5a. The Call to be Missional: DNA
In Chi Alpha we believe that mission is not merely an activity of the church, it is the very heartbeat and work of God. It is in the very being of God that the basis for the missionary enterprise is found. God is a sending God, with a desire to see humankind and creation reconciled, redeemed, and healed. Because the very character of God is sentness, as Chi Alpha missionaries, Christ's Ambassadors, the we desire to be to be a going church, a movement of God through his Spirit, sent to bring healing to a broken world, specifically our campuses. North America and college campuses are as much a mission field as any other nation or people group on the face of the earth. The existing church, which is invariably static, rooted in one place, institutionalized, needs to recover its sent-ness in order to become the missional church. However, because most of us come from these type of churches we need to break free from that attractional mindset making sure we aren't planting a attractional-extractional church in our missions context.
Many of the new Protestant church movements and Campus Ministries of recent years are simply variations on the old Christendom mode (a failing system). Whether they place their emphasis on new worship styles, expressions of the Holy Spirit’s power, evangelism to seekers, or Bible teaching, these so-called new movements still operate out of the fallacious assumption that the church belongs firmly in the town square— that is, at the heart of Western culture. Church plants and campus ministries are notorious for failing because at the heart of them they are carbon copies of the already beleaguered failing Christendom-style church. As Missionaries many of us come from these very systems, therefore, we need to be aware of the tendency and pull the attractional church model has on us. As we proceed in our training we do so with an understanding that unlearning this attractional mindset is uncomfortable until we begin to learn what is we need to do as we enter our missionary context. Therefore, we need to resist the urge to go back to where it is comfortable. When we do not understand what to do in ministry there is a tendency to default to what we know. However, fear not. In breaking down old mindsets of institutional ministry and thinking we are freeing up your imagination for what God is going to do in your context.
As we proceed here you will begin to see that being missional is not about doing church but being church. Therefore, our goal isn't to build a good program, but to incorporate the correct DNA within people that instills a culture of movement that flows from the very character of God, his sentness.
As mentioned, the current mode of church has these three flaws in its DNA— it is attractional, dualistic, and hierarchical.
First, by attractional, we mean that the traditional church plants itself within aparticular community, neighborhood, or locale and expects that people will come to it to meet God and find fellowship with others. When we say it is a flaw for the church to be attractional, we refer more to the missionary stance the church takes toward the broader host communities and cultures it inhabits. The missional church recognizes that it does not hold a place of honor in its host community and that its missional imperative compels it to move out from itself into that host community as salt and light. We believe the development of indigenous, contextualized worship occurs inpartnership with new believers from one’s host community. The tailoring of worship services is a lot further down the priority list for missional church leaders. The Come-To-Us stance developed over the Christendom period is unbiblical. It’s not found in
the Gospels or the Epistles. Jesus, Paul, the disciples, the early church leaders all had
a Go-To-Them mentality.
Second, the Christendom-mode church is dualistic. It separates the sacred from the profane, the holy from the unholy, the in from the out. What we have said so far about the sickness of attractionalism finds its roots in the church’s dualistic spirituality. We talk routinely about the “world out there.” What else can that mean other than that we, the church people, are “in here”! Dualism has over 1,700 years createdChristians that cannot relate their interior faith to their exterior practice, and this affects their ethics, their lifestyles, and their capacity to share their faith meaningfully
with others.
Third, the traditional church (Christendom) is hierarchical, deeply indebted to what we see as an overly religious, bureaucratic, top-down model of leadership, as opposed to one that is more structured around grassroots agendas.
While some denominations are ideologically committed to a very top-down hierarchical model that includes archbishops, bishops, priests, and parish councils, others (who call themselves low church) are equally indebted to top-down approaches via regional superintendents, senior pastors, associate pastors, youth pastors, and deacons.
From Pentecostals to the Orthodox Church, from Baptists to Episcopalians and Presbyterians, the hierarchical model seems to be universal. For how much longer can the church ignore Paul’s radical dissolution of the traditional
distinctions between priests and laity, between officials and ordinary members, between holy men and common people? Says English pastor Rob Warner:
“The first Christians radically reshaped the language of “priesthood” and “sacrifice.” In one sense all are
priests; believers are their own priests for all have immediacy of access to God’s grace in Christ. What
priests have performed for others before, believers can now do for themselves. In another sense, none
can be appointed priests in the Christian church, for Christ has fulfilled the priestly role once for all.”
So, what will the future shape of the church look like? If it takes the form we propose for the missional church, it will look vastly varied in its many different contexts. But we can be sure that there will be some common values across the board. It will place a high value on communal life, more open leadership structures, and the contribution of all the people of God.
