Dana Knapp's Missional Church Presentation at Presbytery

This is the presentation on the Missional Church which Dana Knapp gave at the Presbytery meeting, June 15, 2010.

The theme for the next several presbytery meetings is the Missional Church. We will be spending time over the next two years looking at the Missional Church and how it impacts our life together as a Presbytery and as individual mission congregations within the Presbytery of Scioto Valley. 

When it comes to being Missional, it seems everyone wants in on the action. Do a Google search on “missional” and you will get over a million hits, the number growing every minute. Publishers want “missional” in their book titles. Church web sites tout their missional orientation. Numerous national conferences are held on helping church leaders become more missional. Even some seminaries claim they are going missional. 

So what’s the big deal about missional? And why does everybody seem to be staking out a missional claim. 

I believe the rise of the missional church is the single biggest development in Christianity since the Reformation. Missional is a way of living, not an affiliation or activity. It’s emergence springs from a belief that God is changing his conversation with the world and with the church. Being missional involves an active engagement with this new conversation to the point that it guides every aspect of the life of the missional believer. To think and to live missionally means seeing all of life as a way to be engaged in the mission of God in the world. 

In an article titled, “The Missional Church: A Model for the Canadian Church?” David Horrox writes, “The church should stop mimicking the surrounding culture and become an alternative community, with a different set of beliefs, values and behaviors. Ministers would no longer engage in marketing; churches would no longer place primary emphasis on programs to serve members. The traditional ways of evaluating successful churches – bigger buildings, more people, bigger budgets, larger ministerial staff, new and more programs to serve members – would be rejected. New yardsticks would be the norm:  ‘To what extent is our church a sent community in which each believer is reaching out to his/her community? To what extent is our church impacting the community with a Christian message that challenges the values of our secular society?’” 

Don Kimball in “The Emerging Church” describes the missional church “as a body of people sent on a mission who gather in community for worship, encouragement, and teaching from the Word that surrounds what they are feeding themselves throughout the week.” 

Both Horrox and Kimball capture much of the essence and heart of what it means to be missional, but can we probe deeper and articulate a more definitive understanding? I think we can and what follows is my imperfect attempt to explore and develop our appreciation of what it means to be missional. 

But first a necessary word of caution for those who wish to explore and understand what it means to be the missional church or people. Alan Hirsch rightly states that “the word Missional over the years has tended to become very fluid and as it was quickly co-opted by those wishing to find new and trendy tags for what they themselves were doing, be they missional or not. It is often used as a substitute for seeker-sensitive, cell-group church, or other church growth concepts, thus obscuring its original meaning. As a result, missional is often looked upon as just another phase or program. But we err when we do so for missional is more than just another movement, it is a full expression of who the ekklesia of Christ is and what it is called to do and be. As its core, missional is a shift in thinking.” Making this shift can be difficult for many, but to fully appreciate what the missional church is, we must look outside of our traditional understanding of how we do church and realign ourselves with the biblical narrative. So, as you consider the following description, don’t attempt to understand it within your traditional framework, shift your thinking. 

Description of the Missional Church 

• The missional church is a collection of missional believers acting in concert together in fulfillment of the missio dei.
• The missional church is one where people are exploring and rediscovering what it means to be Jesus’ sent people as their identity and vocation.
• The missional church is faith communities willing and ready to be Christ’s people in their own situation and place.
• The missional church knows that they must be a cross-cultural missionary (contextual) people and adopt a missionary stance in relation to their community.
• The missional church understands that God is already present in the culture where it finds itself. Therefore, the missional church doesn’t view its purpose as bringing God into the culture or taking individuals out of the cultural to a sacred space.
• The missional church is evangelistic and faithfully proclaims the gospel through word and deed. Words alone are not sufficient; how the gospel is embodied in our community and service is as important as what they say.
• The missional church recognizes that it does not hold a place of honor in its host community and that its missional imperative compels it to move out from itself into the host community as salt and light.
• The missional church seeks to put the good of their neighbor over their own.
• The missional church will give integrity, morality, good character and conduct, compassion, love and a resurrection life filled with hope preeminence to give credence to their reasoned verbal witness.
• The missional church practices hospitality by welcoming the stranger into the midst of the community.
• The missional church will see themselves as representatives of Jesus and will do nothing to dishonor his name.
• The missional church will be desperately dependent on prayer.
• The missional church gathered will be for the purpose of worship, encouragement, supplemental teaching, training, and to seek God’s presence and to be realigned with God’s missionary purpose.
• The missional church will be a community where all members are involved in learning “the way of Jesus.” Spiritual development is an expectation.
• The missional church is a healing community where people carry each other’s burdens and help restore gently.
• The missional church will require that its leadership be missiologist.
• The missional church will feed deeply on the scriptures throughout the week. 

