel in church planting.

For now, here are the resources I have gathered:

• Driscoll on Mission & Vision of A29�������������������������������� audio manuscript
• Dodson on Spirit-led Ecclesiology����������������������������������� audio manuscript
• Dodson & White on Building Missional Core Teams������������ �� notes

Drew Goodmanson has posted the audio files from all of the plenary and breakout sessions from the Total Church Conference. This was a very good conference. Of all the sessions I attended, these talks stood out the most:

• A Community-centered Gospel Steve Timmis
• Making Disciples for Missional Church � Tim Chester
• Forming a Gospel Community (Jeff Vanderstelt)
• Reaching the Domains of Society (Drew Goodmanson & Caesar Kalinowski)
• Developing Missional Leaders (Jeff Vanderstelt)