The emerging missional church will have these four features in common:
1. Focus on the journey of faith and the experience of God;
2. Desire for less structure and more direct involvement by participants;
3. A sense of flexibility in order and a distinctly non-hierarchical culture;
4. Recognition that the experience of church is about the sustaining of discipleship.
So the church will focus on core faith, on minimum essential order, on people and their gifts, on flexible patterns of life held together in communion and on a shared sense of community.
The missional church will take context seriously, but will also work on recovering the biblical narrative with its richness and potency for today’s world. When story and context are equally embraced, we are beginning to think and act missionally.
So how does this this work out practically? One way to understand is by making different colored spaces. Yellow space refers to a Christian spirituality that is only concerned with the personal, interior world of faith. It characterizes the classic individualized form of faith that focuses on personal quiet times, Bible study, church attendance, and personal moral/ ethical behavior. Blue space refers to an exclusively other focused form of Christian spirituality, one that takes context seriously and features such activities as social concern, justice-seeking, activism, and public moral/ ethical behavior. It is only in the dialogue between them, that we come close to biblical missional activity and spirituality, as illustrated below.
Many of the new Protestant church movements and Campus Ministries of recent years are simply variations on the old Christendom mode (a failing system). Whether they place their emphasis on new worship styles, expressions of the Holy Spirit’s power, evangelism to seekers, or Bible teaching, these so-called new movements still operate out of the fallacious assumption that the church belongs firmly in the town square— that is, at the heart of Western culture. Church plants and campus ministries are notorious for failing because at the heart of them they are carbon copies of the already beleaguered failing Christendom-style church. As Missionaries many of us come from these very systems, therefore, we need to be aware of the tendency and pull the attractional church model has on us. As we proceed in our training we do so with an understanding that unlearning this attractional mindset is uncomfortable until we begin to learn what is we need to do as we enter our missionary context. Therefore, we need to resist the urge to go back to where it is comfortable. When we do not understand what to do in ministry there is a tendency to default to what we know. However, fear not. In breaking down old mindsets of institutional ministry and thinking we are freeing up your imagination for what God is going to do in your context.
As we proceed here you will begin to see that being missional is not about doing church but being church. Therefore, our goal isn't to build a good program, but to incorporate the correct DNA within people that instills a culture of movement that flows from the very character of God, his sentness.
As mentioned, the current mode of church has these three flaws in its DNA— it is attractional, dualistic, and hierarchical.
First, by attractional, we mean that the traditional church plants itself within aparticular community, neighborhood, or locale and expects that people will come to it to meet God and find fellowship with others. When we say it is a flaw for the church to be attractional, we refer more to the missionary stance the church takes toward the broader host communities and cultures it inhabits. The missional church recognizes that it does not hold a place of honor in its host community and that its missional imperative compels it to move out from itself into that host community as salt and light. We believe the development of indigenous, contextualized worship occurs inpartnership with new believers from one’s host community. The tailoring of worship services is a lot further down the priority list for missional church leaders. The Come-To-Us stance developed over the Christendom period is unbiblical. It’s not found in
the Gospels or the Epistles. Jesus, Paul, the disciples, the early church leaders all had
a Go-To-Them mentality.
Second, the Christendom-mode church is dualistic. It separates the sacred from the profane, the holy from the unholy, the in from the out. What we have said so far about the sickness of attractionalism finds its roots in the church’s dualistic spirituality. We talk routinely about the “world out there.” What else can that mean other than that we, the church people, are “in here”! Dualism has over 1,700 years createdChristians that cannot relate their interior faith to their exterior practice, and this affects their ethics, their lifestyles, and their capacity to share their faith meaningfully
with others.
Third, the traditional church (Christendom) is hierarchical, deeply indebted to what we see as an overly religious, bureaucratic, top-down model of leadership, as opposed to one that is more structured around grassroots agendas.
While some denominations are ideologically committed to a very top-down hierarchical model that includes archbishops, bishops, priests, and parish councils, others (who call themselves low church) are equally indebted to top-down approaches via regional superintendents, senior pastors, associate pastors, youth pastors, and deacons.
From Pentecostals to the Orthodox Church, from Baptists to Episcopalians and Presbyterians, the hierarchical model seems to be universal. For how much longer can the church ignore Paul’s radical dissolution of the traditional
distinctions between priests and laity, between officials and ordinary members, between holy men and common people? Says English pastor Rob Warner:
“The first Christians radically reshaped the language of “priesthood” and “sacrifice.” In one sense all are
priests; believers are their own priests for all have immediacy of access to God’s grace in Christ. What
priests have performed for others before, believers can now do for themselves. In another sense, none
can be appointed priests in the Christian church, for Christ has fulfilled the priestly role once for all.”
