A willingness to move out of your comfort zone is pretty much a prerequisite for being a missional church and living a missional life. We can do our best to restructure traditional, attractional church models, so that to all intents and purposes a church looks missional. But a church actually being missional means that those who call it home are living missional lives. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that a church is only missional to the extent that those who call it home are living missional lives.
Living a missional life comes naturally for some people but, I have to admit, I'm not one of them. Moving out of my spiritual and material comfort zone is difficult, especially insofar as it involves the whole business of "going forth"--business that, admittedly, is foundational to the entire missional enterprise. At an intellectual level, I can embrace it. Easily. I can read Genesis 12 as readily as the next person. I know that God is a calling-out God. I understand the Greek word for church in the New Testament is ekklesia--the "called-out ones." But living it...going forth as one who is called out to meet people I do not know in places I do not know... That's tough. It's not my natural inclination. Even just going across the street in my own neighborhood--a place I do know--to meet someone I've seen any number of times already makes me uncomfortable.
I can explain my reaction, talk about how, by nature, I tend to be an introvert; how I spent much of my childhood choosing to be alone because I was one of those frequently nerdy kids who found it hard to fit in. I can even explain it in terms of roles and power: as a pastor, with the congregation I serve, I can work a room full of people, meeting and talking with strangers and I'm fine. But invite me to a party where I'm just me and don't know anyone there, I trail along at my wife's heels like a puppy dog. Obviously, an ability to explain my reaction doesn't necessarily equate to an ability to change it.
I'm reminded of several realities. I do believe that I cannot lead what I do not live, so I have to work to expand my missional comfort zone whatever it takes. I need to remember that what I'm asking of the congregation I serve, even if I'm simultaneously asking it of myself, is difficult and it's frightening. And I must constantly remind all of us engaged in making this move to missional that much of the battle is mental, changing thought patterns that themselves are rooted in a suburban, consumerist, a person's-home-is-their-castle mentality that mitigates against the formation of true community, against opening up to people who are strangers and, in some ways at least, are very different from you.
Praying that God will make me into the person God needs me to be takes on a whole new meaning when that involves moving me out of my comfortz zone and, therefore, exchanging old, ingrained ways of thinking for new ones. "Be transformed by the renewing of your mind," Paul writes. I know it needs to happen. And I want God to help me. I think.
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