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.
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