Missional Church

For the last 3 years, I have participated in conversation regarding the "Missional" church idea. At it's core, missional church is about engaging the world around the church for the intentional purpose of service. Missional church says that the church can no longer hide behind its walls or bury its head in the proverbial sand.

While I agree wholeheartedly that the church should be about engaging the world, I have long felt like some part of this idea didn't sit well with me. When you are part of a frenzy of new ideas and building momentum, it is hard to stop and name the misgiving. But, after 5 months of being introduced to and encouraged to practice contemplative prayer, those concerns have finally crystallized into words.

We are missing the heart.

Missional church, as I've seen it presented and defended, is all about action. It is motivated by our guilt at having ignored this call of Jesus for so long.

The heart of missional church should be that we have sat and listened to the heart of God and therefore been moved by God's love for the hurting and marginalized of our world. In other words, we have to formed to be like God in order to be motivated to bring God into the hurting people around us.

Too much of the missional conversation is all or nothing. "Your church is only missional if all you do minister to the poor." That sounds like Good Will to me, not the church. "Your church will die in 20 years of less if you don't go missional." Where in scripture do we encounter the idea tha that we are to live and react out of fear? Pendulum swing theology never fully captures the life of Christ being lived out in human beings. Instead, it reveals our deepest fear of fully surrendering the mysterious sovereignty of the One we claim to worship.

The truly missional church has spent time being formed into the image of Christ by being near the heart of God so that they are compelled by love and mercy to reach out to hurting people.

Have faith! God has sustained the church, in spite of it's many failings, for these many years in order to continue the mission of Redemption. I don't anticipate that nature changing any time soon.