A Missional versus Maintenance Check Up
For churches that want to follow the call to become more missional, it helps to lay down some clear thinking about what that means. First and formost it is a renewal of the very principles around which a church is organized. Does the church exist to serve itself, or is it called to something higher? Do we serve the mission or are we primarily engaged in our own maintenance? In our consumer culture, this is not such an easy question to answer. We can spend so much of our time and energy trying to complete with the latest and greatest show, that we can deceive ourselves about how we are actually focused. We might not even know if we are more missional or maintenance oriented.
If you want to do a quick check up on whether your church is more missional or maintenance oriented you can use the test that Todd Wilson of the Exponential Network shared with me. He said, just look at the 3 T’s– time,talent and treasure. In other words, take a look at your church calendar, staff roster and budget to see if your resources are primarily focused on keeping up the machine, or expanding the mission. Hard questions. When you add the consideration of attractional or incarnational to this matrix it gets more challenging still. But we can ask the question more directly: “How are your 3 T’s being spent to send and support believers in the invasion of culture with the gospel, and not just on proxy mission (doing it for them)?”
Let’s be clear about what it means to be missional. I like this definition: ”a community of God’s people that defines itself, and organizes its life around, its real purpose of being an agent of God’s mission to the world” (www.forgottenways.org). You can look at it this way: an army in the field is focused on primary objectives related to taking and invading territory. The maintenance and supply function exists to support the mission. When that army shifts from an offensive posture to being a police force, all kinds of very difficult things begin to happen, as we can testify to from many recent experiences in other nations (abu ghraib, etc.). When we consider the idea of missional versus maintenance in the church, it all comes down to primary objectives and aligning our actions and resources around those objectives.
For many churches this shift is a historical fact, and leaders then have to work very hard to reverse the trend. The first step is to recognize that we have in face become very internally focused, and that maintaining our machine has overtaken our efforts to invade our culture with the good news. Repentance has to precede change. There is no doubt that following Him in this will get in the way of some our well intended maintenance, but the most hopeful news is that the commitment to mission, the heart of “being sent” resides in very God’s nature, and by returning to him this heart can be renewed in us.
One Response to “A Missional versus Maintenance Check Up”
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I couldn’t agree more with you about the shift for churches to be more missional and intentional in their focus and efforts. There’s a great opportunity to dialogue more about what this means in our contemporary culture around faith/innovation/justice at the next Idea Camp Conference in DC. You should check it out! http://theideacamp.ning.com/