Thoughts?

There’s been a lot of discussion these days regarding churches being “missional.” That’s one of those terms that began to appear a few years ago that sounds really good, but that no one seems to understand. It’s similar to the use of “emergent church.” Sounds good, but no one really gets it.

I wanted to submit this post as a primer on the subject. A very basic one.

Before I do, though, I wanted to address something that you may have been wondering about. I’ve been writing a little, and you’ll continue to see a lot more writing concerning topics that deal with missional church. In case you’re wondering why, check out the “about” section of this blog for more info. But in short, it’s because of a program I started a few months back where I’m studying a lot of missional leadership stuff. I just mention that so you know where all this stuff is coming from.  Ok….moving on.

So I was reading an article recently from Alan Roxburgh called “The Missional Church” (you can download it by clicking on the link) in which he seeks to give some basic definitions about what the missional church movement is about. I’ll share just a few of the most basic points.

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It’s a question I’ve been thinking about for the last few months.

At the moment I just have one church. And without any traffic, it takes me a good 40 minutes to get to the church. With any traffic at all, it easily takes me an hour or more. I feel like it’s been severely limiting to my ministry. If someone wants to meet with me, I find myself thinking about what time they want to meet. Is it close to rush hour? Can they meet at a different time to avoid traffic? Of course if there’s an emergency I come no matter the time.

But I can’t lead a small group from my house. It’s too far for people to come.

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I was in a meeting today with a group of pastors and Ken Burrill (he’s like the pastor’s coach/supervisor) gave a great presentation on the “10 Characteristics of a Missional Leader” based upon the life of Jesus.

I’d like to share them with you here.

Jesus….

1. Invested in people (didn’t get the citation)

2. Saw long and far (John 17)

3. Sent people away from Him on mission (Luke 10:1)

4. Grieved for communities (Luke 19:41)

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I just read one of the best definitions of a missional church. I think. And guess what? It’s not from a pastor or theologian, and it doesn’t even have any Scripture quotations. Cue the scream: *scream*

Here it is. It’s from Jeff Bezos, founder and chairman of Amazon.com, and it’s in reference to their strategy for creating products and reaching customers:

“There are two ways that companies can extend what they’re doing. One is they can take an inventory of their skills and competencies, and then they can say, “OK, with this set of skills and competencies, what else can we do?” And that’s a very useful technique that all companies should use. But there’s a second method, which takes a longer-term orientation. It is to say, rather than ask what are we good at and what else can we do with that skill, you ask, who are our customers? What do they need? And then you say we’re going to give that to them regardless of whether we currently have the skills to do so, and we will learn those skills no matter how long it takes. Kindle is a great example of that. It’s been on the market for two years, but we worked on it for three years in earnest before that. We talked about it for a year before that. We had to go hire people to build a hardware–engineering team to build the device. We had to acquire new skills. There’s a tendency, I think, for executives to think that the right course of action is to stick to the knitting—stick with what you’re good at. That may be a generally good rule, but the problem is the world changes out from under you if you’re not constantly adding to your skill set.” (Click here to read the whole article).

This concept kind of turns some of the dialogue on spiritual gifts on its head. For example, much of the seminars on spiritual gifts focus on exactly what Bezos was talking about: what are my talents, gifts, personality, etc. But I think his concept is more Scriptural. It simply asks, “what does our community need, how can we reach them,” and then the church would go about learning those skills or doing what is necessary to reach the people. I think this is something the Holy Spirit can really work through: the Spirit blessing you with gifts as you seek to reach those far from Christ.

What do you think of this concept as related to spiritual gifts and reaching people?

[image by Jim Darling] *picture of a guy reading on an Amazon Kindle with a cover.