The Missional Church

During the spring/summer I want to spend some time reflecting on how God is calling his church to raise its prophetic voice, get on the streets, and become a truly "missional" reality in the world.

This is especially important for those of us who live in the Western world, for much of Christianity in the West is enculturated. We are numbed out, suffering from a severe form of apathy. Our imagination is stunted. Indeed, we are sleeping.

What do I mean when I say that the church is enculturated? Consider the words of Brian Walsh:

"As a community of believers and as individuals we have, mostly against our best intentions, been thoroughly sucked in to our secular culture...Our consciousness, our imagination, our vision has been captured by idolatrous perceptions and ways of life. The dominant worldview, the all-pervasive secular consciousness, has captured our lives. And what is so intriguing about this phenomenon is that we were not taken after a long drawn-out fight. No, it happened in our sleep...We simply bought into the materialistic, prestige oriented, secular values of our age without ever noticing that that is what was going on. At present, the church is virtually in a coma, asleep to her own cultural entrapment...We are numb. To be numb is to be without passion; it is the absence of pathos; it is a-pathy. We are so numb that we don't even realize what has happened to us. Our numbness denies us of a spiritually renewed imagination. We are numb, we don't notice the perverse abnormality of affluence. We are numb to the precariousness of our times, numb to the danger of the earth, to the pain of the poor, to the impossibility of our present affluent lifestyles" (Subversive Christianity, 29 and 37).

For the church to wake up from its slumber and embody the mission of God, we must center ourselves on the reality that God sent Jesus to save the world and sent the Spirit of Christ to sustain and recreate the world. Only as we move out from this center in faith and love, and choose to follow the way of the Suffering Servant will we become the people God wants us to be.

As we move out from that center we become participants in God's mission to bring renewal and restoration to his broken creation.

Mission is about what God is doing in the world - renewing, recreating, enlivening imagination, renewing minds and hearts, restoring the cosmos.

So, our primary calling is to get on board with what the Holy Spirit is already doing in our communities and in the world.

We must WAKE UP to God's reality, to God's justice and righteousness. We must turn from our idols of economism, consumerism, sexism, racism, technicism, and scientism. And we must turn in faith and hope to the living God. We must allow the Holy Spirit to reorient us to God's ways, and thus to become integral parts of transformational communities of faith.

It's time for us to get on our boots and start moving our feet - to become culture formers, to focus on people and relationships, to get impassioned to serve others, and to embody the radical love of Christ in every aspect of our living!