So, what will the future shape of the church look like? If it takes the form we propose for the missional church, it will look vastly varied in its many different contexts. But we can be sure that there will be some common values across the board. It will place a high value on communal life, more open leadership structures, and the contribution of all the people of God.
The emerging missional church will have these four features in common:
1. Focus on the journey of faith and the experience of God;
2. Desire for less structure and more direct involvement by participants;
3. A sense of flexibility in order and a distinctly non-hierarchical culture;
4. Recognition that the experience of church is about the sustaining of discipleship.
So the church will focus on core faith, on minimum essential order, on people and their gifts, on flexible patterns of life held together in communion and on a shared sense of community.
The missional church will take context seriously, but will also work on recovering the biblical narrative with its richness and potency for today’s world. When story and context are equally embraced, we are beginning to think and act missionally.
So how does this this work out practically? One way to understand is by making different colored spaces. Yellow space refers to a Christian spirituality that is only concerned with the personal, interior world of faith. It characterizes the classic individualized form of faith that focuses on personal quiet times, Bible study, church attendance, and personal moral/ ethical behavior. Blue space refers to an exclusively other focused form of Christian spirituality, one that takes context seriously and features such activities as social concern, justice-seeking, activism, and public moral/ ethical behavior. It is only in the dialogue between them, that we come close to biblical missional activity and spirituality, as illustrated below.
Since the combination of yellow and blue on the color chart does make green, it’s a clever way to think about missional spaces. They are green spaces. And missional Christians might rightly be referred to as green people. In a green space, story and context, the individual and the communal, the interior world and the exterior world, the
religious and the non-religious, find genuine meeting.
Missional Church is a reversing of the three mistakes made by the Current Church Model (attractional, dualistic, hierarchical).
The Missional Churches main three principles are:
1. The missional church is incarnational, not attractional, in its ecclesiology. By incarnational we mean it does not create sanctified spaces into which unbelievers must come to encounter the gospel. Rather, the missional church disassembles itself and seeps into the cracks and crevices of a society in order to be Christ to those who don’t yet know him.
2. The missional church is messianic in its spirituality. That is, it adopts the worldview and practices of Jesus the Messiah, rather than that of the Greco-Roman empire. Instead of seeing the world as divided between the sacred (religious) and profane (nonreligious), like Christ it sees the world and God’s place in it as
more holistic and integrated.
3. The missional church adopts an apostolic mode of leadership, rather than a one-dimensional top-down. By apostolic we mean a mode of leadership that recognizes the fivefold model detailed by Paul in Ephesians. It abandons the triangular hierarchies of the traditional church and embraces a biblical, flatter leadership community that unleashes the gifts of evangelism, apostleship, and prophecy, as well as the currently popular pastoral and teaching gifts.
We believe the missional genius of the church can only be unleashed when there are foundational changes made to the church’s very DNA, and this means addressing core issues like ecclesiology, spirituality, and leadership. It means a complete shift away from Christendom thinking, which is attractional, dualistic, and hierarchical
religious and the non-religious, find genuine meeting.
Missional Church is a reversing of the three mistakes made by the Current Church Model (attractional, dualistic, hierarchical).
The Missional Churches main three principles are:
1. The missional church is incarnational, not attractional, in its ecclesiology. By incarnational we mean it does not create sanctified spaces into which unbelievers must come to encounter the gospel. Rather, the missional church disassembles itself and seeps into the cracks and crevices of a society in order to be Christ to those who don’t yet know him.
2. The missional church is messianic in its spirituality. That is, it adopts the worldview and practices of Jesus the Messiah, rather than that of the Greco-Roman empire. Instead of seeing the world as divided between the sacred (religious) and profane (nonreligious), like Christ it sees the world and God’s place in it as
more holistic and integrated.
3. The missional church adopts an apostolic mode of leadership, rather than a one-dimensional top-down. By apostolic we mean a mode of leadership that recognizes the fivefold model detailed by Paul in Ephesians. It abandons the triangular hierarchies of the traditional church and embraces a biblical, flatter leadership community that unleashes the gifts of evangelism, apostleship, and prophecy, as well as the currently popular pastoral and teaching gifts.
We believe the missional genius of the church can only be unleashed when there are foundational changes made to the church’s very DNA, and this means addressing core issues like ecclesiology, spirituality, and leadership. It means a complete shift away from Christendom thinking, which is attractional, dualistic, and hierarchical