Missional Cynicism

My wife Terry and I attended the Sentralized missional church conference in Kansas City the end of September.  It was a challenging, exhilarating experience.  But in one profoundly significant way, it was also disturbing.

Part of the attraction of the conference for me was the heavy-hitter keynoters, among them Alan Hirsch, Hugh Halter, Neil Cole...and Michael Frost.  I single out Michael Frost because, frankly, he was the big draw for me--the big draw because, unlike the others, I'd never heard him speak in person before and because presentations I've seen him make via YouTube have been, well, stunning.  And, like so many of us who've embraced missional/incarnational church, I've been heavily influenced by Michael's writing.

He didn't disappoint.  His presentations were as edge-of-your-seat as I expected.  Michael Frost has to be one of the most gifted communicators I've ever encountered not just of missional ecclesiology but the Gospel.  What I didn't expect--and what I ultimately found so disturbing--is, by his own admission, how cynical he's become.

At one point, after saying, well, yes, it's good if you're doing mission, and it's good if you've got church members volunteering in the community, he jabbed his finger toward the audience and shouted, "Don't tell me your church is missional if you can't tell me the people in your community you've been called to serve!"

You know, I get it.  I appreciate the concern of many who have been on the frontlines of the missional church movement, blazing the proverbial trail for the rest of us, being concerned that missional will be co-opted--domesticated, if you will--by well-meaning churches and denominations who don't fully understand what being missional means.  But cynicism doesn't help.  Many of us, especially those of us working to figure out how to move mainline attractional congregations to a missional/incarnational paradigm...those of us who aren't planting new churches where we can create a missional culture from the get-go...we have to move a step at a time.  And the steps typically are small and not without pain.  It's true: in the congregation I serve, we aren't at the point we could tell Michael Frost or anyone else the specific people within our community we've been called to serve.  If that means we aren't missional yet, so be it.  But we're a lot more missional than we used to be.

So--no, cynicism isn't helpful.  But what disturbs me most is not the cynicism but what I'm fearful the cynicism may be pointing to: that missional will become idolatrous, that in some twisted way, missional will itself become attractional.  The hit on attractional has always been that it keeps God's mission in service to the church rather than the other way around.  I don't want us to take God's mission and put it in service to missional.  It's useful, of course, to identify characteristics and practices of missional church.  But when we start to suggest that unless you're doing X--whatever X is--you're not missional, we set up achieving a missional identity rather than participating in God's redemptive work in the world as our primary task.  And that smacks of idolatry.

Isn't it possible that the God Who has called us back to a missional/incarnational way of being church might also call us to different ways of being missional and incarnational, such that to suggest a given congregation must be X or it cannot be missional is not that different from those human-imposed strictures that define many attractional churches, the very strictures we're trying to leave behind?