Missional by Any Other Name

It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his classic The Cost of Discipleship, who wrote, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die" because it was Jesus himself who said, "Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."

I think the case can be made that the vast majority of the reasons why the church is in the mess that it's in is because--as with so much else Jesus said--we, the supposed followers of Jesus Christ, have not taken him at his word.  We have been unwilling to give up our lives, to die to this world, in order to live for him and his Kingdom.  Which, among other things, may explain why the Sermon on the Mount may be among the most admired yet least practiced words ever uttered.  Rather than making following Jesus the focus of our lives, we allow it to be a part of our lives (sometimes a large part of our lives, granted, but, nonetheless, only a part).  Something we do as opposed to something we are.

I'm becoming ever-more mindful of this as I continue to discover just how hard it is to help lead a traditional/attractional congregation to embrace what it means to be missional/incarnational.  Much of the difficulty is simply a consequence of how entrenched traditional/attractional thinking is among people who have been doing church one way for 50, 60, 70, 80 years.  Part of it, too, is just the all-too-natural, all-too-understandable fear people have of change.

But I wonder if much of the difficulty of getting people to embrace missional isn't rooted in how we approach discipleship in general.  It's standard-issue missional church rhetoric to say that becoming missional/incarnational is not a new strategy for church-growth, not a new program or ministry, not an updated, tricked-out repackaging of the Social Gospel.  It is a way of life.  As such, asking someone to embrace the idea of becoming a missional church is asking them to change the way they live--not just do church missionally, but live missionally.  It is to say to them what Jesus says to all who wish to follow him: let go of an old way of life to live a new one.  To call people to missional, in other words, is, in effect, to bid them come and die.  And if we find that difficult to do in the context of following Jesus, how much more in the context of church.

From the standpoint of leadership, the consequences of this are as frightening as they are simple.  You cannot talk or teach or cajole or threaten or coerce people to missional.  You can only live them to missional. Which is to say, you can only lead them by the example of your own life.  Which means the death--the dying to this world--starts with me.

Wrong Church? No--Wrong Gospel

Much thinking and reading of late (much of what follows I owe to the work, among others, of Dallas Willard and Leonard Hjalmarson) and I'm increasingly convinced: as much as we have a church problem, we have a Gospel problem.

The church piece we know well: traditional, attractional church don't work no more.  Nor do denominational structures that reflect such a paradigm.  What we haven't acknowledged nearly as much--and this surprises me now that I'm aware of it--is the extent to which our ecclesiastical challenges are rooted in a common understanding (more to the point, misunderstanding) of the Gospel.

Typically, the church has embraced one of two versions of the Gospel.  By no means are they mutually exclusive, but one does tend to be privileged over the other.

The first is a Gospel of Atonement: in accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, your sins are forgiven, you receive the gift of eternal life, and your salvation is assured.  This understanding of the Gospel is primarily about the individual--an individual's relationship with Jesus Christ and an individual's salvation.  Discipleship is less of an issue because the primary focus is on the profession of faith in Christ and forgiveness of sins (“I’m right with Jesus…why do I need discipleship?”).  To the extent it is pursued, discipleship is seen as a primarily individual behavior done for the benefit of the individual.  Not surprisingly, in this understanding of the Gospel, the purpose of evangelism is to win souls and make new Christians.

The second is a Gospel of the Kingdom: people can live now in the Kingdom of God, a vision of what life can and should be in all its dimensions and a way of life that can help bring it into reality.  This understanding of the Gospel is primarily about others because, as Leonard Hjalmarson points out, the Kingdom of God is inherently relational (Kingdom implies relationship with the King, with fellow citizens, with the community in which you live, with standards of justice and mercy), missional (it propels us into mission in response to God’s call to be part of the Missio Dei and in the name of expanding the Kingdom) and monastic (it calls us to shared spiritual practices in community, such as worship, prayer, and reconciliation).  Here, the purpose of evangelism is to make disciples--in line, obviously, with the Great Commission and the fact that, in the Gospels, Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God more than anything else.

It should not be news that the version of the Gospel a church embraces will be reflected in the structure, ministry, and assumptions of the church itself.  The Gospel of Atonement will tend to result in a church focused on the needs of the individuals in the pews: ministries will be about self-development, worship will be focused on individual experience, the locus of church life will primarily be the church building, and mission and outreach will be a personal prerogative.  In other words, a Gospel of Atonement will pretty much result in a traditional, attractional church.

A Gospel of the Kingdom of God, on the other hand, focused on others, will tend to result in a church focused on the community and growth of the Kingdom: ministries and worship will reflect an over-arching concern for the Missio Dei, the locus of church life will be outside the church building, and mission and outreach will be the organizing principle of all the church does.  A Gospel of the Kingdom of God, therefore, will pretty much result in a missional/incarnational church.

