This is from a great article by Dwight Friesen called “Why I am Not Missional”
Here is an excerpt:
Often church and organizational leaders like to stress a singularity of mission so that they can encourage more Christians to attach themselves to the leader’s vision or mission. This is a great way for leaders to get their pet projects done, to make a name for themselves, grow large ministries, and of course bring honor to God. The much harder thing for a leader to do is to help the people in their relational networks uniquely express Christ. That kind of unique Kingdom service may be hard to take credit for.
While i am not ready to drop the word “missional” because i believe, as my co-pastor Brad, so wisely pointed out, that incarnational and missional are theologicaly tied together as the incarnation is the our picture of missional living
This above quote though is also really imporant. Brad and I have been discussing the vision behind The Well and what is so compelling about our community that people will rearrange their lives to take part in it. A temptation is to get a concrete idea (like a building project or something) that people can hold onto and pour their lives into. The problem with that is that, that kind of thing usually takes them out of the world and out of the “daily life” things where they can incarnate the love of christ to their world.
What I think is the bigger challange is to be a community that works together in the places that we all live to bring the reign of Christ to those places. That, to me is missional because it is incarnational.
In this case, the “church” (i.e. community) is like an outpost for the ways God is using us to be part of His redemptive activity. It needs to be highly networked in many different ways and takes on the shape of gathering and sending at the same time. In suburbia, this is quite a challange for many reasons.
Again, this is a hard way to “build a church.” But I think it is worth it.
All of this might not make any sense, and might be missing some important stuff, but that is because we are still processing through it all so bear with me. 🙂