Doing some reading on the Missional Church again because I (and a few others in our community) are in the midst of restructuring our church. The goal is to rebuild a community “structure” that has at its base a very missional focus. Everything in this structure will work for and serve the abilty of our local community being “a sign, foretaste, instrument and agent of God’s inbreaking kingdom…”
This quote near the end of Guder’s book, Missional Church struck me…
The primary organizational challange for the church is to find ways to structure the life of teh particular communities so that they can carry out the faithful witness in their places, always in responsible connection to the entire church around the world and cultivated by the ecclesial practices that God’s Spirit provides. The particular community happens concretly in the coming together of Christians to worship, to grapple with the Scriptures, to be instructed in the faith, to love each other, and to practice the rule of Christ corporately and individually. All of this focuses on the community being sent into its mission field as Christ’s witness.”
(page 234)
The usual challange is that most “local congregations” are so established and their strucutures do not always point to the missional task. For many of these churches, it is quite a task to redirect all their “ministries” toward a misssional trajectory. The fun thing for us, is that we are having free reign to begin anew and create spaces for this to happen almost from scratch…