Over the past year I have had an increasing number of conversations with pastors and church leaders about the church’s inability to “reach” their local communities. Many local churches have come to the realization that they have lost the ability to “attract” people to church programs and events. They sense that something has changed, but they are unsure about the essence of the change and what ministry adjustments might be necessary. In most cases, the leaders have no “grid” or “framework” to rethink the form and function of the church. Therefore, they lean towards a solution that ultimately involves more of the same church growth principles and programming.

I believe, as many of you that follow this blog, that a significant portion of the “solution” begins with recapturing the missionary nature of God and His church. The “framework” that is necessary is found in the best of the missional church conversation that is taking place today.

I have been studying and participating in this conversation for the past decade. Last year I completed a doctoral project that was targeted on assisting churches in the development of a missional ecclesiology. The core of the training project included three major elements.

The first piece of the training attempted to answer the question, “What is Missional Church?” During this portion of the training we examined the biblical, theological, and missiological underpinnings of the missional conversation. We also conducted a brief survey of the history of missional church, along with exploring what others were saying on the topic.

The second portion of the training focused on understanding the cultural shifts that have taken place in North America, and how those shifts have contributed to the marginalization of the church. This second element speaks to the question of “Why is the Missional Church conversation important?”

The third element of the training dealt with missional practice, or the question, “How can an existing church cultivate a more missional posture?” In this final section of the training we focused on issues surrounding community engagement and transformation, as well as how to make incremental changes in a missional direction with resources such as prayer, time, staff, facilities, and finances.

I share this brief training outline as an introduction to what I would be willing to share with other local congregations. I would like to make available a customized seminar that would focus on the series of topics mentioned above. The training could be customized to any size group that was most helpful. It could range from a two hour presentation targeted to a selected group of church leaders to a full day seminar presented to the whole congregation. You would decide the best fit for your situation and local context.

I want to make perfectly clear, that I am not trying to “make a buck” off of the missional church conversation. In fact, because I am supported by a national mission organization, the North American Mission Board, I would lead such a seminar with no required fee. I simply desire to assist churches and church leaders to better understand the missional conversation, and the significant implications it has for a local congregation.

If you have questions or would like to discuss what this might look like for your church, simply email me at brad.brisco@gmail.com

Here is an extended quote from a great book by Linda Bergquist and Allan Karr. I hope to post a review for the book in the next week.

Today’s church has posed itself a serious challenge: to live according to its missional nature rather than simply organize around mission activities. This challenge is something of an antidote to the church’s previous practice of piecing together a theology out of the two “Great Commission” verses found in Matthew 28:18-20 and Acts 1:8 rather than from the entire biblical story.

When we miss the big picture — that God is forming a people for Himself and reconciling the world to Himself — it affects our ecclesiology and reduces mission to a program or department of a church. A century ago, the German theologian Martin Kahler said that mission was “the mother of theology” in that the theologizing of the early church was necessitated by its missionary encounters with the world. Over many years, other prophetic voices have tried to call us to a more authentic theology, but we have not always listened. In 1969, missiologist Heinrich Kastin wrote: “Mission was, in the early stages, more than a mere function; it was a fundamental expression of the life of the church. The beginnings of a missionary theology are therefore also the beginnings of Christian theology as such.”

As you design, refine, or re-align, these questions about the role of mission will be some of your most important decisions. Do you believe that missions are something that the church does, or that mission is something that the church intrinsically is? Your answer to this question either limits or releases people. It helps define whether the church seeks the lost, or whether we expect the lost to seek the church. Which will it be?

– Church Turned Inside Out: A Guide For Designers, Refiners, And Re-Aligners by Linda Bergquist and Allan Karr

Following is a short video (produced and edited by Bill Kinnon) that recently “resurfaced” on the internet. It is an interview between Alan Roxburgh and Craig Van Gelder.

Van Gelder is professor of congregational mission at Luther Seminary in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is author of “The Essence of the Church,” “The Ministry of the Missional Church,” “The Missional Church in Context,” “The Missional Church and Denominations,” and editor of “Confident Witness — Changing World” and “The Church Between Gospel and Culture.” (All of which are excellent, but the last two are my favorites)

There are a couple of issues raised in this video I think are important to consider. First, I appreciate Van Gelder’s emphasis on the theological foundation of missional church. Like many others in the missional church conversation, Van Gelder sees the necessity to shift the starting point for any discussion on missional church to the topic of mission.

Instead of beginning with questions surrounding the mission activities of the church, we must start first with questions concerning the missio Dei, or what is God’s mission in our context. Or to use David Bosch’s famous quote, “It is not the church which undertakes mission; it is the missio Dei which constitutes the church.”

Second, this emphasis on participating with what God is doing raises the crucial issue of discernment. When we start with God’s mission it is imperative that we discern how He is working. We must ask, “What is God doing in my neighborhood, workplace, or school?” And the follow-up question, “In light of our gifts and resources, how does God want us to participate with Him?”

