Missional vs. Traditional Church

At least three blogs before this one have picked up on a provocative new way of viewing church. I'm taking my turn now to share some strong appreciation and agreement, with just a couple of reservations. This appears to originate in Adam's "Thoughts from the Cheap Seats." He contrasts a traditional model of church to a missional model.

They are illustrated thus:

There's a lot to like in this contrast. I wouldn't have diagrammed it quite the same, because of my own experiences with church. For the typical model, instead of resting everything on the weekend worship service, I would have placed "church programs" as the typical foundation. I've been in churches where it seemed the burden everyone shared was to keep all the church's ministries going; and all these programs had the same sacrosanct, inviolable feel as Sunday morning worship had. The original purpose of a program may have been forgotten, its leaders may have lost all vision for the ministry, but heaven help us if we let one of them go! That would be unfaithful to Christ and his church!

This is all too common, and it sacramentalizes activities that were never meant to be. God raises up activities and programs for a purpose, and sometimes he closes them down. We just don't always notice when he does so, so we keep them going anyway, even though the blessing and life of God have been lifted from them. Meanwhile, mission is viewed as something "out there," something for specialists in faraway lands. For the rest of us at home, it's something to give money to, but otherwise it's more or less an afterthought.

What I like most about the second, missional model, is the foundation and the second and third tiers. A church must know what its mission is, and it must view its role missiologically. Again, I've been in churches whose unconscious operating principle seemed to be, "We welcome anyone and everyone as long as you're just like us." God will not bless that. It's self-centered. "For if you love those who love you, what reward have you?"

As missionaries, we must learn what it means to be incarnational, to follow Christ's example, to set aside what is merely cultural, including privilege and comfort, to reach out to those who need Christ. Like missionaries, we must learn to speak the language of the culture we're trying to reach, so that we can translate God's message into language they'll understand.

Church-words are rich and wonderful where they are understood, but in the general culture, if you say "the just shall live by faith," you might just as well say, "Der Gerechte wird infolge von Glauben leben," That says the same thing in German, but many readers of this English-language blog don't know the language and it's just gibberish to them. If our listeners don't know what we mean by "just" and "faith"--or even "live"--then even the English phrase is gibberish. We have to explain it, to translate it into terms they can follow. It's not only terms that need translating, by the way; many Christian concepts are so foreign even to Western culture that they need to be demonstrated, illustrated, patiently explained.

The third tier, mission-oriented and trained leadership, is essential for maintaining focus, direction, and effectiveness. Leadership counts. So does community.

The small-group structure of the next level is extremely effective in many ministries, but not as essential a building block as the lower ones in this model. It depends on the size of the church and on how small groups are implemented. And the weekend worship service is not at all the least important aspect of church. It provides a central place for setting forth the church's character, its beliefs, its direction, its values--all this on top of the intrinsic value of gathering for worship and teaching.

You can check out other opinions on these models at Eternal Revolution or Tall Skinny Kiwi.

Posted: Tue - September 13, 2005 at 04:10 PM |

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Missional vs. Traditional Church

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson