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.