Clearly, I'm generalizing. Exceptions can be found.  But there is, I believe, a fundamental truth at work here, and it has great significance for the missional/incarnational paradigm.  Any church wishing to be a missional/incarnational church would be well-served by first making sure everyone involved understands and embraces a Kingdom of God Gospel.  I'd even go so far as to say it's a necessary first step, and that's coming from a pastor helping to lead a church down the road to missional that didn't get the Gospel straight first.  In retrospect, I'm realizing how different (dare I say easier?) the journey thus far would've been had we taught the congregation a Gospel of the Kingdom of God to begin with.  In that case, all this change wouldn't be in service to something new and untried (what the heck is missional anyway?) but in service to what Jesus pretty clearly preached is God's intent for God's people and God's church.

If you die tonight, where will you go? It's the favorite evangelical question.  It's also the wrong one.  The right question is, If you don't die tonight, what are you going to do tomorrow?  And the right answer is, “Trust Jesus with all of my life because the Kingdom is now.”

   

I Volunteer--I'm Missional!

I had a church member come to me not long ago and say, "Enough of the missional stuff already.  I get it.  It's time to move on. Tell me something new."  You've got it?, I asked.  "Yeh," she replied.  "A lot of people in this church spend a lot of hours volunteering.  We understand about being missional."

A number of responses came to mind at that moment.  But the look on her face, the tone of her voice...my pastoral spidey senses told me to smile, say thank you for letting me know how you feel--and no more.  So that's what I did.  But as much as I might disagree with her, I understood where her comment came from, and it had less to do with her understanding of missional than with what I surmise to be her understanding of the Gospel.

A consequence of Christendom's domestication of the Gospel is making it first and foremost about personal salvation.  It is about that, of course.  The Gospel is the promise of the restoration of right relationship between Creator and created and the promise, to those who profess the Lordship of Christ, of eternal life.

But that's not all it is--not, I'd argue, even the half of it.

The Gospel is also about the Kingdom of God, about God's will being done on earth, among the living, before the immortal disposition of ones' mortal remains even becomes an issue.  It's about Jesus' radical vision of life as God intends life to be right here, right now, for all God's children.  As much as the Gospel is about atonement, in other words, it is about the existential realities of life lived day-in and day-out in a broken world.

But when the Gospel is understood primarily in terms of individual salvation, then the missional impulse inherent in the Kingdom of God becomes expressed as add-on behaviors, adjuncts to what the Gospel is really about, which is saving souls.  Behaviors like volunteering--an important, eminently worthwhile thing to do--because they are an expression of outreach, become evidence that one is "missional."  But that's rather like dancing a polka and claiming you're German.  Missional is not something you do.  It's something you are. It isn't a set of behaviors or way of talking that you embrace.  It is an epistemology, if you will--a way of understanding what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ and fundamentally reordering and restructuring every area of your life accordingly.  It is inherently relational, inherently other-centered, inherently sacrificial, because when Jesus explained what it meant to follow him, he made it clear: we are to die to this world to live for him and the Kingdom, which is to say for others...to pick up our cross and follow.

To the extent the Gospel is about us as individuals, it is in service to something much bigger than any one person: it is in service to the Kingdom.

The because-I-volunteer-in-the-community-I'm-missional church member is part of the ongoing challenge of helping lead a church from traditional to missional/incarnational: striking a balance between the need to keep a missional/incarnational paradigm in front of the congregation on a regular basis with the need to avoid annoying those in the congregation who think they "get it" to the point that they tune-out altogether.

But that's a topic for an upcoming post.

Discipleship Isn't a Program

In the ongoing missional church conversation, much is said about the necessity of discipleship.  In fact, one of the leading voices in the conversation--Mike Breen--goes so far as to say that in the absence of having a system in place that produces and reproduces disciples, the missional movement, like so many church movements before it, will fail.

Maybe.

Predictions of failure aside, though, there is no doubt that creating disciples is a (perhaps the) critical issue.  It's an easy enough conclusion to draw from Jesus himself--go forth and make disciples, he said, and I will build the church.  Discipleship is job one.

This isn't a challenge peculiar to missional/incarnational churches, however.  It's a challenge faced by all churches of all times in all places.  And it's a challenge rooted, first, in Christendom's substitution of church for Kingdom and, second, in the fact that we've thoroughly domesticated the Gospel in order to control it.  Domesticated it in the sense that the church has taken what is, in truth, a call to a very radical, counter-cultural way of living and emasculated it (forgive the sexist overtones) into a sappy, syrupy behavioral to-do list of suggested behaviors (often masquerading as "spiritual disciplines") from which we pick and choose those we can integrate into our daily lives with minimal discomfort and upset.

