Chapter 20 CENTERING THE MISSIONAL CHURCH

Though a clear and valuable benefit exists in identifying the common ground of the missional church, the range of differences among various definitions and viewpoints is great, and many aspects of the visions for “missional living” contradict each other. Everyone involved in the missional conversation concludes that others are making significant errors, and I am no different in this regard. As I have observed the ongoing conversation about the missional church and tested many of these ideas as a practitioner, I have three primary concerns with the way some segments of the missional conversation are appropriating the core insights outlined at the end of the previous chapter. We need to learn how to discern and avoid each of these problems if we are to be effective in developing a ministry with a Center Church orientation.

PROBLEM #1: NOT COMPREHENSIVE ENOUGH

First, we examine the branch of the conversation that sees the missional church as simply being evangelistic. I agree that any missional church must be pervasively, intensely evangelistic in the common use of the word - we must call people to personal conversion. However, the typical evangelical gospel presentation is too shallow. It speaks cursorily about a God whom we have sinned against, a Savior who died for our sins, and a call to believe in this Savior. The simplicity of this communication presumes that those listening share the same essential understanding of the words God and sin as the speaker.

But what if a growing majority of people outside the church live by such a radically different view of life that much of what is now said and done by the Christian community is inexplicable or even deeply offensive to them? What if many listeners hold a profoundly different understanding of the concepts of God, truth, right and wrong, freedom, virtue, and sin? What if their approaches to reality, human nature and destiny, and human community are wholly different from our own?

For decades, this has been the situation facing Christian churches in many areas around the world — places such as India, Iran, and Japan. Evangelism in these environments involves a lengthy process in which nonbelievers have to be invited into a Christian community that bridges the gap between Christian truth and the culture around it. Every part of a church’s life — its worship, community, public discourse, preaching, and education — has to assume the presence of nonbelievers from the surrounding culture. The aesthetics of its worship have to reflect the sensibilities of the culture and yet show how Christian belief shapes and is expressed through them. Its preaching and teaching have to show how the hopes of this culture’s people can find fulfillment only in Christ. Most of all, such a congregation’s believers have to reflect the demographic makeup of the surrounding community, thereby giving non-Christian neighbors attractive and challenging glimpses of what they would look like as Christians.

One reason much of the evangelical church in the United States has not yet experienced the same precipitous decline as the Protestant churches of Europe and Canada is that, unlike these places, the U.S. still includes sizable remnants of Christendom. We have places where the informal public culture (though not the formal public institutions) still stigmatizes non-Christian beliefs and behavior. There is, according to journalist Michael Wolff, a “fundamental schism in American cultural, political, and economic life. There’s the quicker-growing, economically vibrant … morally relativist, urban-oriented, culturally adventuresome, sexually polymorphous, and ethnically diverse nation … And there’s the small-town, nuclear-family, religiously oriented, white-centric other America, [with] … its diminishing cultural and economic force… two countries.”1

To reach this growing post-Christendom society in the West will obviously take more than what we ordinarily call an evangelistic church; it will take a missional church. This church’s worship is missional in that it makes sense to nonbelievers in that culture, even while it challenges and shapes Christians with the gospel.2 Its people are missional in that they are so outwardly focused, so involved in addressing the needs of the local community, that the church is well-known for its compassion. The members of a missional church also know how to contextualize the gospel, carefully challenging yet also appealing to the baseline cultural narratives of the society around them.3 Finally, because of the attractiveness of its people’s character and lives, a missional church will always have some outsiders who are drawn into its community to incubate and explore the Christian faith in its midst.

So the idea that “to be missional is to be evangelistic” is too narrow. A missional church is not less than an evangelistic church, but it is much more.

PROBLEM #2: TOO TIED TO A PARTICULAR FORM

A second major problem is the tendency to put too much emphasis on a particular church form. Many who participate in missional church discussions insist that the church should be incarnational rather than attractional.4 If taken as a broad principle, this is a correct statement. That is, if an attractional church is understood as tribal, as showing little concern for the broader community, drawing people in from the world and absorbing them into internal church programs that only meet their felt needs rather than equipping them to serve — then a missional church should not be attractional. 5 And if incarnational can be defined as a church that listens to its community to learn what its needs are, speaks and interacts with its community with respect, equips and sends its people out to love and serve - then all missional churches should be incarnational.

