Yeah, I’m sorry about that title. And I'm really sorry about that picture.
But it did make you look.
In our last post, I talked about being outward-focused and the critical need for leaders to develop and nurture outward-focused cultures in their churches. I absolutely have a bias in this regard: I tend to think of churches as primarily being missionary outposts, especially in our post-Christian world of “nones” and “dones”, deconstructed former church-goers, and hyper-politicized evangelicals.
So let me lay out what I believe are two basic tenets of outward-focused churches.
First, an outward-focused church functions like a missionary outpost. It assumes people have a huge need for Jesus’ love and touch, based on what it sees in the people around it: poverty-stricken in spirit, broken, captive to an unseen enemy, spiritually blind, and oppressed. A missional church assumes that it was sent to people who are in huge need of the Holy Spirit.
Second, leaders in outward-focused churches view themselves and their followers first-and-foremost as missionaries. And because of that, they develop a missionary mindset and paradigm. For instance:
Missionaries see the Church as a force, not a fortress. I once heard a TV preacher slamming churches for being “user-friendly.” He said, “If I had my way, we’d have a twelve-foot barbed wire fence around our church and only the committed that were able to crawl over it could get in.” Well, that’s okay if the church was just an army made up of people who had enough military-like personalities before they know Jesus to crawl over the barbed wire. But the truth is, the Church is also a hospital. And there’s a reason hospitals don’t have barbed wire around them and military bases do.
Missionaries learn the language and seek to understand the culture before anything. What good is trying to influence when you don’t speak the language or understand where people are coming from? Paul’s message in Athens (Acts 17) is a master-class in verbal outreach with him quoting Greek philosophers and poets and not dismissing their religiosity.
Missionaries mix with the culture, not run from it. Missionaries love the people that are really different from them, they don’t hate them and call them names. Missionary outposts live with the tension of being culturally relevant and counter-culture. In other words, there is some philosophical conflict…it’s not just black-and-white in terms of ministry approach.
Missionaries see their mission is to heal, not condemn. Do I really need to explain this one?
Missionaries hold evangelism and holiness in creative tension. Sometimes we pit discipleship/holiness against evangelism…and we see this as either one thing or the other. But it’s not either/or. Perhaps with our Father there is no tension between mercy (“come as you are”) and holiness (“you must change”) if we see them both as prescriptive for wholeness. God will make us into “little Christs”, replicas of His Son if we’re willing. He’s in the transformation business.
What’s your take on how missional your church is? Do you see yourself functioning as a missionary or more as a caretaker? Whatever the case, it’s good to insert a level of “corporate self-awareness” to wrestle with where we really are.
Dave Workman | The Elemental Group
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