Responding to the Mission of God in Prayer

This weekend I had the opportunity to lead the responsive prayers to each of the three teaching sessions on The Plant’s annual retreat. 

For the first section we responded to the last stanza in Gerard Manley Hopkin’s poem "as kingfishers catch fire, as dragonflies draw flame":

Í say móre: the just man justices;   
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—   
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,   
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his   
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

This poem outlines what it means to be missional: to be Christ for others.  We prayed through this poem, asking to be just people, to keep grace, to live before God as we would want to be seen in God’s eyes, to be Christ to others, and to be Christ to each other. Responding to the call to restore, reconcile, and heal as God’s mission, our group then continued to pray through three breath prayers, taken from N.T. Wright’s Trinity prayer, that match the model of restore, reconcile and heal.

Restore: God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, set up your kingdom in our midst.
Reconcile: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Heal: Holy Spirit, Breath of the living God, renew us and all the world.

During the next session we responded in prayer to the call to be active in the mission of God and what that looked like in our lives in a physical way: by drawing our prayers with crayons.  This exercise allowed the people in the group to put thought onto paper in a creative way that was physical and creative.  Creativity is a bridge to a deeper understanding of our lives and ourselves, and praying through drawing created a sacred space for the Spirit to speak tangibly to the group.

Finally, during the last session we prepared ourselves to live out the mission of God by taking communion in a joyous and intimate manner, learning that communion is instructive: we do not do to remember bread and wine, we repeate communion often because it teaches us how to be missional and be Christ: through community, sharing, love, and worship.

Does Missional Forget the Gospel?

As a movement the missional church has been about sending the faithful out to live the gospel life outside the confines of the programmed and attractional church models.  Yet in the midst of this rejuvination of missional thinking Jonathan Dodson sounds a warning:

If we continue, we will build a new Church based on missional methods,
social justice, international justice, not based on [sic] teh Gospel of Jesus
Christ who defeated sin, death, and evil at the cross in order to make
all things new. Our sin, our death, our evil for his righteousness, his
life, his glory. We are in danger of abdicating [sic] teh Gospel in the name
of mission. Just read the CT interview with Rob Bell. Not much Jesus, not much gospel, but lots of justice.

I couldn’t disagree with the statement more, and I think it shows the failure to look ahead and over the horizon to see the fruits of living missionally and justly.  First of all we are a people of justice because Christ has completed the ultimate act of justice: "defeating sin, death, and evil at the cross in order to make all things new" (emphasis mine).  All things new is the action of discipleship that Jesus gives to us, that as we present the gospel of Christ resurrecting himself and acting through the world and people to make all things new we are making disciples who in turn go out to the world and work to make all things new.  We must not convert minds, we must convert minds, hearts, souls, and limbs!  A true disciple is one who, after hearing the good news and participating in baptism, goes forth to do justice, love mercy, and act humbly before God.  We are disciples in a dramatic and actional way, not just through the way of preaching.  That is the heart of missional, to be Christ to people, and being Christ necessitates justice at the epicenter of all.  As Hopkins poeticizes:

the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

To be Christ is to be the man that does justice!  Then we are his brother and sister, and in justice we meet Christ.  The Eucharist is justice, that our daily bread becomes the powerful symbol of our eternal bread, Christ resurrected and resurrecting the world.  As St. Gregory of Nazianzus’s hymn says:

Yesterday I was dead with Christ;
today I am sharing in his resurrection.

We are all sharing in the resurrection of Christ.  We are all awak to the glory of eternal life.  So we act justly to present the gospel in all of its glory, to touch the hearts, minds, and bodies of people in need of justice.  We are the brothers and sisters of God putting the world to rights in a dim way, and look forward to the One who will put the world to rights for all times.  And because of this, our doing and waiting, our action and our hopeful looking forward, we cannot separate justice from the mission of God, for our God is a just God who has put justice at the center of his gospel.