However, many argue that any church that bases its ministry on bringing people in to a large weekly meeting cannot be missional. David Fitch, a pastor in the missional community Life on the Vine, writes the following about megachurches:

Mega-church… packages a service to speak a message that they assume can make sense to anonymous guests. Missional assumes the opposite — that people have no language or history by which to understand the words “Jesus is Lord.” Therefore we must incarnate/embody the gospel for it to make sense. A packaged entertaining speaker/program every Sunday simply cannot do the job of communicating the gospel in post-Christendom.

Fitch asserts that non-Christians in a post-Christian society will be so completely unable to understand the gospel that any mere verbal presentation of it will not be compelling or understood. In addition, he argues that any church that focuses on a large weekly gathering will by necessity require too much time and money for the church to be missional. For Fitch, to be missional is “to spend most of one’s time and ministry outside the four walls of a church building, inhabiting a neighborhood learning who they are, what they do, and where the spiritual/ holistic needs are. Its rhythm contradicts the rhythm of an attractional church.”7

Many believe, along with Fitch, that a missional church cannot take the form of a large church or even of a small traditional church that is centered on a weekly worship and preaching service. Those who hold this view organize either as small house churches (ten to fifty people) with bivocational pastors and leaders or as a network of midsize house churches that gather for larger “attractional” meetings occasionally.

MISSIONAL COMMUNITIES
A practical resource for creating a missional church is Mike Breen’s Launching Missional Communities: A Field Guide.& Key attributes of a missional community include:

Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch address this model:
Most of the emerging churches we have been able to uncover are quite intentional about developing smaller communities … It is also much closer to New Testament ecclesiology and missions practice. The household church unit was the primary unit of missional community in the New Testament. Today whether they meet in homes like the contemporary house church movement or not is irrelevant. What is important is that they tend to be smaller, more diverse, less organized, life-oriented, missional, relational, faith communities, not requiring their own specialized churchy buildings.2

I believe this view presents too rigid an understanding of the missional church. I pastored a small church in a small, working-class town for nearly ten years. My church naturally had the kind of characteristics that house churches are seeking to create through intentional planning. Missional communities seek to re-create the oikos - the large, extended family of children, grandchildren, relatives, business associates, and neighbors that constituted most churches in the New Testament — and insist that ministry should be informal, relational, and organic.10

However, the midsized groups that are gathered into missional communities are not truly oikoi. They are usually not related to each other by a variety of blood ties, do not work in the same shops and plants, have not gone to the same schools, and have not belonged to the same clubs and civic organizations — which is how people in a small town know one another. The Christians in my church did not have to find ways to know their geographic neighbors; they were already deeply enmeshed with them. All the believers lived within a few miles of one another and rarely moved out of the area. We ate together, spent lots of time in each other’s homes, and were deeply involved in each other’s lives apart from Sunday services. And because of these durable and multivalent relationships, a great deal of outreach, pastoral care, fellowship, and community service did indeed happen organically through relationships. In short, small churches in small towns have, in general, the kind of relationships with each other and the surrounding community that missional communities seek to forge.

For more than twenty years, I’ve led a very large church in Manhattan in which we have significant mobility and turnover and in which people learn, do ministry, and are cared for mainly through large-scale programs. My conclusion? Both churches had seasons of evangelistic fruitfulness. In many cases, the traditional gathered church does tend to draw people “inside the walls” instead of sending and supporting Christians out to minister in their networks of relationships. However, in my own experience, my large urban congregation-particularly in its first decade - was, by and large, far more effective than the small church I served in reaching unchurched and non-Christian people. In the final analysis, I don’t believe any single form of church (small or large, cell group based or midsize community based) is intrinsically better at growing spiritual fruit, reaching nonbelievers, caring for people, and producing Christ-shaped lives. I say “in the final analysis” because each approach to church—the small, organic, simple incarnational church, and the large, organizational, complex attractional church has vastly different strengths and weaknesses, limitations and capabilities.

Alan Roxburgh, in his role as a consultant, finds that one of the first questions people ask him is this: “Can you show me a missional church model?”11 They want a specific way of doing church, with a concrete pattern they can emulate. He rejects the very question, and so should we. Look again at the outline of the features of an effective missional church (pp. 256-58). Those features can be present or absent within any church model and size. Nearly any type of church may embrace or resist these features, though in different ways. All kinds are thriving; and all kinds are failing.

