“The gospel is the announcement that God has revealed his kingdom and opened it up to sinners through the birth, teaching, miracles, death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, who will one day return to overthrow evil and consummate the kingdom for eternity.”

Later in a section titled “Underestimating the Mission” Dickson makes a helpful distinction between proclaiming the gospel and promoting the gospel.

I want to make a distinction throughout this book between the specific activity of proclaiming the gospel and the broader category of promoting the gospel. The former is properly called “evangelism,” a word that derives from the New Testament term evangelizomai, which only ever means “announcing (grand) news.” The wider category of promoting the gospel includes any and every activity that draws others to Christ (including, of course, evangelism). People sometimes use the words “mission,” “out-reach” or “witness” for this larger work, but I prefer the expression “promoting the gospel” (I’m sure I pinched this from someone else but I can’t remember from whom) because it reminds us that at the heart of our mission to the world is the news about Christ, the gospel. In my view, when “mission” becomes disconnected from the gospel, as it sadly does in some church circles, it no longer deserves to be called Christian mission.

– John Dickson in The Best Kept Secret of Christian Mission: Promoting the Gospel with More Than Our Lips

In the videos Holt shares from his book “God Next Door: Spirituality and Mission in the Neighborhood.” His emphasis is that the neighborhood is a place where God is, and it is a place where God calls us to participate with Him. In the first video, Holt shares a tragic story that played a significant role in his journey towards an emphasis on the local context.

In the second clip, Holt speaks to the importance of fighting against the neglect of our neighborhoods. Even though most people live in a series of relational networks that function outside of the neighborhood context, we must recognize that neighborhoods remain an important piece of the fabric of society. While watching the second video, I was reminded of my favorite Eugene Peterson quote: “The way of Jesus is always local and ordinary.”

Churches throughout the Western world find themselves increasingly marginalized from society as they endeavor to relate the good news to people whose assumptions and attitudes have been shaped by modernity and postmodernity. Our post-Christian, neopagan, pluralistic North American context presents crosscultural missionary challenges every bit as daunting as those we would face on any other continent.

Unfortunately most pastors and church leaders have had no missiological training. Consequently they resort to marketing strategies in place of missionary insights in their attempts to reach out to a population that is becoming increasingly distanced from the church.

– Eddie Gibbs in Church Next: Quantum Changes in How We Do Ministry

The primal mission is God’s, for it is he who sent his prophets, his Son, his Spirit. Of these missions the mission of the Son is central, for it was the culmination of the ministry of the prophets, and it embraced within itself as its climax the sending of the Spirit. And now the Son sends [us] as he himself was sent.

And,

The crucial form in which the Great Commission has been handed down to us (though it is the most neglected because it is the most costly) is the Johannine. Jesus had anticipated it in his prayer in the upper room which he said to the Father: “As thou didst send me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (John 17:18).

Now, probably in the same upper room but after his death and resurrection, he turned his prayer-statement into a commission and said: “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you” (John 20:21).

In both of these statements Jesus did more than draw a vague parallel between his mission and ours. Deliberately and precisely he made his mission the model of ours, saying “as the Father sent me, so I send you.” Therefore our understanding of the church’s mission must be deduced from our understanding of the Son’s.

- John R.W. Stott in Christian Mission in the Modern World

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In the discussion on leadership I appreciate Keifert’s emphasis on leadership being more about time than about a position. He speaks about the leader cultivating segments of time to assist the congregation in discerning what God is doing in their local context. It is about taking the time to create environments for people to dwell in the Word. It is about having the time to be patient — to hear from God and to hear from each other.

Another topic that I found interesting dealt with Keifert’s journey towards the missional church conversation. He shares how it involved both “failure” and “discovery.” The failure involved disenchantment with his own ministry experience in a traditional church. The discovery included the reading of Newbigin’s “Foolishness to the Greeks.”

I think Keifert’s journey parallels the experience of many. There is a deep sense of  uneasiness, frustration, or even failure in a current ministry setting. Church leaders recognize something isn’t right about how they do ministry. They sense that something has changed, but they are unsure about the essence of the change, or what changes might be necessary. At some point, however, they “discover” that others have experienced the same anxiety. They “discover” authors that begin to give language to these changes. Perhaps, like Keifert its Newbigin, or Bosch; or more recently, maybe it is Guder, Van Gelder, Hirsch, or Frost. But regardless of the author, they rediscover the missionary nature of God and His church, and the reality that the church is sent into the mission field that is now North America.

This has certainly been my journey. I wonder about your experience. Has failure + discovery propelled you into the missional conversation?

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

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

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.