Thoughts About Missional Church Planting
3 Comments
Thoughts About Missional Church Planting
By Pastor Scott Thomas, Acts 29 Director
I have spent the last six years seeking to understand all I can about planting a missional church. I have seen some great expressions of missional church planting and I have seen what I regarded as abuses of missionality or sinful syncretism in the name of cultural contextualization.
Christianity Today article stated,
"The terms missional and missional church are barely 10 years old, but already they bring up more than half a million hits on a Google search. Churches are inundated with missional books, missional websites, missional consultation groups, and missional speakers. Yet the meaning of the term remains unclear.
"Some use missional to describe a church that rejects treating the gospel like a commodity for spiritual consumers; others frame it as a strategy for marketing the church and stimulating church growth. Some see the missional church as a refocusing on God's action in the world rather than obsessing over individuals' needs; others see it as an opportunity to "meet people where they are" and reinvent the church for postmodern culture."
Apparently, the confusion continues.
I appreciated the recent article by my friend Ed Stetzer entitled Transforming Culture in the Jan/Feb 2009 edition of Outreach Magazine (not yet published online). Ed said, "Preaching against culture--as we often do--is like preaching against someone's house. It's just where they live. There is good in it, and there is bad in it--preach discernement, not culture condemnation."
It prompted some thoughts I have about missional church planting. I am not opposed to one aspect over the other. I am simply illustrating how we are prone to over-emphasis and am calling us to follow God's mission instead of our own notion of cultural contextualization or missional living.
- Connecting with culture is over-rated. Connecting with God is under-rated.
- Building a congregation is over-rated. Building the Kingdom is under-rated.
- Serving the church is over-rated. Serving the community is under-rated.
- Personal evangelism is over-rated. Communities on mission together is under-rated.
- Church strategic goals are over-rated. Holy Spirit guidance is under-rated.
The argument is often over whether a church is either relating to its culture or rejecting its culture (missional or non-missional). I think there is a third way. A missional church connects with culture and connects with God. It builds the Kingdom while building the local church. It serves the community where it resides while its congregants are served. Its focus is on engaging evangelism personally and in community with others and it fervently follows the Holy Spirit as it makes plans for the glory of God.
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Russell Frame on Jan 9, 2009 2:14am
Well said Scott. Our tendency to over-emphasize and lean to extremes is a danger we should be reminded of in many ministry areas, especially for church planters who are often reacting to the church environments they are leaving. The wide-spectrum of expressions that we see in Jesus and the Apostles work should remind us of this. I think an important theme to missionality is having a loose grip on our own preferences, being willing to adapt as needed to create that union of Gospel and Community which is the local church, realizing that any single expression has limits and weaknesses which will need to be addressed in some way.
Randy Simon on Jan 14, 2009 1:09am
Thanks for bringing some synthesis and balance to all the "missional" language that's flying around everywhere these days. Your article is excellent because it's succint and clear. God bless.
Raymond Salzwedel on Jan 21, 2009 6:07pm
I think that balance has been something with which the church has always struggled. Tension is a luxury many of us do not afford ourselves. Without becoming an Hegelian purist, I would suggest that unless we can see the pendulum itself, we are pressed to keep swinging. Once in a while I wish someone would cry out to a view that they vehemently disagreed, "You are right, but only some of the time".
This leads me to the point. Scott, I think you have made an excellent argument for balance, and for patiently holding the tension, without being drawn and quartered by it.
I say "quartered", but maybe I should say "pentiled", because I submit that even Niebuhr's Christ and Culture which presents five possible relationships that the Gospel has with Culture, may be a false "pentachotomy". Rather, we may be constrained to walk a fine path between these views.
Our balance? Perhaps Piper puts it best: Missions exists because Worship doesn't.
For completeness of this comment, may I just note:
1. Hegel himself did not articulate the thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad himself - that was left to later philosophers, but has some similarities and is popularly so used.
2. Niebuhr put foward the following 5 possibilities:
a) Christ against Culture
b) Christ of Culture
c) Christ above Culture
d) Christ and Culture in Paradox
e) Christ Transforming Culture