Craig Van Gelder & Alan Roxburgh – What is Missional Church? from Allelon on Vimeo.

Most of you that follow this blog are familiar with The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch. It is certainly one of the most significant books in the present missional conversation. If you are not familiar with the book you can read a series of post I did here. I would also highly recommend the more recent The Forgotten Ways Handbook, which I wrote about briefly here.

To move the conversation beyond the written word, and to hear directly from Hirsch himself, check out the training videos created by Lance Ford at Shapevine. The training involves eight sessions, or “podules,” that include an introduction, a session on chaos theory, and a session on each of the six mDNA elements described in The Forgotten Ways. The eight session training is priced at $39.95, however Shapevine is currently running a special which includes the same online training in a DVD format. In other words, you can get instant access to the online training while having the DVDs shipped in the next couple of weeks.

For those of you in the Kansas City area, keep a watch out for the development of some local learning cohort groups as we work through this excellent training together.

(ht: alan hirsch)

For several months now I have been meaning to highlight two fantastic tools for missional living. I have purchased more than twenty copies of each of these “handbooks” to give to those I know are on the journey of developing misisonal churches.

The first is The Tangible Kingdom Primer written by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay. The primer was written with two specific purposes in mind. First, to be a spiritual formation tool to prepare the hearts of people for mission. It is written in such a way that participants can simply be a group of friends who commit to journey through an eight week spiritual formation exercise together. Second, the primer is to be a field guide for starting mission activity together. In other words, it is also a great fit for those who are already inclined to jump in on practices that can engage and impact a local context.

The workbook is divided into seven days of experiences each week. The weekly rhythm looks like this: Day one involves the exploration of the missional/incarnational concept; Day two presents scripture for meditation on the highlighted topic or issue; Day three pushes for a bit of change in the way you think/act; Day four is about putting thoughts into action; Day five pushes the activity towards a faith community for encouragement and discernment; Day six involves ”calibration” whereby the theme of the week is examined from a different angle; Day seven is a day of rest or sabbath.

The second resource is The Forgotten Ways Handbook by Alan Hirsch and Darryn Altclass. The book is a practical oriented companion to Hirsch’s excellent 2007 book The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church.  By the way, if you are not familiar with The Forgotten Ways, I blogged through much of the book here.

The handbook moves beyond the theological foundation laid in the original The Forgotten Ways, to a place of practice that very few resources provide. This extremely practical handbook includes helpful tools including summary sections encapsulating the ideas contained in each chapter of the original book, suggested habits and practices to help readers embed missional principles, and adult learning-based techniques and examples from other churches that enable readers to process and assimilate the ideas in a group context.

If you are planting a misisonal community or attempting to transition an existing church in a more missional direction I would highly recommend both of these resources. By the way, both Halter and Hirsch will be speaking at Verge in February.

Because of a major glitch involved in the 2.9 WordPress upgrade, the blog has been down for the past couple of weeks. But because of the great help from the guys at iThemes I am finally back up. So to get caught up a bit here are several links I have been hoarding:

Len Hjalmarson adds a bit to an excellent post by David Fitch on Instilling Missional Habits.

Len again with Dallas Willard on Incarnation.

Ortberg shares a great illustration of the incarnation.

How Religious is Your State?

Spiritual Warfare and Gospel Movements.

A good reminder from Dan Kimball to start with prayer in 2010 and to see church buildings as mission outposts.

Churches and Social Media from Drew Goodmanson.

Is There an Organic Church Movement?

Update: Andrew Jones and How to Spot a Church Movement.

Ervin R. Stutzman has written an excellent paper titled “Preaching in the Missional Church” which can be downloaded here. Stutzman provides a brief analysis of the effects of secularization on the Christian church in the West. He then moves to discuss the response of the missional church to the secularization process. However, the majority of the seventeen page paper is focused on the missional church approaches to preaching. He suggests nine key characteristics of “missional preaching.” Below I have listed each characteristic, with a small portion of Stutzman’s explanation, for the first few points. For further clarification read the entire paper.

Missional preaching prepares God’s people for their work in the world.

Guder (Missional Theology for a Missional Church, 1998) maintains that effective Gospel preaching arises from a missional hermeneutic. This method of interpretation “works from the basic assumption that the New Testament writings are directed to communities which are primarily and essentially defined by their missionary vocation. They are apostolic communities, that is, churches founde.d by the apostolic proclamation with the purpose of continuing that witness in their particular contexts.”

Missional preaching grows out of the “agonistic” encounter between the gospel and the church.

Agonistic preaching is “the struggle to proclaim the gospel in such a way that it ‘frames’ the entirety of our ministry in light of the context we live in” (Wyatt, Preaching to Postmodern People, 1999). . . . Wyatt describes four key expressions of agonistic preaching. It is 1) iconic, 2) midrashic, 3) parabolic and 4) poetic.

Missional preaching takes place in many contexts outside the traditional worship service, including the public square.

Guder claims that “preaching” has come to mean something quite different from the New Testament definition of the word. In many North American churches, preaching is practiced only within the church, to the faithful, on Sunday morning. Such preaching probably bears more resemblance to the New Testament concept of ‘teaching’ than to its concept of ‘preaching.’

Missional preaching is concerned with authenticity of life and witness, not simply proclamation of spiritual propositions.

Daniel Oudshoorn avows that to be missional, the western church must learn to “speak Christianly in the midst of Babel.” Christian living, coupled with faith in the Holy Spirit, ought to provide the content and meaning of the Christian message.

Missional preaching deliberately draws contrasts between the gospel message and the practices and values of American civil religion, aiming for conversion from habits shaped by participation in American democracy to habits formed through Christian discipleship.

“Public announcements of God’s actions in the world are a call to conversion, to turning around, to giving up idolatries, and to placing one’s loyalty in the one true God and God’s reign.” This is just as true for believers in the church as for nonbelievers outside the church.

Missional preaching has a cross-cultural dimension.

The “tendency of early Christianity to cross cultural boundaries is a fertile starting point for developing a model of biblical interpretation. It is fertile, especially for our purposes, because it places the question of the relationship between Christianity and diverse cultures at the very top of the interpretive agenda.” Missional preaching, then, engages in various ways with people outside the dominant culture or even the “churchly” culture, the privatized gatherings of Christians in local communities of faith.

Missional preaching employs an interactive style of presentation that engages postmodern listeners in a participatory manner.

Missional preaching employs storytelling and metaphorical language in an “abductive” mode.

Missional preaching is shared among those in the congregation who are effectively sharing the gospel with others.

Stutzman concludes his paper with the following paragraph:

Finally, training schools must find ways to equip a range of people, beyond the seminarian or other matriculated student, for the ministry of preaching. To reach our world for Christ, we need a multitude of lay people (if such a term is even appropriate), to announce the gospel in every corner of our nation, indeed around the globe. These preachers can benefit from instruction in preaching even though they will not earn a degree in one of our evangelical institutions. We will do well to provide training for them in the context where they live and work.

(ht)

I am about fifty pages into Introducing the Missional Church, and thus far it appears to be the comprehensive, yet very accessible introduction of the topic that has been greatly needed. There are two specific positions the authors take in chapter one that I appreciate.

First, they present a very evenhanded critique of “attractional vs missional.” They write:

The assumption of the attractional imagination is that average people outside the church are looking for a church and know they should belong to one, and therefore, church leaders should create the most attractive attractional church possible. The mission, then, is to get people to attend. This story is still repeated over and over again across North America. It’s not that we shouldn’t be attractive for those looking for a church to attend; it’s that this has become the primary focus of churches, and as a result they miss what the Spirit is up to in the world. . . .

There is nothing wrong or bad about attracting people to attend the various, meetings that a church holds. We are not advocating an either/or imagination that demands that we move from attractional to missional. That would be a sign of poor leadership. If we are good leaders in a church that is good at what it does, then we will attract people, and that is good. We are simply saying that the attractional pattern is not the goal or the primary call of the church. . . .

A missional imagination is not about the church; it’s not about how to make the church better, how to get more people to come to church, or how to turn a dying church around. It’s not about getting the church back to cultural respectability in a time when it has been marginalized. All of these are good things, but they aren’t the focus of a missional imagination. . . .

God is up to something in the world that is bigger than the church even though the church is called to be a sign, witness, and foretaste of God’s purposes in the world. The Spirit is calling the church on a journey outside of itself and its internal focus. Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, summarizes this imagination in this way: “It is not the church of God that has a mission. It’s the God of mission that has a church.” He is saying God is at work in the world to redeem creation, and God invites us to participate in this mission. . . . Rather than the primary question being, “How do we attract people to what we are doing?” it becomes, “What is God up to in this neighborhood?” and “What are the ways we need to change in order to engage the people in our community who no longer consider church a part of their lives?” This is what a missional imagination is about.

Secondly, I appreciate the author’s belief that there is no missional church “formula” or “model.” Again they write:

The local churches the Spirit will shape on these unknown waters will come in many different forms: new, developing churches and old, traditional congregations; large, small and medium churches; denominationally connected and independent churches. There isn’t one specific form, predictable pattern, or predetermined model. On these new waters we become pioneers who are creating new maps shaped in, with, and for the contexts and communities into which we have been called. Here we will learn to experiment and test ideas. Some will work; others will fail. Through trial and error we will imagine new ways of being Jesus’ people.

– Introducing the Missional Church: What it is, Why it Matters, How to Become One by Alan J. Roxburgh and M. Scott Boren

Here are two additional sessions from last month’s missional church conference. In these two sessions Eric Swanson speaks to the topic of community transformation. The final 30 minutes of session one includes the audio of an animated short film titled The Man Who Planted Trees. The film is the story of a solitary sheperd who patiently plants and nurtures a forest of thousands of trees, which single-handedly transforms his desert surroundings into a thriving oasis. The film sparked a very good discussion around the topics of focus, forbearance, and investing for the long-term. You can purchase the film and read multiple reviews here.

Here are the first two audio presentations from the Kansas City Missional Network Gathering.

In session one, Eric Swanson, author of The Externally Focused Church, shares the characteristics of EF Churches. These characteristics include:

They believe that their communities can’t be healthy without the church.
They believe Christians don’t grow until they begin serving.
They understand the power of service.
They lower the thresholds to service.
They partner with other entities.

Swanson’s presentation is replete with excellent illustrations and examples of churches that are impacting their communities as they learn fresh ways to serve their cities.

In session two, Swanson spends time discussing the crucial importance of combining good deeds (that create good will) with good news.

Four new arrivals that I hope to read/blog over the holidays:

Church Turned Inside Out by Linda Bergquist and Allan Karr. I am into chapter three of this one. The book is subtitled “A Guide for Designers, Refiners, and Re-Aligners.” While talking about the importance of new church designs, Linda and Allan emphasize that every church is a neccesary original. Here is a short interview with Linda and Allan from Leadership Network.

Introducing the Missional Church: What It Is, Why It Matters, How to Become One by Alan Roxburgh and Scott Boren.

Sent and Gathered: A Worship Manual for the Missional Church by Clayton Schmit.

When Helping Hurts: Alleviating Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . And Ourselves by Brian Fikkert and Steve Cobertt.

History of Missional Church – Part I
History of Missional Church – Part II
History of Missional Church – Part III

Other Notable Authors and Contributors

There are a number of other authors who have contributed significantly to the missional church conversation in the past decade. Two of the more notable voices have been that of Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost. Their first collaborative effort was The Shaping of Things to Come [1] published in 2003. In that book, the authors built upon the twelve indicators first offered by the GOCN by adding three additional overarching principles that provides perhaps the best direction for what it means for a church to be missional. The additional principles include the following:

1. The missional church is incarnational, not attractional, in its ecclesiology. By incarnational we mean it does not create sanctified spaces into which unbelievers must come to encounter the gospel. Rather, the missional church disassembles itself and seeps into the cracks and crevices of a society in order to be Christ to those who don’t yet know him.

2. The missional church is messianic, not dualistic, in its spirituality. That is, it adopts the worldview of Jesus the Messiah, rather than that of the Greco-Roman empire. Instead of seeing the world as divided between the sacred (religious) and profane (nonreligious), like Christ it sees the world and God’s place in it as more holistic and integrated.

3. The missional church adopts an apostolic, rather than a hierarchical, mode of leadership. By apostolic we mean a mode of leadership that recognizes the fivefold model detailed by Paul in Ephesians 6. It abandons the triangular hierarchies of the traditional church and embraces a biblical, flat-leadership community that unleashes the gifts of evangelism, apostleship, and prophecy, as well as the currently popular pastoral and teaching gifts. [2]

Hirsch and Frost believe the missional “genius” of a church can only be unleashed when there are foundational changes made to the church’s very DNA, and that means addressing fundamental issues like ecclesiology, spirituality, and leadership. It means there must be a complete shift away from a Christendom way of thinking, which, as mentioned above, has been attractional, dualistic, and hierarchical. [3]

Several other books that have added much to the missional church conversation in the past decade are included in the following abridged annotated bibliography:

Craig Van Gelder, The Essence of the Church: A Community Created by the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000).

In The Essence of the Church, Van Gelder shares his concerns for many churches taking a functional approach to ecclesiology. He then moves to articulate a missional ecclesiology, which he places in the context of God’s purposes within creation and his eschatological intention. According to Van Gelder, the church is the redemptive reign of God implemented in a fallen world. Furthermore, it is the Spirit which carries out the redemptive purposes of God through the church as the Spirit empowers it for ministry. After describing the church from a redemptive, Trinitarian theological perspective, Van Gelder reserves the second half of the book to give practical advice about what the church is, what the church does, and how the church should organize to best live out its missionary nature.

Milfred Minatrea. Shaped by God’s Heart: The Passion and Practices of Missional Churches (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004).

In Shaped by God’s Heart, Minatrea offers a good introduction to the missional church conversation. The book is organized in three sections. Part one is titled, “The Church in a New and Changing World.” In this portion of the book Minatrea discusses the difference between being “mission-minded” and “missional.” In part two, “The Nine Essential Practices of Missional Churches,” he presents the core of the book as he shares nine practices that he has observed in studying missional churches. Part three is titled “Structures and Strategies for Becoming Missional.” In this last section Minatrea shares strategies for church leaders who desire to move their churches towards becoming more missional. Additionally, each chapter includes helpful reflection and application questions to be used in group studies.

Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006).

In The Forgotten Ways, Frost and Hirsch describe the current form of church in two simple ways. A missional church is one that goes to where people are to engage them on their own cultural turf while an attractional model expects people to leave where they are and come join the church culture. They contend that the attractional, institutional church that in large part is the creation of the church growth movement, has created a spectator Christianity that is largely irrelevant at reaching 85 percent of the culture. However the book is much more than a simple attack on the attractional church or the church growth movement. Building upon theological reflection and missiological principles, the authors develops a sound missional theology for the church. The Forgotten Ways will certainly remain one of the most significant contributions to effective missional engagement.

Alan J. Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach a Changing World (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006).

In The Missional Leader, Roxburgh and Romanuk draw upon many years of experience as consultants to church leaders across the United States and Canada. They offer a realistic approach to leaders who are struggling with what it means to be a missional church in a local context. The authors caution against adopting business models and church growth techniques. Instead they continually emphasize the importance of recognizing that the church is a spiritual entity that is lead and empowered by the Spirit. The goal of spiritual leadership therefore is to discern where and how the Spirit of God is working in the context of the local church.

Ed Stetzer and David Putman, Breaking the Missional Code (Nashville: B&H, 2006).

Breaking the Misisonal Code is one of the most practical introductions to the missional conversation. The book is built upon the premise that the church is a community created by God to be sent as a missionary into a local context. To do so effectively means that the church must break the “missional code” of their context. Each church must function as a missionary people exegeting their culture in order to better present the Gospel.  Throughout the book Stetzer and Putman provide numerous examples of churches that exhibit missional qualities. They also offer multiple definitions to bring clarity to missional terminology. For any church leader who desires to better understand the basics of missional practice Breaking the Missional Code would be a great place to begin.

Patrick Keifert, We Are Here Now: A New Missional Era (Eagle, ID: Allelon Publishing, 2006).

In We Are Here Now, Keifert offers a framework for deep change in churches and leadership teams that are striving towards missional engagement. Similar to other books on the missional church, Keifert agrees that as a result of vast cultural changes the church is in desperate need of recapturing its missionary nature. However what sets We Are Here Now apart is that Keifert lays out a long-range plan of spiritual discernment and transformation for a local congregation. Keifert maintains that when it comes to serious missional commitment, there are no quick fixes and real change is shaped by Scripture, the Holy Spirit, and attention to each other.

Craig Van Gelder, The Ministry of the Missional Church: A Community Led by the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007).

Van Gelder writes that the premise of The Ministry of the Missional Church is to encourage churches to recognize the ministry of the Spirit in the midst of constant congregational change. He believes that God’s intent is often to use change either directly or indirectly to move a congregation in new directions of meaningful ministry under the leading of the Spirit. Furthermore, Van Gelder desires for congregations to understand that the Spirit-led ministry of the church flows out of the Spirit-created nature of the church. In other words, being precedes doing. Or to put it another way, the nature of the church establishes the foundation for understanding the purpose of the church and its ministry and determines their direction and scope. Van Gelder does an excellent job of showing that when a church begins with its nature, or essence as a Spirit-created community, growth and development are the natural outcome.

Craig Van Gelder, ed., The Missional Church in Context: Helping Congregations Develop Contextual Ministry (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007).

The Missional Church in Context is a collection of eight outstanding papers presented at a consultation held at Luther Seminary in December of 2005. The premise of the consultation, and exemplified by the book title, is that every context should be seen as a missional context, and every congregation as a missional congregation that is responsible to participate in God’s mission in that context. The book does not promote a method or model of ministry but encourages various congregational expressions to enter a discernment process, with the Spirit, to identify the theological foundations and insights in order to develop the capacity for ministry engagement. Again as indicative of the title, context does matter. Collectively the contributors state that the church needs to develop a “formation triad” that includes congregational formation (the shaping of a concrete Christian community), spiritual formation (corporate and personal attention to initiatives of God) and missional formation (local church’s identity and agency in its encounter with the immediate context). This text represents another important voice speaking on the significance of context in the formation of the local church.

Hugh Halter and Matt Smay. The Tangible Kingdom: Creating Incarnational Community (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008).

The Tangible Kingdom is a guide to the planting of missional communities written by two missional practitioners and church planters. One of the strengths of the book is the use of stories to illustrate the power of incarnational community. They show what it looks like to leave the safe “bubble” of much of modern evangelicalism and ventured out into the lives of those around us. Further it provides helpful direction on combating consumerism, living out our mission in the context of an entire community, and what it means to practice biblical hospitality.

Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways Handbook: A Practical Guide for Developing Missional Churches (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009).

