Missional Church

We use the term 'missional church' around The Bridge all the time. We are about to use it a lot over Labor Day retreat and in the Sept. 13 sermon on "Where does The Bridge go from here?" We have defined it before, but I found this definition on Jonathan McIntosh's blog and it does a better job than I could, so here you go:

A pastor told me the other day, “I realize that we are not a missional church.” What did he mean?

Simply that, at some point, the church let something get in the way of actually bringing the transformative message of the gospel into contact with people.

Mission drift happens when a church lets something else take over: a building project, an unstated theology of “people should come to us,” or sometimes simple laziness. Often an unspoken attitude hangs like a cloud over the entire church; an attitude that those who don’t look like us, dress like us, vote like us, have the same skin color, or come from the same socioeconomic background are not really welcome here.

And the church stops. Reaching. People.

People.

Real, living, sweating, broken, sinful people.

People need hope. They need God. They need the light of the gospel. Please, for all our discussions and books and conferences and postulating and sermon prepping, let us not forget this.

And we won’t forget if we understand something simple yet surprising: God was a person (and still is!). The incarnation – God as a person – helps us understand and relate to people.
The cross provides the framework for our theology (what we believe about and how we relate to God). But it’s the incarnation, that provides the framework for our missiology (what we believe about and how we relate to culture).

The cross is our message.
The incarnation shapes & informs how we communicate that message.

And what do we see in God as a person?

We see Jesus.

And we see him loving people. Spending time with people. Sharing his life with people. We see an outcast ministering to outcasts. We see grace offered to a prostitute. An adulterer. A tax-collector.

And he looks out at them and he is absolutely moved with compassion because he sees that they are “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” And he says I am here. I am here to “seek and save that which is lost.”

A missional church sees that people and culture are not enemies of the church, but broken treasures that God is restoring.

Because of this, a missional church is committed to:

• Cultural exegesis – becoming humble students of the varied people & cultures surrounding the church.

• Faithful contextualization – communicating gospel truth in ways the culture understands.

• Producing missionaries instead of consumers – equipping people to live out the gospel through their daily lives and work.

• Building a great city, not just a good church – the goal being more than a full church, but a transformed city.

• Social justice – healing real wounds and righting injustices in the community around them.

• Church planting – multiplying to new towns, cities, states and countries by starting new local churches.

Interestingly, however, Philippians 2:5-8 indicates that God came in human form so that Jesus could humble himself “by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” The man who was God was headed somewhere. The cross.

It is not enough simply that God lived among us. He also died for us.

Being “missional” is not enough. Mission fails if it does not point to the cross. The message that we are translating for culture must be “Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”

Of course, many churches that supposedly “get the gospel” fail to properly live out that gospel for their context; for them it is gospel in theory, not gospel in practical reality.

Because Jesus’ death has bought us life, we are now messengers of a new reality. We will faithfully proclaim and lovingly incarnate this new reality: to tell & live it for the hope of the world around us. This is the essence of mission.

So, as you can see, missional church is vastly more than just sending checks to some missionaries or even just being involved in international mission trips. The Bridge is committed to whatever it takes to be missional. HE is worth IT!