So the idea that “the missional church is the smaller house church” is shortsighted.

PROBLEM #3: LOSS OF A CLEAR UNDERSTANDING OF THE GOSPEL

My third and greatest concern is that, while all missional church books use the term gospel constantly, it is obvious they do not mean the same thing by the term. This is a very serious problem. It is especially true of those who see being missional primarily in communal/reciprocal terms (though it occurs in the other categories as well).

The final result of God’s redeeming work in Christ will be a completely renewed cosmos-a new heaven and a new earth. Therefore we can say that God is out not only to pardon and save our souls but also to heal all the ways sin has ruined the creation. However, some stress this aspect of God’s saving program to the virtual exclusion of any attention to individual conversion. The reason is, as we have seen, that many redefine sin and salvation in completely corporate or horizontal terms. In their view, sin is mainly the selfishness, pride, greed, and violence that destroy community and God’s creation. Accordingly, Christ’s redemption is primarily the defeat of the forces of evil in the world that cause the harm, and the Spirit’s application of this redemption is by means of tearing down barriers and moving toward a human society of sharing, egalitarianism, and mutuality. Finally, becoming a Christian is not about being reconciled to God through repentance and faith but about joining the new community that is at work to bring about a world of peace and justice. The classic doctrines regarding sin — as an offense against God’s holiness that incurs his righteous wrath, as Christ propitiating God’s wrath and taking our punishment as our substitute, and as the “great exchange” of our sin being placed on Jesus and his righteousness being placed on us — are rejected as too individualistic and as a contributing reason for the church’s failure to become missional. Of course, as we have observed many times in this book, sin has a devastating effect on our corporate life, and Christ’s redemption surely will eventually restore creation, but when these traditional doctrines of sin and atonement are discarded, the corporate dimension virtually eliminates the call for individual repentance, faith, and conversion.

REWORKING THE DOCTRINE OF SALVATION
While we cannot unpack all of the theological assumptions that underlie the reworking of the concept of salvation into corporate terms, one premise, it seems to me, is a one-dimensional view of the kingdom of God. According to Geerhardus Vos (see pp. 229 – 30), the kingdom of God is “the realm of God’s saving grace” that is entered by the individual through the new birth. The doctrine that we are justified through faith in Jesus’ finished work—not our own—can easily be put in kingdom terms. Jesus is “King” of our salvation - he fully accomplishes it; we contribute nothing. Vos then notes that the kingdom of God is also “a realm of righteousness, justice, and blessing” that has a social-future dimension.

Many today seem to place all the stress on the social dimension of the kingdom, which they pit against the idea of salvation through Christ’s imputed righteousness. Another premise is a belief in the social Trinity, a view that puts much more emphasis on the three-ness of God than his unity and stresses God as a nonhierarchical, loving community rather than emphasizing his holiness.12 Finally, those who do this redefining of the doctrine of salvation often embrace a background belief in the Barthian understanding of all humans as elect in Christ and therefore not under God’s judicial wrath.

It should be acknowledged that the writers in this category continually speak of individual and corporate redemption in such phrases as “not only individual salvation but also” or “more than individual salvation” as a way of indicating that they are not denying or changing traditional evangelism but rather adding to it. But upon reflection, I find that the individual and corporate aspects of salvation, mission, and Christian living are often pitted against one another, and the individual aspect nearly eliminated. These doctrinal shifts result in a very different way of understanding a local church’s mission. As mentioned in chapter 5, using the concept of sphere sovereignty, it is best to think of the organized church’s primary function as evangelizing and equipping people to be disciples and then sending the “organic church” - Christians at work in the world—to engage culture, do justice, and restore God’s shalom. In many expositions of the missional church, this distinction virtually disappears.13

Most important, this overly corporate definition of sin and salvation results in a very different way of doing evangelism. Let me give one example. This way of reconceiving sin and redemption (as corporate and horizontal rather than as individual and vertical) was given popular-level expression by Dieter Zander, a pioneer of the emerging church. In an article titled “Abducted by an Alien Gospel,” he relates how his aunt shared the gospel with him when he was a child. She said, “If you are lying, you are committing a sin. If you die tonight without having your sins forgiven, you will go to hell.” That night, Zander asked Jesus to forgive all his sins and come into his life, and he went to bed sure of eternal life.