——————–

I really enjoy Jonathan’s blog Church Planting Novice.  It
seems once a week I am e-mailing a link from the blog to people at our
church plant to some really good thoughts.  But, and I know it seems
counter-intuitive, I really disagreed with Jonathan’s conclusion and am responding
to it.  So don’t get the wrong idea.  The blog is always one of the
first I read and I very much recommend it to all.

Hey Look, Todd Hiestand is on TV

Friend and fellow PBU alumni Todd Hiestand was interviewed by The Idea Camp recently:

Todd is the pastor at The Well, a church where I recently facilitated a "Becoming Imitators" workshop.

Kudos to Todd!

More information on Todd:

Website: http://toddhiestand.com

Twitter: toddhiestand

Missional is for Christians Too

Missional is a way of being the church that projects itself as being concerned with how the church interacts in an un-Christian world.  Missional churches are finding ways to be Christ’s presence within a culture that no longer can relate to religion in terms it understands.  As the church’s political and cultural power wanes, we become less authoritative and less central, which means we have to stop trying to pull people back toward the center (toward buildings, toward outreaches, toward concerts…) and instead pitch our tents in the midst of the broader culture.

Missional is the way the church reaches the world.  But it is also a forgotten, maligned, and neglected fact that being missional is the best way to disciple other Christians as well.  There can be a real defficiency in missional ecclesiology that does not fully convert the way a church functions but instead retro-fits the current structures of the church to move outside the church walls.   When current church structures are retro-fitted to be missional the task often falls on the pastoral staff and the discipled members of the community to be "missional" and the new members and persons on the fringe of the faith community are left to "grow."  The Church, Catholic and Protestant, evangelical and mainline, has recognized that it has a major discipleship problem on its hands, and missional provides a unique opportunity to be the platform that not only revitalizes evangelism but discipleship as well.

Participation is the most meaningful currency to coming generations (including my own).  People who are contemplating following the way of Jesus are brought along on the way through facets of a missional worldview.  What is also necessary though is the inclusion of all areas of the local church, from the pastoral staff at the center to those contemplating a life in Christ on the edge, in missional living. 

Missional should not be scary to people on the edges of the faith community, the rare attenders, the seekers, the questioners, the hurt, the betrayed, the new, the lonely: all want to be part of something bigger than themselves and all desire to participate in community.  Becoming a missionally minded church allows the local church to have all parts of the church participate together in the communal life of the local church and gives new followers and those on the edge opportunities for discipleship: true discipleship that teaches people how to be Jesus through social justice, care for the poor, participation in the broader culture, healing, and instruction in how to follow the way.  

This is where the paradigm reversal of believe-behave-belong turns into belong-behave-believe.  Participating in the mission of God moves people toward the kingdom of God.  It’s hard to believe that is true.  That hardness comes from how long we have relied on ourselves and our cultural power to bring people to church instead of the power of the Spirit to bring about the kingdom as an alternative way of living.  Now is the time we must call all Christians into radical living that breaks down barriers within the church itself, barriers that hamper discipleship with rigorous hierarchy and formula instead of allowing the mature followers to work along side those on the edges and draw them into discipling relationships that are based on mentoring and shepherding.  The role of the local church is to make sure that all are active, because only through activity—walking, pilgrimage, following—are all members of the body being discipled and reaching out to the world with the power of Christ.

Missional: A Double Edged Sword That Cuts Deep

When the idea of missional is spoken of it is almost always in good terms.  When a church community is being missional it is living out the gospel all days and at all times.  Friendships are closer.  The community is more tight knit.  There is more than just a "worship service."  There is living, breating, heart-beating community.

When anything is living and breathing with a beating heart a cut from a sword hurts.  That’s kind of obvious, but it didn’t really sink in until a bunch of "stuff" (for a lack of a better or worse word) happened within our community at The Plant. No one worry, everything is alright and I am still having a blast being part of a community that is trying to find its way on a journey toward being missional in suburbia, but being missional, though it is great to be a close knit community and build strong friendships, well, sometimes being missional kind of sucks.  It cuts deep.

