Between Churches: Excursus on Mission

I've been writing intermittently about my ongoing experiment in finding and re-settling at a new church. (Read my earlier posts--in reverse order, I'm afraid--here.) Today I want to interrupt myself with a question that came to mind the other night: Should I be looking for a church, or do I need to find a mission?

The question came up while I sat in on a gathering in the northwestern suburbs of Chicago--close enough to home that I could crash the party, but far enough away that I didn't need to worry about getting committed. It was intended as an initial discussion about how people in this particular community could be more missional--more actively and thoughtfully engaged in showcasing the Christian faith where they lived. But it quickly became a recruiting opportunity for Forge America.

Forge is an international missionary-training organization formed in Australia by Alan Hirsch. I became a bit of a Hirsch groupie earlier this year--a little late to the party, I freely admit, since his books have been circulating for nigh on a decade now--and as it happens, Forge America is being established in the Chicago area. I met the people who are launching it here, and they're very cool--just months into this new initiative, they're bubbling with enthusiasm and creative energy. I like to be around people like that; it makes me feel more enthusiastic and creative myself.

One of the main elements of the Forge methodology is a year-long residency, in which people develop the theological grounding for their perceived mission and get skill-training in doing the work of a missionary--cultural anthropology, sociology, theology, what have you. I should hasten to add that this isn't primarily a means to the ends of the earth; Forge emphasizes the notion that being on mission is what it means to be the church, so wherever you find yourself is, to borrow a phrase from Jesus, ripe for the harvest. Some people who are trained by Forge go on to travel internationally, but the vast majority start or continue work where (or near where) they live. A year of anything costs money, of course, so my eye went quickly to the bottom line: $2500.

Gulp.

Just above the bottom line, however, was another requirement: participants in the residency program have to be (and continue to be) actively engaged in an ongoing mission. That is, of course, open to interpretation, but I found myself deferring the money question and fretting instead over the mission question. What, I wondered, would I write on that line of the application form? What is it that I'm actively giving myself to? In the midst of window-shopping all these churches in and around my community, what am I producing, creating, engaging? What in the world am I doing?

Big gulp.

In the grand scheme of things, $2500 is not a ton of money; a college or graduate student would easily spend that in a semester (maybe a quarter, maybe a week) and not blink. But a mission you can point to and say with confidence "This is what God has me doing right now" . . . For a melancholic cynic like me, saying anything so emphatically is hard; for a suburban sloth like me, locking in to such audacious activism is even harder.

I know for a fact that I'm not alone in carrying a certain amount of ennui about how to relate to church. I've heard from enough people over the past several posts, over the past several months--over the course of my adulthood, really--to know that contemporary people struggle to identify with churches as institutions. But maybe we're asking the wrong questions; maybe we're setting off on the wrong quest. Maybe instead of searching for a church to consume, we should be discerning the mission God has for us, and letting whatever then passes for church coalesce around it.

OK, enough of that. I'll get back to deconstructing churches as institutions soon, I promise.

The Ministry of the Missional Church

I serve on the elder board and the “vision team” of my church. I also serve on the “banner committee,” because the village our church is in (Lombard, Illinois) has a thing about how, where and when churches hang banners on their property. But that has nothing to do with anything.

As is often the case during staff transitions and annual budgeting, my church is in the midst of a discernment process. I took this as an opportunity to get better acquainted with the trend du jour among church planters and planners—the missional church movement—so I read the cheapest book I could find on the subject, which happened to be a copy of The Ministry of the Missional Church by Craig Van Gelder, a professor of congregational mission at Luther Seminary.

Left by one of my coworkers on the free table, it’s a densely written and highly complex book about, essentially, “what the church is—that is, a community created by the spirit and . . . has a unique nature, or essence, which gives it a unique identity.” (p. 17) Van Gelder seeks to establish the primary mission of each church, which is, in brief, “to understand the leading of the Spirit in shaping the church’s ministry.” (p. 19)

Each church’s responsibility is twofold: the church embodies the Spirit in pursuit of (a) the integrity of the body of Christ and (b) the mission of God. So we have this dual responsibility that is both harmonic—we resemble Christ in how we relate to one another—and melodic—we follow God into our locality and beyond to reconcile the world to God and itself. This is not an easy task but it is also not an uphill climb: the mission of God has been accomplished in the ministry of Christ and is now proclaimed and projected forward. Likewise we are empowered by the Spirit in our pursuit of a communal life that rightly bears the name “body of Christ.”

Nevertheless, the challenge of “maintaining our harmony” and “keeping sight of our melody” is very real, in part because contexts are always changing. “Contexts go through fundamental change, which require congregations to consider how they might respond. . . . On the surface such congregations [might] appear to be in inevitable decline and a slow death. In reality, new opportunities for mission and ministry await their engagement.” (pp. 48-49)

So the responsible church keeps an eye out for the inevitable changes in its context.

• How has the economic status of its community changed over time?
• How has the demographic mix changed over time?
• How does the average person in the church’s context define “the good life”?
• How does the average person define moral and ethical responsibility?
• What expectations does the average person bring to relational life? God?
• What forecasts can be reasonably anticipated regarding the church’s context?
• How do these changes manifest themselves in outreach and life together?

Beyond these observations, however, the church has the theological responsibility to view its context through the eyes of Christ, “to discern the work of God that is taking place.” (p. 59) Van Gelder filters this down to two questions:

• What is God doing? This is a question of faith and discernment.
• What does God want to do? This is a question of wisdom and planning.

So the vision of any church is a responsive exploration of those two questions: What is God doing in my town? What is God doing among the people of my church? Moreover, what does God want to do in these little communities? “Every congregation,” Van Gelder concludes, “needs to learn how to confess the faith within its particular context.” (p. 66)

The Ministry of the Missional Church isn’t the book to systematically retrofit your church for its next season of meaningful ministry. The average layperson—say, for example, me—would be regularly confused by the mix of scholarship, theology and jargon, and the chapters don’t yield immediate, specific action plans. No, this is a foundational book, and as such it’s worth a slow read among the culture leaders of your church, to figure out what questions to ask of their church, their community and themselves in order to lead their culture well.