The Forgotten Ways Handbook is a follow up to the 2006 publication by the same name. However, the handbook moves beyond the theological foundation built in the original The Forgotten Ways to a place of practice that very little resources provide. This extremely practical handbook includes many helpful tools including summary sections encapsulating the ideas contained in each chapter of the original book, suggested habits and practices to help readers embed missional principles, and adult learning-based techniques and examples from other churches that enable readers to process and assimilate the ideas in a group context.

Reggie McNeal, Missional Renaissance: Changing the Scorecard for the Church (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009).

The most significant contribution that Missional Renaissance makes to the missional church conversation is McNeal’s attempt to establish a new way of measuring success in the church in the United States. For years the measure of faithfulness and vitality in the church has been in terms of growth in attendance, finances and facilities. However to assist the church in making a shift in a missional direction, McNeal argues that the church must begin to measure success by using a new scorecard. He asks, What would happen if we measured vitality in terms of growth in the area of people, service, prayer and outreach?

---

1. Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21^st Century Church (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003).

2. Ibid.,12.

3. Ibid.

History of Missional Church – Part I
History of Missional Church – Part II

The Gospel and Our Culture Network

As Newbigin’s writings gained a larger circulation and the British programme received greater recognition, a version of the Gospel and Our Culture conversation began to emerge in the United States. A network began to take shape in the mid-1980s and by the early 1990s, under the leadership of George Hunsberger, the Gospel and Our Culture Network (GOCN)[1] was publishing a quarterly newsletter and also convening a yearly consultation. “By the mid-1990s, the movement in the United States had begun to find its own voice beyond the influence of Newbigin, and the Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company began to publish a series of books under the moniker The Gospel and Our Culture Series.”[2] To date the following volumes have been published in this series:

George Hunsberger and Craig Van Gelder, eds., The Church Between Gospel and Culture: The Emerging Mission in North America (1996).

Darrel L. Guder, ed., Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (1998).

George Hunsberger, Bearing the Witness of the Spirit: Lesslie Newbigin’s Theology of Cultural Plurality (1998).

Craig Van Gelder, ed., Confident Witness — Changing World: Rediscovering the Gospel in North America (1999).

Darrel L. Guder, The Continuing Conversion of the Church (2000).

James V. Brownson, ed. StormFront: The Good News of God (2003).

Lois Y. Barrett, ed., Treasure in Clay Jars: Patterns in Missional Faithfulness (2004).

While the Gospel and Our Culture Network does not offer a precise definition for “missional church,” they do provide what they refer to as “indicators of a missional church.” The indicators are an effort to identify what might be some of the key aspects that contribute to the church’s unique ability to better understand and therefore connect with the diverse cultures within the North American context.

1.  The missional church proclaims the gospel.

What it looks like: The story of God’s salvation is faithfully repeated in a multitude of different ways.

2.  The missional church is a community where all members are involved in learning to become disciples of Jesus.

What it looks like: The disciple identity is held by all; growth in discipleship is expected of all.

3.  The Bible is normative in the church’s life.

What it looks like: The church is reading the Bible together to learn what it can learn nowhere else – God’s good and gracious intent for all creation, the salvation mystery, and the identity and purpose of life together.

4.  The church understands itself as different from the world because of its participation in the life, death, and resurrection of its Lord.

What it looks like: In its corporate life and public witness, the church is consciously seeking to conform to its Lord instead of the multitude of cultures in which it finds itself.

5.  The church seeks to discern God’s specific missional vocation for the entire community and for all of its members.

What it looks like: The church has made its “mission” it priority, and in overt and communal ways is seeking to be and do “what God is calling us to know, be, and do.”

6.  A missional community is indicated by how Christians behave toward one another.

What it looks like: Acts of self-sacrifice on behalf of one another both in the church and in the locale characterize the generosity of the community.

7.  It is a community that practices reconciliation.

What it looks like: The church community is moving beyond homogeneity toward a more heterogeneous community in its racial, ethnic, age, gender, and socioeconomic makeup.

8.  Peoples within the community hold themselves accountable to one another in love.

What it looks like: Substantial time is spent with one another for the purpose of watching over one another in love.

9.  The church practices hospitality.

What it looks like: Welcoming the stranger into the midst of the community plays a central role.

10.  Worship is the central act by which the community celebrates with joy and thanksgiving both God’s presence and God’s promised future.

What it looks like: There is a significant and meaningful engagement in communal worship of God, reflecting appropriately and addressing the culture of those who worship together.

11.  The community has a vital public witness.

What it looks like: The church makes an observable impact that contributes to the transformation of life, society, and human relationships.

