God’s Missionary People: Rethinking the Purpose of the Local Church

by Charles Van Engen | Available Here

Charles Van Engen’s God’s Missionary People helped launch today’s missional discussion, and still has much to tell our local church. Before coming to Fuller, Van Engen was a missionary and theological teacher in Mexico. He has taught at other seminaries and served as president of the General Synod of the Reformed Church in America. He continues his work in Mexico through his organization Latin American Christian Ministries. At Fuller, he teaches various classes in the school of Intercultural Studies and provides mentoring from Doctoral students.

The thesis of the book is captured in this introduction:

“Local Congregations the world over will gain new life and vitality only as they understand the missiological purpose for which they alone exist, the unique culture, people and needs of their context, and the missionary action through which they alone will discover their own nature as God’s people in the world” (20).

Summary

Part 1-Local Churches: God’s Missionary People

The book begins with Van Engen’s explanation for the need for the Church to revisit its ecclesiology in the light of missiology. He bases this on the historical self-understanding of the church (drawing from both the Apostle’s Creed and the marks of the Church), as well as developments in globalism and ecumenicism. His argument is that the church should restate its self-understanding in terms of being a missionary people.

Part 2 Local Churches: A New Vision of God’s Missionary People

In seeking to identify the purpose of the church, Van Engen focuses on four tasks: “koinonia,” “kerygma,” “diakonia,” and “martyria.” The result of such a group of people is the Covenant Community of the King.

Part 3 Local Churches: Becoming God’s Missionary People

The final section of the book deals with the practical side of structuring a missional Church. It wrestles with the understanding of laity and leadership. It also deals with the practical aspects of managing an organization.

Reactions

This is a book that I wish I had come across years ago. One idea I found invaluable was placing the missional church in historical perspective. By dealing with the historical self-understanding of the church, as well as the tasks early church, the idea of being missional is taken out of its current trendiness and placed well within scripture and tradition.

Some of the most valuable takeaways for me were the four tasks of the church from Part 2. What would it look like if my church and my life, were judged by these four tasks?

• Koinonia is probably what we do best. We love to eat together and play together. But we still have a ways to go when it comes to simply doing life together.
• Kerygma is something that my church is learning. We could benefit from a deep study of the question “what does it look like to make Jesus “Lord”?
• Diakonia has always been a strength of our community. We have many who are social workers and counselors. But maintaining and growing it to non-professionals will take some concentrated effort to maintain.
• Martyria is another growth area. For some of us, the idea of clearly articulating our faith, and maybe even suffer for doing so, is something that may feel too “churchy.”

As much as I like this book, my only complaint is that it may already be dated. I would love to see Van Engen update this book, and reflect on how the developments in the missional movements have embraced his ideas, and how he might have missed the mark.

The post God’s Missionary People: A Book Review appeared first on Chris Morton.

Part One: The Context and Challenge of Missional Leadership

Part One opens with an overview of the issues at hand and a description of how Missional Leadership compares to pastoral leadership. They argue that God is not finished with the church, it his means of reaching the world. They explain the different phases of transition that a church will go through as it navigates from the models that served it well in the past to a missional model. The authors also describe what makes a missional congregation different, and why leading it is a unique task.

Part Two: The Missional Leader

Part Two focuses on descriptions of what makes a good leader including features like maturity and self-awareness. It also discusses how to create a coalition that will help build momentum in a missional direction. This requires creating a culture where the leadership listens to the church and the church listens to the surrounding community.

Quotes

“Missional leadership is about creating and environment within which the people of God in a particular location may thrive.”

“Today, in discussion about the nature of church leadership, there is little theological wrestling with the questions of how to form or socialize a people into an alternative community. On the contrary, there is growing emphasis on how to help seekers feel they belong in a congregation without any expectations or demands on their lives.”

“A missional church is a community of God’s people who live into the imagination that they are, by their very nature, God’s missionary people living as a demonstration of what God plans to do in and for all of creation in Jesus Christ.”

“We have forgotten that God’s future often emerges in the most inauspicious places. If we let our imagination be informed by this realization, it will be obvious that we need to lead in ways that are different from those of a CEO, an entrepreneur, a super leader with a wonderful plan for the congregation’s life. Instead, we need leaders with the capacity to cultivate an environment that releases the missional imagination of the people of God.”

“We are in a period that makes it impossible to have much clarity about the future and how it is going to be shaped. Therefore those leaders who believe they can address the kind of change we are facing by simply defining a future that people want, and then setting plans to achieve it, are not innovating a missional congregation. They are only finding new ways of preventing a congregation from facing the discontinuous change it confronts.”

Two Takeaways

One great takeaway is the “Three Zone Model of Missional Leadership.” It is a great tool for helping leaders of established churches comprehend the changes that must be made for a church to envision and carry out any new endeavor (not just “missional” ones.) Reading this, I began to see where various churches I have been a part of fit on the spectrum. It also helped me understand the difficulties many church leaders I interact with are having. Most importantly, it gave me a vision of what pitfalls to watch out for as my church matures.