After moving as an adult to the San Francisco area, Zander tried talking to a Jewish neighbor about Christianity. What he shared was essentially what he had known of the gospel since childhood: “God loves us, but we’ve all sinned. God sent Jesus to pay for our sins, and if we trust in Jesus’ payment, God will forgive our sins and give us eternal life.” But as he spoke, he not only found his gospel presentation ineffective; he found himself thinking, “This just doesn’t sound like good news.”

Going back to Scripture, he came to realize that the heart of Jesus’ gospel was “the kingdom of God.” And what was this? “The arrival of a different kind of life, under the reign of a present and powerful God who, according to another version of Jesus’ good news in Luke 4, was intent upon restoring, healing, redeeming, and reconciling all of creation.” Here Zander follows the basic contours of the missio Dei. With his new understanding of the kingdom of God as a “different kind of life” and the restoration of all creation, he redesigned his gospel presentation and returned to his Jewish friend:

I no longer believe that being a Christian is just a matter of having my sins forgiven … The good news that Jesus announced is that we can live our lives with God—which is the best kind of life that is humanly possible. We don’t have to live life alone — taking care of ourselves, being afraid that we don’t have what we’ll need, being intimidated and controlled by things in our life that we can’t seem to change, wondering if there’s anything or anyone who can make sense of the whole thing.

Jesus’ message is, simply, “Turn around and step into a life with God, the kind of life I lived and invite you to live with me.”

When we accept Jesus’ invitation, believe that what he is saying is true, and follow him with our whole life, we experience freedom from past sins and future fears, along with contentment, joy, love, and power today. 14

Zander reports that his neighbor responded more positively this time. He concludes his article by saying that we must “bring to people the same message that Jesus brought: the offer of life with God and the invitation to be his coworker in what he is doing in the world.”

This article vividly captures how our conception of missio Dei will play a significant role in what we actually share with people as the gospel. The gospel of Zander’s childhood (let’s call it the AG for “alien gospel”) was indeed inadequate. First, the AG offers an extremely thin concept of sin. Sin is seen as merely breaking the rules, for which you need forgiveness. There is no hint of sin as the deep and settled bent of the heart toward self-salvation and idolatry. Because the AG’s account of sin is so shallow, listeners do not get the sense either that their sin is deeply unfair, wrong, and offensive to God or that it is profoundly destructive of their own lives. Instead, this view of sin as “rule breaking” leads listeners to see that their only problem is the legal consequences of the sin they face from the Divine Enforcer. Nothing in this presentation shows sin as intrinsically wrong, hateful, destructive, and shameful in itself.

As a result of this thin view of sin, the AG does not really clarify the classic gospel distinction between grace and works, between faith in Christ’s saving work and faith in our own saving work. The average hearer of the AG will see themselves as saved, not primarily because of Jesus’ death on the cross, but because they are sincerely submitting to God and begging for mercy and resolving to live a better life. Essentially, they do not see themselves as moving from faith in their own moral efforts (whether as secular or religious persons) to faith and rest in Christ’s saving work. Rather, they see themselves as moving from living bad lives to living better ones. Their sins are forgiven, and God accepts them because they are now living for Jesus - not the other way around.

When we look at Zander’s redesign of the gospel (let’s call it the KG for “kingdom gospel”), we find that it doesn’t actually change this pattern at all. First, there is still no mention of the cross or why it was necessary for Jesus to die. In fact, there is no mention of Jesus’ saving work at all. The emphasis is not on Jesus as substitute but on Jesus as a model of living a particular kind of courageous and loving life (“step into … the kind of life I lived and invite you to live with me”). Second, in order to receive both forgiveness of sins and power within, we must “believe that what he is saying is true, and follow him with our whole life.” Instead of being invited to believe and rest in the saving work of Christ, there is an invitation to stop living in one way and start living in another. The listener to Zander’s gospel can easily conclude the same thing they did when they heard the AG: “If I live in the right way, then I’ll be forgiven and accepted.”

