Missional Christianity: Leadership Issues

I can hardly pretend to be an expert on how to lead a church into missional Christianity. My own congregation is in a transitional stage. This shouldn’t be surprising–very few churches have gotten past the transitional stage. The idea is still very new, and we’re all still feeling our way along. In 10 or 20 years, things will be dramatically different, but no one but God knows how.

You see, missional Christianity isn’t about picking up a how-to book and applying a proven formula to your congregation. Rather, it’s a journey into the unknown, guided by the Holy Spirit and the example of Christ.

And so here are some very uninspired and unproven ideas about how to get started. Ask me 2017, and I’ll tell you how well they worked!

Focus on the Gospels. In the Churches of Christ, we once focused on Acts and its stories of conversion. Our emphasis was on how to be saved.

Later, we went through a process of learning grace, and so we focused heavily on Romans. Of course, Paul’s epistles were always important to us, because that’s where we found the “proof texts” for how to do worship and church organization.

We never spent much time in the Gospels because they didn’t answer the questions we were asking. Which means, of course, we weren’t asking the right questions.

Teach the Gospels. I’d start with Luke. Introduction. Chapter by chapter outlines. Teach it in the classes and from the pulpit. Remember: the church will never taken seriously a teaching that isn’t reinforced from the pulpit. Which means–

Be sure your preacher is on board. Not just willing, but committed. In the Churches of Christ, we are very sermon oriented and so we are very preacher oriented (although we like to deny it). But the preacher can only go as far as the elders let him, and so–

Be sure your elders are board. The elders have to want this in the worst way. It’s not enough that they give the preacher permission–they have to lead the charge through teaching and making the hard choices. The “hard choices” come from having to do a lot of things differently. First, you have to–

Simplify. The classic book is Simple Church. It’s a paradoxical book. It very effectively explains the importance of asking your congregation to do only what’s really necessary, but it completely fails to discuss what’s really necessary.

You have to relieve your members of as many burdens of membership as possible so that they have time and energy to be committed to mission. You can’t just pile the demands of mission on top of what you’re already doing (and likely struggling to get done).

We’ve canceled Sunday night services for the summer, the annual youth rally we sponsor, and VBS. Obviously enough, each of these events has a constituency within the congregation, and each event does something good.

But missional leadership is all about giving up the good for the better–making the mission more important than church politics or even doing good–when you can do even better.

Then again, neither should you be callous. Although we are no longer doing VBS, we’re doing a VBS type of event during our Sunday morning and Wednesday night classes. VBS does some great things, but we’ve found we can use our existing times to do the same things.

Just so, we’ve kept some Sunday night events of special importance. And we’ve made certain that those who’ve attended our youth rally in the past have alternative events to attend.

Now, the temptation is to simplify just so you can kick up your heels and relax. It’s hard to create new, better habits, and so we must–

Establish a culture of volunteerism. I used to be in the Rotary Club. The rule was “No one ever refuses to do a job they’ve been asked to do.” Wow! … and this without the promise of heaven!!

Somehow, churches have developed the sense that we need only volunteer if we have some spare time and just happen to feel like it. Saying no is perfectly acceptable and involves no negative consequences at all.

Part of this is due to the leaders’ fear that people will leave if we demand too much. Part is the sense that church is about being saved rather than about doing mission.

Here’s an excellent quotation I stumbled across–

But Christianity isn’t primarily about going to Heaven, it’s about seeing Heaven come to Earth. Unless Christianity is understood as an unfinished drama, there will be no inherent impetus for mission. But when Christianity is seen as a story, mission makes perfect sense; working out our salvation, learning to love more completely, stewarding the environment, and ridding ourselves of sin are natural out-workings of narrative theology. If we understand Christianity as a story, and read the Bible like the story it is, we realize that the story is going somewhere. And we are part of that story, we have a part to play in moving the story towards its conclusion. We have something to do, and it isn’t just to “play nice until Jesus comes,” it’s to build for the kingdom (not to build the kingdom, but to build for the kingdom).

See Ben’s Blog.

We have to start with a better theology, but pretty quickly the church has to very specifically insist that it’s members fulfill the purpose for which Jesus died–so we’d do good works–not as an institution, but as individuals interacting with a sick and dying world to make it a little better. And so, we should–

Celebrate those of our members who take the plunge. We should have testimonies where members talk about how their lives have been enriched by getting involved. And we need to–

Give members low-threshold opportunities to get involved. The hardest part, the most radical change, is just getting started. Once the members get involved, they’ll enjoy it and will invite friends along to help. The trick, then, is just to get them started.

Members need a place to start not too far outside their comfort zones and that coordinates with their work schedules. If every service opportunity conflicts with an 8 to 5 job, we won’t get much done! For that matter, we might even offer baby sitting.