12.  There is a recognition that the church itself is an incomplete expression of the reign of God.

What it looks like: There is a widely help perception that this church is going somewhere – and that “somewhere” is a more faithfully lived life in the reign of God.[3]

One final note from the writings of the Gospel and Culture Network: Darrell Guder emphasizes the importance of having congregations formed by hearing the Bible “missionally.” He points out that when missional renewal is happening, different kinds of questions are brought to the Bible. He writes:

Congregations are open to being challenged, to looking hard at their deeply ingrained attitudes and expectations. The missional approach asks, How does God’s Word call, shape, transform, and send me . . . and us? Coupled with this openness is the awareness, that biblical formation must mean change, and often conversion. Christian communities may discover that their discipling will require repentance and that their way of being church will have to change.[4]

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1. “The GOCN is a collaborative effort that focuses on three things: (1) a cultural and social analysis of our North American setting; (2) theological reflection on the question, what is the gospel that address us in our setting? And (3) the renewal of the church and its missional identity in our setting.” George Hunsberger, The Church Between Gospel and Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 290. For more information on The Gospel and Our Culture Network see www.gocn.org

2. Van Gelder, The Missional Church and Denominations, 4.

3. Walter C. Hobbs, “Method,” in Treasure in Clay Jars: Patterns in Missional Faithfulness, ed. Lois Y. Barrett (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 160.

4. Darrell L. Guder, “Biblical Formation and Discipleship,” in Treasure in Clay Jars: Patterns in Missional Faithfulness, ed. Lois Y. Barrett (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 70.

As churches attempt a move in a more missional direction one of the major issues involves rethinking church “measurables” or “scorecards.” David Fitch offers several good ideas on this topic in chapter one of The Great Giveaway. He contends that there is still a need to measure, but the things we “count” will be very different. When speaking on my favorite measurable Fitch writes:

Let us also turn from measuring the size of buildings to the number of new churches planted. Let us count the number of local congregations each church has formed outside itself instead of the attendance figures on Sunday morning or the increased size of the worship facility. We must ask, Why is it that pastors of large churches are more willing to build bigger buildings than empower a group of forty to fifty people to plant another living body of Christ? If indeed the facts are true that the greatest conversion growth occurs in churches when they grow from fifty to two hundred people, why is it that we insist on building bigger churches after they reached one thousand?

What does it say about our assumptions for church growth when we plant churches that already start with two hundred people? Does it say that a church is not really a “successful” church until it reaches a thousand? But if we accept our new conditions in a post-Christian culture, pastoral success and the success of a church will not be measured by simple numbers alone, but by church plants, the spurring on of missional congregations that can display a witness visibly to the new life in Christ before a watching and lost world.

If what we have said above is true, evangelicals should seek a vision of the world that is populated with local bodies of Christ, not megachurch centers. Instead of huge religious arenas for private individuals to come eat, shop, and see a religious production, let us evangelicals pursue a world where one can no sooner go to a Starbucks, a Cineplex movie theater, or a local tavern without also being confronted with an alternative center for life, a life centered under the lordship of Christ, the visible local body of Christ. If this is what it means to be a physical body of Christ in North America, then the ultimate sign of church success will be “the number of churches you have planted,” not how big your church is in terms of attendance, decisions, or church facilities.

As presented in an earlier post, Christianity in North America has experienced a move away from its position of dominance as it has witness the loss not only of numbers but of power and influence within society. “The United States is still, by all accounts, a very religious society. The pollsters affirm that Americans and Canadians believe in God, pray regularly, and consider themselves religious. But they find less and less reason to express their faith by joining a Christian church.”[1] As a result, many historical denominations are now in serious decline, while others are just now beginning to recognize that they are now in their own mission field location.

This recognition of the North American religiosity shift to a post-Christian, neo-pagan, pluralistic mission field has lead many to return to the foundation of what it means to be the church of Jesus Christ in the world. “This involves the issue of ecclesiology (ecclesia = ‘church’; -ology = ‘the study of’). In the midst of our changing world, we are in constant need of continuing to engage in the study of the church, to explore its nature, to understand its creation and continuing formation, and to carefully examine its purpose and ministry.”[2] The chief discussion that has emerged over the past few decades around these important issues of ecclesiology and missionary engagement in North America is known as the “missional church conversation.” While there are a number of prominent contributors to this dialog, by far the most influential has been the contributions made by missiologist Lesslie Newbigin.[3]

The Influence of Lesslie Newbigin

Upon returning home to England in 1974 from missionary service in India for nearly 40 years, “Newbigin took up the challenge of trying to envision what a fresh encounter of the gospel with late-modern Western culture might look like.”[4] In the book Foolishness to the Greeks, he posed the question: “What would be involved in a missionary encounter between the gospel and this whole way of perceiving, thinking, and living that we call ‘modern Western Culture?”[5]

Newbigin’s missiology was largely formed by the mission theology that took shape within the International Missionary Council (IMC) conferences of the 1950s through the 1970s. Perhaps the most significant of these conferences was the one convened in Willingen, Germany in 1952. At Willingen the conference recognized that the church could be neither the starting point nor the goal of mission. “God’s salvific work precedes both the church and mission. We should not subordinate mission to the church nor the church to mission; both should, rather, be taken up into the missio Dei, which now became the overarching concept. The missio Dei institutes the missiones ecclesiae.”[6] It was here that this idea (not the exact term) missio Dei first surfaced. When discussing the paradigm shift that began at Willingen, David Bosch writes:

