1.  New

Cynics looks at the Missional conversation, and call it the latest trend.  However, there are two features which differentiate it from being “seeker sensitive” or “purpose-driven” or “emergent.”

First, the Missional Church is simply the human expression of the Missio Dei. This is the idea that throughout the trajectory of history, God has been on a mission.  This is most clearly articulated by Jesus when he says “as the Father has sent me, so I send you.” God sent Noah to preach, Moses to form, Israel to model, the prophets to witness, Jesus to save (among other things), and the Apostle to establish.  Now God sends his church.  James and Peter were sent to Jerusalem, Paul to the Gentiles, and Thomas to India.  Patrick was sent to the British Isles, Francis of Assisi to the Muslims, and the Wesley Brothers to England and the Americas.  I do not have time to speak of John Wycliffe, William Carey, Hudson Taylor, Alexander Campbell, William Seymour, Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, Brother Andrew, John Wimber, or Rick Warren. This is just what God has always done. As is often said, it is not that the church has a mission, but that God’s mission has a church.

Second, the Missional Church is also a recognition that missionary principles must be applied in the West, as well other mission fields. As Jesus was God Incarnate in first century Judea, missional communities are the church incarnated in a certain time and place.  The current missional conversation was kicked off when Lesslie Newbigin returned to England from India, to find his homeland was just as much of as “mission field” as the south east.  Modern missionary principles were first articulated by Ramon Lull in the 13th century.  However, they can be easily seen in Paul’s sermon at Mars Hill.  Moreover, the Missional Church sees the incarnation as the ultimate act of “mission work” and Jesus as the ultimate missionary.

2.  For Christian Hipsters

Hipster culture is the incarnation of post-modernism, where irony exists as an end unto itself. Hipsters tend to be found in coffee shops and reading philosophy. They listen to obscure indie music, like DIY projects, and get their news from John Stewart.  Hipsters went mainstream and now skinny jeans can be found anywhere.  Even seminaries.

There are Christian hipsters.  Those who want to ironically mock the Christian music of the 90s they were force fed in youth group.  Evangelicals who discovered they’re okay with alcohol and dancing.  They moved to Portland (or Austin) because they read Donald Miller 10 years ago, and have been reading either Hauerwas or Piper ever since.

Missional thinkers seek to understand their culture.  Hipsters usually understand culture because they enjoy mocking it.  So the resonance is understandable.  But if you relegate the missional conversation to 20-somethings in skinny jeans, you’ve missed the point that God is sending his whole church to the whole world.  For the missional church to succeed, it must speak to the urban poor, for the aging boomers and for the bike-riding, mustache wearing gentrifiers.

3.  Owned by Neo-Reformed or Neo-Anabaptists

Newbigin was an Anglican who retired in a Reformed church. His writings were repopularized by Darrell Guder, who teaches at a not-exactly-evangelical seminary.  Over the last few years the term has been latched on to seemingly everyone, from neo-Reformed groups to charismatics to liturgicals.

However, there is a lot of star power and momentum behind neo-Reformed churches these days. When the neo-Reformed groups like Acts 29 began using the term, it was easy to think that “missional” was just one more their ideas. However, there are others.   Often, they were the ones who felt a need to distance themselves things “emergent,” but were still committed to reaching their culture.  Others find themselves entranced in Anabaptist theology, except for the Amish-style cultural exile.

This wide range of groups who call themselves missional simply reflects a growing acknowledgement of a need to think differently about the role of the church in the West.  Whether it’s Acts 29 and GCM, or Ecclesia Network, Missio Alliance or forward thinking seminaries like Fuller and George Fox, I am happy to see so many embrace the term.

4.  Going to Revive Your Dying Church

Wondering why your church is dying?  Why aren’t the kids showing up any more?  There are a lot of reasons. And yes, the fact that your church is not missional is one of the reasons it’s dying.  But you can’t flip a church and suddenly make your church missional.

Think about the people you know who aren’t a part of your church.  (If you don’t know any, that’s the first problem.)  Does your church have anything to say to them?  Is it equipped to serve them in their brokenness? If your answer is no, the question is why not?  Many churches are content with maintenance.  They are organizations that maintain the music they like, they politics they like, they programs they like.  Many churches are only interested in improving what they already like doing.

Reaching a completely different segment of the population would like require dismantling what your church does now.  If your church suddenly became missional, you’d probably kill it.

5.  A Way to Rebrand Your Favorite Your Pet Ministry

It seems like the term missional is being pasted in front of everything from clothing lines to parenting techniques.  This is a branding strategy.  Nobody showing up for Sunday School?  Let’s try calling it “missional Sunday School.”It’s not that Sunday school can’t be missional.  But, as we said before, it only becomes missional if the Sunday School is (1) is in line with the Missio Dei and (2)  is incarnationally representing God’s mission to a specific people in a specific culture.  Now, that’s a Sunday School I’d get up early for.

6.  A program you can institute

There was a time when the answer for everything in a church was to “create a program for it.”  It’s easy to imagine such a church hiring a “Pastor of Missional-ness” to create a new missional ministry.  The best possible result in such a situation is that a few people in the church would start living on mission.  But that wouldn’t make the church missional.  Becoming missional means changing the entire trajectory of your church to focus on living out the Missio Dei in your time an place.

7.  A new way to say “Evangelism”

Leading people to a point of conversion, or evangelism, is necessary to the work of the missional church.  But so is creating justice.  So is living in as a unique counter community.  So is worship.  Evangelism takes place within the missional church, but it is not the mission of the church.  Churches that use the word “missional” as an attempt to rebrand old techniques, especially old bait and switch evangelism techniques, are avoiding the hard work of exegeting culture and making disciples.

8.  Lacking Discipleship

A good argument has been made that the Missional Church is bound to fail because it is not centered around discipleship.  I’m the first to tell you that Jesus’s big idea was for people to actually try to do what Jesus said. While this statement gets attention, it is a false dichotomy.  Discipleship is the #1 task of the missional church.

Perhaps this gets confusing because missional people also like to talk about ideas such as “exegeting culture” or justice or  community.  Jesus sent his disciples to make more disciples.  More than one disciple in the room together is a missional community.  The effect a missional community has on an a given time and place is justice.  This results is new disciples who are sent to a new time and place.  In other words, being a missional church looks like going to a specific place and making disciples.

9.  Opposed to missions

One truly confounding misconception is that missional church is somehow opposed to traditional mission work.  But if a missionary understands the world we live today, they can’t escape the reality of globalism.  The world is interconnected in an unprecedented way.  The decline of Christendom has mad it clear that the U.S. and Europe now need the same type of mission work that Africa and Asia do.  And yes, that may occasionally mean sending less money to establish overseas works in order to support a new missional effort in the West. Or it might not. But the fact is, the church is growing a lot faster in the global south than it is in the traditional seat of christendom. Churches from the global south now send missionaries to Europe!  The missional church realizes that 21st century missions go “from everywhere, to everywhere.”

10.  The End All

Missional is the best way I know of to understand what God has always been doing, and where we fall into it.  But, yes, the current terminology will probably be overused and fall to the wayside.  Who knows if there will be any “missional churches” in 20 years or even 200.

But there will be a God on a Mission.

Whatever you want to call it, I hope you join Him.

I also hope you’ll join me to talk about this more at the Missio Alliance gathering in April.

The post 10 Misconceptions About Missional appeared first on Chris Morton.

I saw a strange thing on Social Media yesterday.  My feed blew up with comments and tweets railing against the Super Bowl.  It seems that a number of well meaning pastors and Christians were using the internet as their street corner bullhorn for railing against a pigskin worshipping Nineveh.

The truth is, the chorus is right.  Football in America is both false god and false church.  But this reaction is incredibly unhelpful, for three reasons:

It runs counter to the missional message of Incarnation.
Mission theology is rooted in the uniquely Christian message of incarnation.  Our gospel is rooted in story of God becoming man, and living among us.  Jesus’ life and teachings take place in, and uses the metaphors of his culture.  He does object lessons at weddings, teaches about holidays like the Sabbath and uses   recognizable agricultural metaphors.  Incarnation says that God talks to us on our level, about our world.  The Super Bowl should be an opportunity to do this.

It insults the crowds.
“Football is a false god”. “Advertisements perpetuate sexist and damaging stereotypes.” “The false connection of sports-based tribalism is shallow and unhealthy”.  These things may all be true.  But helping people realize this requires a level of maturity and theological nuance that cannot be taught in 140 characters.  So, instead of sharing the gospel, we just insult people for liking what they think is normal. Starting with an insult means ending a conversation.

It trivializes the other sins of our culture.
I understand the doctrine of grace and that all sins are equal in the eyes of God.  But when we decide to attack cultural sins, we need to be strategic.  If you are trying to bring people alongside you in God’s mission, why start with the Super Bowl? Why not take on the orphan issue or the AIDs epidemic or our ongoing 21st century Jim Crow urban life?  Let’s save our megaphones for screaming about the love of God and the atrocities that make life hell for so many.

Churches should be full of people abandoning their false gods and choosing to worship Jesus.  Let’s tell them that.  But let’s use incarnational means, graceful words and meaningful missions to teach about it.

The post What’s with all the Super Bowl Hate? appeared first on Chris Morton.

For a long time, I had only heard of two ways new churches were started. One was when missionaries traveled to far off lands. The other was when a local church found an issue to split over.

Many new endeavors in the church are based in a person’s desire to get their way. People leave churches because they are angry about the worship style or the role of women or desegregation. A minister or a group of people can’t get his way or can’t find a job, so he starts his own thing.

Or sometimes churches or ministries are based solely on a single issue. “We’re going to be the church with guitars” or “we’re going to stand up for the rights of the unborn” or “we’re going to be a church that welcomes everyone.” While there is important discussion to be had on many issues, neither of these are our fight or our instructions.

Our fight?
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Our instructions?

“Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

Could it really be that simple?

The post Missional Missteps: Picking the Wrong Fight appeared first on Chris Morton.

People have been starting new churches for about 2000 years now, but as best as I can guess, our modern idea of what a “church planter” is and does can’t go back much earlier than the 80s.

I’m referring to the “Rick Warren” idea of moving into a new city and starting from scratch.  A guy, usually a 30-something former youth and/or worship pastor takes his wife and their four kids to a new city. He puts out some ads, starts a small group in their home, and within a few years, they’ve got a big group singing christian radio songs in the auditorium of the local elementary school.

This is an over-simplification to be sure, and it gives no credit to the hard work that many have put in to launching such communities.  But it does reveal a major problem with this model, sometimes referred to as “The Parachute Planter.”  The problem is, the individual “drops in,” often has little or no relational connections to the city.  This means they’ve never taken the time to learn what it is the city needs, how to speak to the city, or how to love your neighbors.It would be fair to ask how often such a model reaches people who don’t know Christ, as compared to simply rearranging people from existing churches.

Before I moved to Austin, I had lunch with a man who helped plant the church that I now call home.  When I told him about my desire to be a part of church planting, he responded by saying something along the lines of:

“Sell your Christian Books and CDs. Unsubscribe from your blogs and stop listening to your podcasts.  Move to our neighborhood.  Then we’ll talk about it again in a year.”

This kind of made me angry.  I thought I was ready to hit the ground running.  But after a year (or two) I had detoxed from the christian subculture in which I had been embedded, and began to develop an idea of what “locally grown” church would look like.  What I didn’t realize was that this is what every cross-cultural missionary must do, take a few years to learn the language, customs and lay of the land.  Why would church planting in the U.S. be any different?

Here’s two suggestions for avoiding being a parachute planter:

1.  Rather than looking for a cool city to move to, consider planting in a place you already know: near your hometown, or on the other side of the city you’re already in.

2.  Take the advice give above.  Spend a year doing nothing but getting to know your city.

The post Missional Missteps: The Parachute Planter appeared first on Chris Morton.

God’s messengers have never been known for their success rate. Noah failed to save the lives of his contemporaries from the flood. Moses failed to get Pharaoh to let his people go. The prophets failed to get God’s people to remember they were God’s people. Jesus’s life ended in a vicious, brutal public execution.

So why go share a message that is bound to fail? Why not do some focus groups and market research and figure out what people want to hear, and how to tell them? Why not focus on the target market which is least likely to kill you?

It’s because Jesus message isn’t a new product or philosophy. It’s the promise that people can change.

Jesus never gave the impression that people would like him or his message. In fact, he made it very clear that it requires a tremendous sacrifice that few are willing to commit. He says things like:

“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (Mt. 16:24)

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” (Mt. 7:13-14)

I think sometimes people hear this and get the wrong idea, that Jesus is some exclusivist, who only likes certain people and condemns everyone else. That’s really an oversimplification of what Jesus is saying here. He’s just stating the fact: My message is hard. My good news comes at a price. And most people won’t want to pay that price.

Jesus is giving people the chance to change, but the thing about change is that you can’t force it on them. You’ve probably known someone who made poor decisions. Maybe they had a habit of getting in to bad relationships. Maybe they had an addiction. Or maybe just a bad diet or bad hygiene. You can’t force them to change. All you can do, is clearly and lovingly, let them know that a better way is possible. And there’s a very good chance that they will choose to ignore you and keep doing what their doing.

When Jesus sends people out, he’s not so much concerned about where they go, but how they go. The first thing he wants them to understand is that they will often fail. Their goal isn’t success. Their goal is to speak the truth in love. And wherever we go, whatever we choose to do, it’s crucial that we go with this understanding that it is okay to fail, and it is more important to love.

photo credit: Alex E. Proimos via photo pin cc

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