Missional Church is…

Paul writes – Below is my Saturday attempt at describing “Missional Church”. It was an attempt to draw together themes and words from a group response to dwelling in 2 Corinthians 4:1-12.

A missional church is experienced in our being willing and able to sit and act together; vulnerably in the place of mystery, institutional routinization, uncertainty, and the heavy silences seeming hope-less-ness. It is to wander at the intersection of past, present, and future. It is to notice and discern. It is to look for and find God. God’s work in hints of the Kingdom and quiet whisper of Spirit.

Missional church is to sit in a hard place – the place where vision statements and all manner of strategies and plans die – where, like the seed, they must die for the sake of Jesus-shaped life and possibility.

Missional church is to embody and bear gospel in places of darkness and death (in all its forms). It is to preference “we” over “me” and to hold in tension “they” and “us.”

Missional church is being willing to honor the cracks, our mortality, our own brokenness and frailty; the characteristic marginality, insignificance and foolishness that marks our way in the world, for in all these, surprisingly, is discovered the fragile tentative beginnings of resurrection life.

Missional church is to story (God’s) gifts of life and aliveness, in all their richness and wonder; gifts at work in us and through us in Jesus-shaping and Jesus-shaped ways.

Describing “missional church” is not, for me, the final word. It is a work in progress. I wonder what it would look like here in Cambridge...? Also, I wonder, given this one way of describing a missional church, how would you begin to describe the role and values of leadership in this kind of 2 Corinthians 4:1-12 shaped church…? What would leadership look like…? What kinds of things might they do…?

Comments

[Danny]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the missional church. There are so many different directions it has been defined, but am glad to see that you are wrestling with it here.