No wonder, then, that our understanding of disciples and discipleship is...well, let's just say it's something that any close reading of the Gospels and Acts makes clear is a good deal less than Jesus intended.  Which goes a long way towards explaining why the church, on so many fronts, is in the mess it's in today (WorldVision's Richard Stearns nails this).

So: the challenge for all churches, missional or otherwise, is to discern and teach biblical, Jesus-driven discipleship. Given the plethora of off-the-shelf, out-of-the-box discipleship programs available, it shouldn't be so.  Except that that's precisely the problem: we approach discipleship as a program.  Discipleship isn't a program.  It's a way of life.  It isn't a series of books or classes, a 12-step program or a seminar.  It isn't a set of behaviors that can be integrated into our already-living daily lives.  Our worldview cannot shape our discipleship.  Our discipleship must shape our worldview.

This is not to say behaviors aren't important.  Paul makes that clear enough.  Nor is it to say that any efforts invested in learning more about discipleship are wasted.  It's simply to say that we can't get there from here.  Centuries of domesticated Gospel and discipleship-as-program have gotten us where?  Discipleship is what Jesus has always told us it is: we die to ourselves (and to the world, with all that means) to live for Him.  Reading Scripture and studying and practicing spiritual disciplines can be aids to the journey but they cannot be the journey itself.

The day we quit talking about programming and polity and ministries and mission--quit, in fact, talking about church because, after all, Jesus himself promised us that he'd take care of that--and, day-in-, day-out begin living for Christ and the Kingdom, is the day we truly begin to become disciples.  That, in itself, won't immediately solve the challenge of producing disciples who produce disciples, but it is, I believe, the absolutely necessary pre-condition for such producing and reproducing to begin.    

If You Want People to Follow You, They Have to Know You Care

More than one book has been penned (well, key-stroked) about Leadership Principles According to Jesus.  I've never been entirely comfortable with the everything-you-need-to-know-you-can-find-in-Scripture school of Christianity.  Most of what you need to know, certainly.  All the really important stuff you need to know, absolutely.  But everything?  Biblical truth transcends time and place, but I'm not sure even Jesus would claim that the Gospel narratives of his earthly ministry provide a leadership textbook for the 21st century.

But...even if Jesus doesn't tell us everything, that doesn't mean we shouldn't practice everything Jesus tells us.  I'm thinking of one Leadership Principle in particular: If you want people to follow you, they have to know you care about them.

Jesus calls his disciples, they drop literally everything to follow him.  Sure this is Jesus we're talking about.  Being the Messiah does give your call street cred that your average run-of-the-mill ministry opportunity doesn't have.  And Jesus undoubtedly had a charisma (fully human yet fully divine) that pretty much immediately banished any second thoughts his disciples had about answering the call.  But, for all that, Jesus was relentless in communicating through words and actions not only that he cared for those who followed him, not only did he love them, but he was willing to die for them--even when they had no idea what he was talking about when he spoke of what awaited him on that hill outside Jerusalem.

"A new commandment I give you...love one another as I have loved you."  That would've made no sense apart from Jesus' manifold efforts at compassion and caring for his followers...caring that went way beyond saying, "I care about you" or "I love you," though Jesus undoubtedly said that often enough.  Jesus cared enough about his followers to invest time in them, to teach them (over and over in the face of their thick-headedness), to warn them, to heal them, to tell them the truth that following him would mean rejection and suffering and daily shouldering their own cross.  And for all who said, "this is too hard," and turned back, we know of the relative handful who stayed and followed and, ultimately, understood...a handful that grew into a few hundred, a few thousand, a few million, tens of millions, hundreds of millions.  And that relative handful: they followed because Jesus was the Messiah, was charismatic, because he was the Way to life.  But they followed, too--in fact, until they did figure him out, probably followed mostly because--Jesus cared about them in profound and extraordinary ways, and they knew it.

I don't know anybody (OK, hardly anybody) who answers the call to ministry for the paycheck.  Most churches don't have the resources to pay people enough to do the work.  It's too hard, too costly.  People do the work because they are called and they can't not do it.  And they follow a leader because they buy into the vision and believe in the mission but, most of all, I think, because they know the leader cares about them.  In my experience, at least, people will not follow someone they think doesn't care about them no matter how compelling the vision or urgent the mission.  They don't expect the leader to die for them, but they do expect the leader, through words and actions to say to them in healthy, appropriate ways, I care about you.

Jesus and the "C" Word

There is that dreaded "c" word: change.  And the reality that change--these days, exponential change--is the norm.  And the reality that the church is not immune. And the reality that as the church (especially traditional mainline congregations) now comes to grips with what that change must be, comes to grips that the choice not to change is in fact no choice at all, church leaders necessarily become change agents.