Mission was understood as being derived from the very nature of God. It was thus put in the context of the doctrine on the missio Dei as God the Father sending the Son, and God the Father and the Son sending the Spirit was expanded to include yet another “movement”: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit sending the church into the world. As far as missionary thinking was concerned, this linking with the doctrine of the Trinity constituted an important innovation. Willingen’s image of mission was mission as participating in the sending of God.[7]

While the Trinitarian foundation for mission theology was later formulated as the missio Dei by Karl Hartenstein,[8] and still later given fully expression by Johannes Blauw in his 1962 book The Missionary Nature of the Church,[9] Lesslie Newbigin articulated his own expression in The Open Secret.[10] Central to Newbigin’s understanding of mission is the work of the Triune God in calling and sending the church, empowered by the Spirit, into the world to participate fully in God’s mission. This theological assertion understands the church to be the creation of the Spirit: which exists in the world as a “sign” that the redemptive reign of God’s kingdom is present; it serves as a “foretaste” of the eschatological future of the redemptive reign that has already begun; and it serves as an “instrument” under the leadership of the Spirit to bring that redemptive reign to bear on every dimension of life.[11]

In the following extended excerpt from an outstanding PhD dissertation on Newbigin’s missionary ecclesiology, Michael Goheen provides an excellent summation of the significance of Newbigin’s lasting influence on mission theology:

First, Newbigin’s work has served as the catalyst for bringing the issue of mission in western culture to the forefront of the agenda of mission studies. The appearance of his book The Other Side of 1984 marks a major milestone for a missiology of western culture. With unusual skill the book crystallized a number of issues which have stimulated vigorous discussion. The stream of books and articles written by Newbigin since that time has continued to focus the issue for many people. The Gospel and Our Culture movements in Britain, North America, and New Zealand, the Missiology of Western Culture project headed up by Wilbert Shenk, and a growing stream of publications on the issue bear witness to the stimulus that the work of Newbigin has produced in the last couple of decades.

Second, Newbigin played an active and central role in the International Missionary Council and the Commission of World Mission and Evangelism of the World Council of Churches. After serving as a missionary in India for twenty-three years, Newbigin took the post of general secretary of the IMC and then director of CWME of the WCC. His influence was formative for many of the discussions throughout since 1948. Newbigin was shaped by the theology, missiology, and ecclesiology of the early ecumenical movement. Yet when there was a dramatic challenge to that paradigm, Newbigin was able to appropriate many of the insights of the new challenge. His flexibility along with his commitment to tradition makes his insight for the current ecclesiological discussions significant.

There is a third reason for focusing on the work of Newbigin. Not only has he provided an impetus for renewed reflection on the issue of mission in western culture and been an active participant in the ecumenical movement, Newbigin has also paid close attention to ecclesiological questions throughout his long and distinguished career as a recognized leader in the context of three settings: as a missionary in India; as an ecumenical leader in a global context; and as a missionary to the West. A glance at his bibliography reveals at once the interest that Newbigin has had in ecclesiological issues in his published work. His record as a missionary, bishop, ecumenical administrator, and pastor all testify to his commitment to the local church. Indeed, it is his vast experience in struggling for a missionary church in many different contexts that has nourished his deep and valuable theological reflection on ecclesiology. It is precisely the missionary ecclesiology developed by Newbigin that has been foundational for and formative of both his work within the ecumenical movement and his call for a missionary encounter with western culture.[12]

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1. Darrell L. Guder, Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America, ed. Darrell L. Guder (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 1.

2. Craig Van Gelder, The Missional Church and Denominations: Helping Congregations Develop a Missional Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 2.

3. For a complete biographical sketch of Newbigin’s life see: Paul Weston, Lesslie Newbigin: Missionary Theologian (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 1-16. See also, George Hunsberger, Bearing the Witness of the Spirit: Lesslie Newbigin’s Theology of Cultural Plurality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).

4. Van Gelder, The Missional Church and Denominations, 2.

5. Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 1.

6. David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1991), 370.

7. Ibid., 390.

8. John A. McIntosh, “Missio Dei” in Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions, ed. A. Scott Moreau, Harold Netland and Charles Van Engen (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 631-633.

9. Johannes Blauw, The Missionary Nature of the Church: A Survey of the Biblical Theology of Mission (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962).

10. Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: Introduction to a Theology of Mission (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).

11. Van Gelder, The Missional Church and Denominations, 3.

12. Michael W. Goheen, “As the Father Has Sent Me, I Am Sending You”: J.E. Lesslie Newbigin’s Missionary Ecclesiology” (PhD diss., Utrecht University, 2000), 22.