What the missional church is not 

• The missional church is not a dispenser of religious goods and services or a place where people come for their weekly spiritual fix.
• The missional church is not a place where mature Christians come to be fed and have their needs met.
• The missional church is not a place where “professionals” are hired to do all the work of the church.
• The missional church is not a church with a “good missions program.” The people are the missions programs and includes going to “Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
• The missional church is not about a new strategy for evangelism.
• The missional church is not missional just because it is contemporary, young, hip, post-modern sensitive, seeker-sensitive or even traditional.
• The missional church is not about big programs and organizations to accomplish God’s missionary purpose. This does not imply no program or organization, but that they will not drive mission. They will be used in support of people on mission.
• The missional church is not involved in political party activism, either on the right or left. As Brian McLaren wrote, we need “purple peoplehood” – people who don’t want to be defined as red or blue, but have elements of both.

What the Missional Church Looks Like 

JR Woodward at Dream Awakener has a perspective on success that really helps my understanding of missional. His post A Working Definition of Success provides a working definition of what missional might look like. Here it is: 

• Not simply how many people come to our church services, but how many people our church serves.
• Not simply how many people attend our ministry, but how many people have we equipped for ministry.
• Not simply how many people minister inside the church, but how many minister outside the church.
• Not simply helping people become more whole themselves, but helping people bring more wholeness to their world. (i.e. justice, healing, relief)
• Not simply how many ministries we start, but how many ministries we help.
• Not simply how many unbelievers we bring into the community of faith, but how many “believers” we help experience healthy community.
• Not simply working through our past hurts, but working alongside the Spirit toward wholeness.
• Not simply counting the resources that God gives us to steward, but counting how many good stewards are we developing for the sake of the world.
• Not simply how are we connecting with our culture but how are we engaging our culture.
• Not simply how much peace we bring to individuals, but how much peace we bring to our world.
• Nit simply how effective we are with our mission, but how faithful we are to our God.
• Not simply how unified our local church is, but how unified is the church in our neighborhood, city and world?
• Not simply how much we immerse ourselves in the text, but how faithfully we live the story of God.
• Not simply being concerned about how our country is doing, but being concerned for the welfare of others countries.
• Not simply how many people we bring into the kingdom, but how much of the kingdom we bring to the earth.

Minfred Minatrea studied a number of missional churches. He defined missional churches as “reproducing communities of authentic disciples, being equipped as missionaries sent by God, to live and proclaim God’s kingdom in their world.” He noted nine practices that they have in common and with my explanatory phrases added: 

1. Having a high threshold for membership (high expectation for belivers)
2. Being real, not real religious (being transparent, authentic, with one foot in the world)
3. Teaching to obey rather than to know (a practical faith)
4. Rewriting worship (Creative, participatory Sunday morning services)
5. Living apostolically (each believer is a missionary)
6. Expecting to change the world (aggressively engaged in transforming communities)
7. Odering actions according to purpose (ruthless aligning of resources with mission)
8. Measuring growth by capacity to release rather than retain ( not megachurches but multiplying churches)
9. Placing kingdom concerns first (in contrast to denominations first. Thus, cooperation with other churches)

As we dialogue and commit to becoming missional churches, we should expect some bumps. Becoming more missional will require “organized abandonment” of some policies and programs that do not align with our mission. There will always be tenacious advocates of any program we either abandon or radically change, and people who will take issue with every dollar diverted in another direction. 

To travel this course successfully, church leaders will need a clear vision of where we are headed and why, resolve to stick to decisions, and a strong community among themselves to help deal with the arrows that will fly. But the price we will pay will be worth the goal we are aiming for, a church that is working aggressively to: follow Jesus as Lord; manifest God’s kingdom to an unbelieving world; and work with the Holy Spirit in drawing people into God’s kingdom. 

Thanks for listening.