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.