If change ain't always pretty, being a change agent can be downright butt-ugly.

Change is hard.  Leading change harder still.  I've been doing a lot of reading in Luke lately, though, and--duh--have been smacked in the face again and again that the ultimate change agent was Jesus Christ.  In the sense that we can divide human history into pre- and post-Jesus, yes.  In terms of redemption and salvation, of being restored to right relationship with the Creator, absolutely.  In preaching Kingdom ethics that turn the ways of the world on their collective head, of course.

But Jesus was the ultimate change agent in another way as well--a way that speaks directly to the challenge of leading change in the mainline church.  Jesus' sabbath-was-made-for-man-man-wasn't-made-for-the-sabbath message in all its manifestations pitted him squarely against an understanding of being church as entrenched, codified, and stratified as any mainline denomination today, posing a threat so severe the only response Church People of the day could muster was kill him.

And in the face of that, Jesus' response was instructive:

• remain faithful to the call God had placed on his life
• speak the truth in love
• have compassion for those who didn't get it
• focus the majority of his personal attention on discipling those who did

In all the resistance to change I've ever encountered, I'm aware of no plots to kill me--yet.  But Jesus' response strikes me as the template for helping to lead change.  Anywhere, but especially in the church.  Faithfulness.  Truth.  Compassion.  Focus.

What does your experience leading change tell you about Jesus' experience leading change?

Rethinking the Dog and Pony Show

The connective tissue is ripping.

Many mainline denomination congregations think "connectional," as in "connectional church," as in we are not stand-alone congregations but, collectively, part of a bigger body.  And in said bigger body--the so-called "middle judicatories" which, for Presbyterians, are synods and presbyteries--we are called to do much of our work.  What happens, then, when such connective tissue, pulled apart, no longer holds?

It's a question being asked across denominations.  In the case of the presbytery to which I and the church I pastor belong, the tissue is ripping rapidly.  The three largest congregations in the presbytery are all withholding financial support of the presbytery itself while they discern whether or not to remain in the denomination.  These three, between them, account for 40% of the presbytery budget.  The presbytery can't withstand a 40% cut in revenue and remain the kind of presbytery it's been.  The presbytery exec (seeing the handwriting on the wall?) has resigned.  Remaining churches are scrambling.

Middle judicatories have important work to do.  Indeed, in the Presbyterian Church (USA), much of the real power in the denomination resides in presbyteries.  So ripping here is painful.

But it also can be rejuvenating.  If, as I believe, Christian churches are being called to a new Reformation, leaving Christendom behind for a renewed embrace of the Missio Dei, of Christ and his kingdom, then the recasting of traditional, attractional church in missional/incarnational forms necessarily must extend to things like synods and presbyteries.  In other words, we have an incredible opportunity to re-think the role of middle judicatories, returning them to what they were always intended be--agents for facilitating ministry, mission, and outreach.

With that in mind, what follows are some suggestions for changing presbyteries.  I'm thinking in terms of the Presbyterian church because that's where I hang my hat.  Change the nomenclature, though, and I suspect the suggestions can work elsewhere...or at least spark some conversation.

•  Refocus presbyteries on building the Kingdom, not maintaining the presbytery.  Put another way, our first allegiance is to Jesus Christ, not an administrative structure. Many presbyteries are top-heavy with committees and policies which exist primarily to maintain the presbytery.  So...
• Limit presbytery committees to only those doing work only the presbytery can do.  In the PCUSA, that would mean the Committee on Ministry, Committee on Preparation for Ministry, and Mission (understood as connecting congregations to do mission together that congregations cannot do alone).  This would then allow us to... 
• Limit presbytery meetings in quantity and duration.  The presbytery of which I'm a member meets four times a year.  That's nuts.  Twice a year is enough, three times at most.  And keep the meetings to three hours.  Multinational corporations are run via meetings shorter than that--why not presbyteries?  Partly this is good stewardship of time and resources.  Forbid the dog-and-pony shows of every committee and ministry in the presbytery getting up and reading what's in their written reports.  And partly it's common sense: meet twice a year for three hours of solid accomplishments, attendance (and participation) at meetings will go up.  Guaranteed.
• Presbyteries should be agents of change as much as agents of preservation.  Presbyteries have the responsibility to take care of business and much of that business involves preserving and maintaining approaches to church rooted in tradition.  But as church membership statistics constantly remind us, we must change.  Change is scary and we frequently don't know how to do it.  There is no entity better situated to bring frightened congregations together to discern and facilitate change than presbyteries. 

What suggestions would you make from your own experience with middle judicatories?