None of this used to matter at the big evangelical churches I had attended over the past few years.  Someone lives in disobedience, someone likes another church better, someone wants to worship at night, someone wants a better kids program, someone wants a drama or dance team—-these were all excuses that rolled of the shoulders of the big evangelical church.  People were consumers.  That was the model that made or broke you.  And it was just a fact of life being in that type of community.  The vast majority of the time it was no big deal when a person or family left a church.  They just attended.

In our missional community you don’t just attend.  You participate.  You’re not a member, you’re a partner.  There is a big difference.  It’s a great, awesome, and powerful difference.  But sometimes it hurts.  Becuase when people matter, their stuff matters, and their leaving or gossip or sins or anger now really matter.  They rip the fabric of the community.  They breed malice and bitterness and distrust.

I am really beginning to understand the nervousness I have always sensed in Paul and Peter’s letters but never been able to relate to until now.  When you are in a purposeful community the ugly side of church becomes a much higher stakes game.  Missional is a double edged sword that cuts into the hearts of peoples lives and brings them to follow Christ, but it also, when something goes wrong, cuts deep.

So what to do?  Well, nothing.  Jesus or the apostles never said it would be easy.  Christ gives us an easy burden, but it is still a burden.  It is still sometimes hard.

It may not be a coincidence that the various ordeals of our church plant have crept up during Lent.  As we remember Christ’s time in the wilderness, his temptations, his foreshadowed crucifixion, it’s comforting in a way beyond words.  Christ has gone before us and has been tempted in everyway.  He also had great joy in life spending time with his disciples.  He also got angry or frustrated with them.  Being a group is complicated.

That’s it.  No words of wisdom from me other than: being missional—living in community—it’s complicated.

But I wouldn’t trade it for anything,

Even if it hurts sometimes.

Missional People Watching

The recent explosion of poker on TV and in the media has given street cred to all those card shark scenes from old Westerns or, one of my favorites, The Cincinatti Kid.  As Casino Royale played out so famously, every poker player has a tell, and once you figure the tell out you can gain the upper hand in betting and controlling the game.

For Christians we don’t have poker tells, we have Bible tells.  That’s why people dress their Bibles up in fancy jackets and put zillions of tabs in them—they want their Bible to "tell" something about them.

As a leader in a missional church plant focused on reaching "missing" people it can be a bummer when a new person comes into church and during the sermon pulls out their Bible.  During our service yesterday every new person I saw had a Bible.  "Ah, man," I thought. "None of these people are missing or needy.  They are probably just church jumpers."  As you can tell, my thinking was really missional at this point.

Peter Rollins tells a parable about conversation.  When you meet a person for the first time and have a conversation with them, do you remember the color of their eyes?  If you do, you weren’t paying attention to what they were saying, who they truly are.  You were just paying attention to their surface.  You weren’t going deep with them.

The Bible "tell" is the color of a person’s eyes in a church.  Those with tons of tabs and a leather cover are holy.  Those without a Bible don’t have eye color—they are blind.  I kind of want some blind people to come to church, so that they could learn to see again in the light of Christ.

But I was approaching this the completely wrong way.  I wasn’t in a missional mindset, I wasn’t living with people and going deep with them, I was just looking for a quick "tell" yesterday.  It is very possible that someone who has never been to church or is truly "missing" brought a Bible to church, because they learned to do that from a TV show or from a conversation.  And there are lots of Christians who don’t bring a Bible to church—me, for an example (…for another post).

To be missional we need to stop relying on the tell to serve others, to invite others, to engage with others.  Tells are the surface, and they don’t begin to allude to what is happening in a person’s life and where they are as a pilgrim on the way.

Most importantly, to be missional means serving all—and that includes Christians.  I think missional minded persons sometimes get caught up in reaching out to the other because we have been brought up just patting each other on the back for so long.  We have just swung the pendulum as far as it could go the other way.  Both are wrong.  To be truly missional means serving all with love, truth, and compassion—the missing, the Christian, the pilgrim, the semi-Christian, the semi-athiest, or wherever the person is in their journey.  We must serve all, and not remember the color of their eyes after doing so.