We’re trying to do this through our small groups. We ask each small group, which normally meets weekly on Sunday nights, to take one week’s meeting and do a service project. Just one project a month using time already committed.

The problem we’ve run into is that our middle class members have no idea what services are needed. They want to help but don’t know how.

Therefore, this year we’ve formed a committee assigned to come up with community service projects that are low threshold and doable on a once-a-month basis.

However, we are also planning to form some small groups that do nothing but service projects–transitioning monthly ministry to weekly.

My own thinking is that most people don’t really benefit that much from a Sunday night Bible study when they’ve already had a church service and a class that morning. Rather, what they’re looking for in small groups is community.

But community is best achieved by working alongside someone. Therefore, if we can just get our members to experience service together, they’ll find a deeper, richer community than they’ve gotten from small groups. At least, that’s the theory …

However, this is not really enough. We already have some programs designed to serve the poor of the community, which are understaffed. To make any of our projects work, we need to–

Recruit like crazy. Recruiting is simple but hard. Very few people do it well, and the reason is that we look for easy answers. There are none.

Rather, the way you recruit is to grab people in the aisles and hallways at church, face to face, and ask and sell. Or call them. But don’t expect good results from making announcements and filling out volunteer sheets. It’s one-to-one solicitation. Announcements and such will reinforce the effort, but nothing replaces person-to-person contact.

I mean, I learned 25 years ago that they only way to get good attendance at a class party was to call everyone–a PARTY for crying out loud! If people won’t show for free food and fellowship unless personally invited, how much luck will we have getting them to do ministry without a personal invitation? (Even Jesus took the time to invite his apostles personally–he never sent someone else to do the job nor did he send a letter.)

Moreover, you have to invite people you don’t know that well, because the people you know are likely (just like you) people who’ve been members for a while who’ve already made commitments.

There’s an art to the process. The recruiter has to be excited about the service opportunity and has to know why this job will benefit the person being recruited. “You’ll just love working with these children! When one of these kids looks you in the eye and thanks you for teaching him about Jesus, you’ll be thrilled beyond words! And, like me, it’ll be the highlight of your week!”

Or “We can’t reach out to the community like we want to if our grass if full of weeds. The people we invite need to see we are proud of Jesus, and if we aren’t proud of our grounds, they won’t believe we’re proud of our Savior. Helping us do yard work is an essential part of our evangelistic effort! And it’s something you can do and be comfortable doing.”

And we have to avoid some mistakes–

Don’t create second-class members. There’s a tendency when we take on a new project, especially one that’s this important, to think of those members who don’t get on board as somehow inferior.

But as important as our mission to the world is, someone still has to tend the babies, prepare communion, and teach the classes. Even if we effectively simplify and reduce the burden on the congregation to maintain existing programs, we’ll still need some volunteers to serve the church itself.

It’s a question of gifts and talents–and necessity. And so, when we celebrate our victories in the world, we need to also thank those who keep things working at church.

Of course, those members who do nothing at all should be called to repentance.

But none of this will come fast. You have to–

Be patient. God will give the increase, but he’ll do it in his own time. Work for little steps and small victories. Build carefully and slowly, but use only the very best materials: good theology, complete unselfishness, and intense love for one another and the world we live in.

And immerse the effort in prayer. Ask the congregation to regularly pray to become missional–to make a difference in our community, to share Jesus with the lost and needy, to bring a bit of heaven to our home town. It should be a part of our Sunday morning congregational prayer every Sunday.

It should even be on the prayer list. It’s just as important as praying for those in the hospital or who’ve lost loved ones.

Finally, we need to remember the three R’s of teaching:

Repeat, repeat, and repeat. One sermon won’t do it. This needs to be a recurring theme. The preacher should help the church imagine what the congregation will be like in 10 years if this really happens. We need to learn to dream! (Maybe we ask the members to submit their dreams for the future of the church and then read the best ones from the pulpit.)

Build missionality into our communion services, our song services, our prayers, our scripture readings, our classes, and our sermons. Of course, to avoid being tedious, we need to teach the lesson from different angles, with different emphases.

But missional Christianity can be found in the Law of Moses, the Psalms, the Proverbs, the Prophets, the Epistles, the Revelation … you see, we’ve just overlooked the obvious teachings of so much of the Bible because we were asking the wrong questions.

Now, if this seems hard, you’re right, and so we should–

Cooperate with other congregations. Changing our community into something a bit more like heaven is well beyond the power of one congregation. Jesus called all Christians to be united for good reasons, and one reason is so that we’d not compete with each other but instead work together to do something bigger than any one congregation.

If we see a successful program to help the poor as a competitive advantage over other churches in town, then we’ve completely misunderstood missionality. The mission is most important–not our pride or church size. We measure success by the success of the work, not by the success of the congregation, but the success of the Kingdom, not the success of the preacher or elders.