God has blessed me with many things, but a great sense of direction is not one of them. Recently, I was leaving a friend’s apartment. I have driven in and out of their home hundreds of times. Only moments had passed when I realized I had missed my turn and I was stranded in a labrynthine subdivision where everything looked the same. I eventually got out, but only after driving in circles and sharing a few terse words to the empty seat next to me.
This is an exciting time to be a missionary. It seems that the dissolution of western Christendom, as well as the rise of a string of isms-secularism, pluralism, postmodernism, and the like-has led the church leaders from across all denominational barriers to same conclusion: We cannot assume our neighbors know Christ. We must become missionaries in our own land.
A lot of churches come to this conclusion and claim it is time for a drastic change. They create a new vision statement for he church with the word “missional” somewhere in it. They tell some rousing stories about people in the congregation already living a missional life. They’ll read some quote from great missionary thinkers. They might even put on a conference and bring in writers and speakers to talk about being missional.
Starting strong like this can be good. It is a time to get one’s bearings.
After a little while the hubbub dies down. This, too is okay, because God’s mission is a journey.
But often, as we’re traveling the missional journey, we look and find ourselves in a place far different that the vision we set out with. Perhaps we set out to reach those far from Christ and we end up catering to Christians. Perhaps we set out to see people transformed into disciples, only to our time being spent managing programs and worship services. Perhaps we wanted to be out among people, but we find ourselves alone in coffee shops, with an inexcusably large latte budget.
We look at our results and wonder: how did we get here?
It’s not that we’ve committed an atrocious sin. The problem is likely smaller. At some point we took a wrong turn, a small misstep, and we’ve landed somewhere completely unexpected.
All it takes is one little misstep and we find ourself managing something quite different than the mission God gave us.
Over the coming weeks I’ll be sharing some of the seven missteps that I myself have taken, as well as the churches and missionaries I have seen. With your input, maybe we can discover some ways to stay on course.
1. Loosing Focus on the People
2. Relevance vs. Hipness
3. Obsession with distinctives
4. Exclusive language
5. Overrating Organic-ness.
6. Telling (or not telling) Your Story
7. Ministering to Church People
…and maybe more!
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