Another valuable takeaway from the book is the interplay between the personality and the strengths of the leader and the nature of the congregation. The book seems clearly written to the average dwindling mainline church, whose leadership has been chosen for their ability to maintain the status quo. This is why the author’s discussion of “imagination” is valuable. It seems there are two ways to move forward: either start over with new leadership and a new endeavor or cultivate imagination. They rightly point the leaders toward remembering what God wants to do in the world, and who their neighbor is.

This to me is the most important lesson from the book: Missional Leadership must be relentlessly focused on the context of their congregation and personally entrenched in lives of those they are hoping to reach.

A church or a leader will never be missional if they haven’t met those to whom they are sent.

The post The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach a Changing World – A Review appeared first on Chris Morton.

Daring Greatly
Brene Brown‘s “data with a soul” may be the most important book you read for awhile. She lays out issues of shame and authenticity in a way that make you feel known. You will be a better human if you read this book.

Prodigal Christianity: 10 Signposts into the Missional Frontier
David Fitch and Geoff Holsclaw

Ecclesia Network friends Fitch and Holsclaw’s pitch for missional neo-Anabaptism. It’s important.

Faiths in Conflict?
Vinoth Ramachandra

One of the best books I read in MAGL. Comparative religions written by a Christian from Sri Lanka.

The Social Animal
David Brooks

David Brooks parable using brain science, behavioral economics and even a pitch for neo-federalism. You might not buy his politics, but he is a model thinker.

Jesus, My Father, The CIA, and Me: A Memoir. . . of Sorts
Ian Chron

Don’t let the ridiculous title fool you. It’s a story about the adventures of life, addiction and where the divine fit in.

Snow Crash
Neak Stephenson

The Matrix meets Raiders of the Lost Ark. Do not read if you are a charismatic Christian with thin skin.

The Power of Habit
Charles Duhigg

How habits work. Read if you want to be a better human. Read especially if any part of your life contains the word “discipleship.”

What We Talk About When We Talk About God
Rob Bell

God is: With us—For us—Ahead of us.
Nothing fans haven’t heard Rob say before, but written for a different audience. The Love Wins fiasco has forced Rob to find a new audience outside the evangelical world. This is a pretty good pitch.

Attached
Amir Levine and Rachel Heller

An introduction to Attachment theory. Great reading if you’re asking “why am I still single.”

Fables
Bill WillIngham

Grimms fairy tales meets Friends. So much fun.

The post 10 Great Reads Encountered in 2013 appeared first on Chris Morton.

“Help me, help me, help me”

and

“Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

The post The Two Best Prayers appeared first on Chris Morton.

The Anabaptist tradition helps a lot with this, perhaps because they were formed as a rejection of 16th century Christendom. Unfortunately, much of the tradition is “separatist”, avoiding engagement with the outside. This is where the growing missional conversation is so important: it gives the church a theology and approach for loving, serving and proclaiming in a culture where they are minorities.

Authors Fitch and Holsclaw call this missional-anabaptist approach “Prodigal”. This is drawn from Karl Barth’s interpretation of Jesus as the ideal “prodigal son”, a “radical missionary… that the Father has sent the Son into the far country to redeem the world”. Their book Prodigal Christianity: 10 Signposts into the Missional Frontier suggests seven practices should shape the life of the church today.

1. The Hospitality of the Table
In instituting the Lord’s Supper, Jesus is creating a practice of humility, egalitarianism and hospitality. The act of serving and eating with people who are different brings the reality of the kingdom into the present, and spills into other opportunities for service throughout the week.

2. Proclamation of the Gospel
“Proclamation is the act of declaring a reality (or truth) that others have yet to see (the kingdom has come!)” They give the example of responding to others by reminding them “Jesus is Lord of your situation,” or asking the question “what do you think God is asking of you?”

3. Reconciliation
They suggest practicing the method of reconciliation provided by Jesus in Matthew 18. “As we practice this reconciliation in our lives together, we are then able to practice it in the neighborhood, bringing Christ’s in-breaking authority to broken relationships and structures where we live.”

4. Being with People on the Fringes
“Jesus says that when you are truly present with ‘the least of these,’ you are also in his presence and this is a sign of what the kingdom looks like (Matthew 25: 31– 46)”. This means creating opportunities to connect with different types of people often across racial or economic lines, where “we relax, take all agendas off the table, listen, and pay attention in order to listen for God and discover where God is working”.

5. Being with the Children
Jesus taught “when we welcome children, when we are present with them in love and hospitality, Jesus becomes present with us… Only by welcoming and becoming like children can we enter the kingdom of God (18:3)… When we refuse to make children into a separate program or ministry… We find ourselves being transformed by the love of children and the things they teach us.”

6. Fivefold Ministry and Gifts
Jesus is not distant but instead is present through his offer of “gifts for equipping the church: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers….these gifts are not only for the internal organization of the church…rather, they are necessary for forming the kingdom in each neighborhood.”

7. Kingdom Prayer
Following the model of the Lord’s prayer, Jesus teaches that Kingdom Prayer is “first and foremost about submitting our lives, circumstances, needs, wants, and struggles into God’s coming kingdom…” Such prayer creates space for Christ’s power and healing, removes ego and interacts with tangible issues in one’s life and community.

What do you think of these seven practices? Do they fit the reality of your situation? What would you add?

The post 7 Practices of a “Prodigal” Church appeared first on Chris Morton.