How Will "Missional" Survive the Future?

I'm a total Sci-Fi fanatic. Most of the sci-fi-post-apocalyptic movies or books that come out get me all jazzed up. I'm fascinated with the concept of how humanity survives when the existing structures previously depended upon on are no longer dependable. In some ways this is how I lean into "being the church". How can the western body of Christ survive the impending collapse? How will the mission of the church survive the future? 

Missional Individualism 
Cultivating a missional perspective is one of the most important recalibrations that a church can make for the future. I am greatly encouraged by this move, but I’ve observed that when a church “goes missional” often they make a fundamental misstep that I believe fractures the longevity of missional momentum. Innocently many churches begin to preach, teach and stir up their congregants to live missionally but often it is fueled by individualism. High emphasis is placed on “me” to use “my” capacities to be missional. Churches hand out 21 helpful hints for “how to be missional” to their attendees. I love helpful hints but in many ways this mode places emphasis on an insidious drive embedded in Western culture: individual productivity. Being missional can easily become a new collection of readily accessible methods in being productive. I’m convinced a missional life cannot be sustained individually.

For those of us born and bred in the good ole U.S-of-A we approach things with a hyper individualistic orientation. We are weaned on the idea of autonomy, when it comes to our ability to climb the spiritual ladder. We naturally envision ourselves "taking on" or "collapsing under" whatever spiritual challenged is laid out before us. This is not the imagination of the New Testament family. This is not the mechanism for missional traction. This individualistic framework threatens the future of the Missional movement. It threatens the gospel's pulse in a real-time neighborhood.

The Missional Pod
The ground floor of missional mobility is in the cultivation of community. After Christendom is in ashes, our primary witness will be the spaces we create for humans to become more fully human. Sustaining community is multiplied in difficulty compared to creating missional energy and I think that's why it has become the church's Achilles Heel.  I detect that what currently is titled community are often task teams, affinity groups and sanitary programs with a cause. There is a level of gathering that happens in these groups but they often do not operate like covenant households. Mission finds its endurance in the ongoing formation of the expanse of community. Community is the "pod" that carries mission into the future.

The Garden Space
Community is the garden space where dirt gets underneath our fingernails, as we learn how to love well. It is the great exposure of those inner inclinations towards “selfish ambition and vain conceit”. In our commitment to a together-life we exercise muscles that we want to avoid using, that make us more nimble for the long haul of missional living. Community is more than “belonging” it is about “becoming” and meeting the best and worst in ourselves. It is a profound instrument that acts like a scalpel and warm cup of tea at the same time. Neutralization takes places in our missional endeavors when community is an addendum or afterthought. For the sake of God’s mission in the world, we need to engage in the physical and the particular rather than being abstract when it comes to the agronomy of community,

Getting Particular
Here are two basic but uncomfortable rhythms that we disciple in those coming out of the fog of individualism and into the light of community. The intention is always to move past the rhetoric of community and into real reorientation. 

1. Availability 

We purpose to move from our place of security and separation to overlap our lives. We make ourselves available through regular shared meals, babysitting each other’s kids, working on each other’s house projects, shopping together, reading together, enjoying holidays together, cooking together and even moving closer to one another. This takes time, time, time to massage into our DNA. This inhabiting-ethos must become intentional. Naturally when we think of "freedom" we associate it with more space for independance and more personal rights. However for the early New Testament faith communities, freedom was the fresh possibility to attach to one another beyond prescribed socio-political-ethnic identifications.

2. Vulnerability

We purpose to incrementally present ourselves as we are, “limited, afraid, insecure, angry and weak”. From my experience this is the hardest risk to encourage people to take. We are so prone to protection, posing and powering-up. I promise, at some point you will get hurt, offended and disappointed. For the sake of God's mission, we need relational glue that is sticky enough to hold us together when our expectations are not met. In the diagnostics of community, this work of vulnerability will often collides with two hidden impulses: inadequacy and cynicism.  Both inadequacy and cynicism whisper in our mind's voice to "hold back", "keep a distance", "weigh your other options", "be suspicious" and "duck out at the first sign of conflict". We cannot genuinely bind with others without the value of vulnerability between us.

