(I posted this over on my other blog, thought it would share it here too)
I was chatting with someone last night and they made the elusion to the fact that if people would just be people of prayer and be people who studied the text, they would naturally be missional. I wanted to disagree. I have spent my whole life “in the word” and have really only started to grasp the missional call of the scriptures until very recently…
Darrel Guder writes about this…
From Treasures in Clay Jars, Patterns of Missional Faithfulness
“It is possible to be biblically centered, to expect and to experience biblical preaching, and not to be a church that acknowledges, much less practices, its missional calling. This is the crisis and dilemma of much of the Western church. It is possible to study the scriptures in such a way that its central emphesis upon formation for mission is missed. It is possible to hear the gospel primarily in terms of what God’s grace does for me, or for you. It is possible to take the Bible seriously, persuaded that it is primarily about one’s personal salvation. It is possible to preach the Bible in such a way that the needs of persons are met but the formation of the whole community for its witness in the is not emphesized. It is, in short, possible to be Bible-centered and not wholeheartedly missional.”