These two practices assemble a bare bones communal frame for sustainable mission in our neighborhoods. Let's not succumb to the narrative of individualism even in the championing of mission.  Lets not sweep the inconvenience and labor of community under the carpet anymore.

Book Review: Creating A Missional Culture by JR Woodward

As a missional practioner, I am always looking for resources that come from others who have been digging deep in the garden of Missional Communities. Lately as I’ve traveled around a bit, I’ve bumped into a lot of “missional talk”; it can become a bit tiring. However, connecting with JR and his book “Creating A Missional Culture” I find missionality saturated in persevering practice. Walking through the book over the last month I’ve felt like I’ve had a conversation with someone who has taken difficult risks to pioneer for the sake of God's in-breaking Kingdom.

The Power of Culture 
My favorite section of the book is on the power of culture. JR is a diagnostician when engaging with the nature of how cultures form and form us. JR helps us see what we have potentially become too accustomed to. He helps us have eyes to see when he says “The dominant culture seeks to squeeze the church into its mold of market-style exchanges, manufacture desire, self sufficiency and addiction.”  I many ways the Evangelical church has built and planted churches leveraging these drives and cultural standards. JR is diagnosing the culture and like an archaeologist begins to uncover how the “host culture” has shaped and socialized us. The glaring narrative of our host culture is fierce individualism. This ethic has seeped into the church and woven its way into our very fabric. JR exposes that this reality has seriously weakened our ability to be an “alternative way of living and of being a human community”.

Re-imagining Leadership 
The feistiest section of the book is when JR transitions to re-imagining leadership that is not individualistic but instead orients around a shared approach to discipleship and culture creating. Honestly this type of leadership makes many of us nervous. There is an illusion of security with a strong hierarchy style, one guy at the top branded leadership. JR is speaking truth when he says that a "Kingdom-formed church must swim upstream when it comes to how we practice leadership." In the chapter “Hearing the Story” he makes an effective attempt at giving us a new lens to read the scriptures when it comes to the narrative of leadership. Within the church we have heroic ideals of sole leaders who rescue the day and lead God’s people into the sunset.  But JR challenges that reading and walks us gradually through leadership in the book of Revelation, in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the Gospels and in Acts and the Epistles. This part of the book is straight up bible survey that lands with saying “the church in Jerusalem was led by a plurality of leaders, James, Peter and John being amongst others…sitting in the round, encircling the table, recognizing God at the center and mutually submitting to each other.” 

The Polycentric Model 
Part three of the book lays out a thorough schematic of what a shared leadership paradigm looks like for the Missional Church. JR calls this a “polycentric leadership model.” He paces us methodically through what he calls the “five culture creators”: apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher. He gives us a good picture of each of the culture creators working together and how each of them is earthed out.  For a couple years now personally, I’ve mulled over and researched whether these five gifts are prescriptive or descriptive. I’m not fully convinced either way yet but JR makes the best case I've read so far for how to interpret Ephesians 4:11-16.  He is gracious and hospitable with his hermeneutic and this drew me in to investigate. Honestly it was this section of the book that stirred me up and challenged me the most and that’s how I like my books to hit me.

For certain, I’m convinced JR Woodward is surgically accurate when he says “structures are not neutral, they are theological statements”.  His passionate case for correcting our over-institutionalized leadership is necessary to free the Missional Church to authentically be on mission and contextual in the west. If we desire to be a church that is a sign of God’s coming kingdom we will “seek to reflect his triune and communal nature in all we do”.  This emphasis on community is more than a fad or just an issue of belonging for JR, it is the plumb-line through the Scriptures. Get this book if you're in the trenches, it's an accessible text book on the missional frontier that is written with urgency, soaked in genuine experience.

Click for my further thoughts on "Mutual Missional Leadership"