In the end, the AG and the KG are not much different. Both of them tell you that Jesus died for your sins and that you need to receive that forgiveness. So far, so good. But both messages fail to present the offensiveness, depth, and destructiveness of sin, and therefore they miss the “sharp point” of the gospel’s spear - the distinction between grace and works, between embracing Jesus as your Savior and merely using him to be your own savior. As we have shown at length earlier in this book, it is understanding and applying this distinction that creates the power for life change. People who believe they are accepted by God because they are leading a traditionally moral, chaste, and good life or because they are living a life of sacrificial service for the needs of the world will be equally insecure, unable to take criticism, prone to look down on people who are not “getting it right,” and unsure of God’s love or of their identity in Christ. Both are still essentially enslaved to the bonds of works-righteousness. It doesn’t matter if it takes a traditional, conservative, moralistic form or a culturally progressive, justice-oriented, kingdom- restoration form.

Evangelicals who describe the gospel as Dieter Zander does will almost always, when asked, profess belief in a traditional understanding of justification by faith. But many others — proponents of the missional church who are outside of the evangelical tradition—have rejected its traditional views of justification and substitutionary atonement. Many will say that talking about the wrath of God and the need for justification simply doesn’t work today. Postmodern people, they say, won’t find the doctrine of justification by grace compelling because they perceive God, if he exists at all, as someone who accepts them as they are without any need for atonement or radical grace. In the KG presentation, people are called, not to be reconciled to God, but to step out of a life of fear and self-absorption into a life of reliance on God and service to others. You are left with the impression that God has no problem with you — you are just shortchanging yourself by failing to belong to his movement. There is no real barrier to be overcome between you and God, other than your reluctance to join his work. I struggle to see how this approach differs in essence from the AG — the classic “salvation by works” way of understanding salvation. It is salvation by a different kind of works. Instead of offering a contextually sensitive starting place for a gospel presentation, it gives us an entirely different definition of salvation altogether, one that is by works rather than by grace.

It naturally follows that this understanding of sin leads to a different understanding of conversion. Traditional Protestantism believed that conversion was more than simply the adoption of a new set of values; it was seen as a radical change in inner identity. The driving motivation of your life was now rooted in grateful wonder and in love for the One who did so much for you. The old motivations of fear and pride were swept away by God’s radical grace. But all of this is muted in the kingdom presentation. When someone hears the KG gospel of submitting to Jesus as Lord and joining his kingdom community, how can they sing Charles Wesley’s cathartic refrain from “And Can It Be That I Should Gain”?

My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

What chains? Set free from what, exactly? The biblical gospel brings people to see their peril in light of God’s holiness while simultaneously becoming aware of the costly and amazing sacrifice of Jesus, who took upon himself the punishment we deserve. If this is muted in our gospel presentations, we also mute that sense of wonder at the astonishing love of Jesus, the one who has rescued us. D. A. Carson, in a lengthy review article of various authors who share many similarities with the views of Lesslie Newbigin, David Bosch, and Darrell Guder, wrote the following:

We have repeatedly seen how the “story” of God’s advancing kingdom is cast in terms of rescuing human beings and completing creation, or perhaps in terms of defeating the powers of darkness. Not for a moment do I want to reduce or minimize those themes. Yet from what are human beings to be rescued? Their sin, yes; the powers of darkness; yes. But what is striking is the utter absence of any mention of the wrath of God. This is not a minor omission. Section after section of the Bible’s story turns on the fact that God’s image bearers attract God’s righteous wrath. The entire created order is under God’s curse because of human sin. Sin is not first and foremost horizontal, social (though of course it is all of that): it is vertical, the defiance of Almighty God. The sin which most consistently is said to bring down God’s wrath on the heads of his people or on entire nations is idolatry—the de-godding of God. And it is the overcoming of this most fundamental sin that the cross and resurrection of Jesus achieve. The most urgent need of human beings is to be reconciled to God. That is not to deny that such reconciliation entails reconciliation with other human beings, and transformed living in God’s fallen creation, in anticipation of the final transformation at the time of the consummation of all things. But to speak constantly of the advance of the kingdom without tying kingdom themes to the passion narrative, the way the canonical Gospels do, is a terrible reductionism.15

Carson’s point is vital. There are most definitely corporate and horizontal aspects in both sin and redemption. These biblical concepts are deep, comprehensive, and far-reaching. But if in the effort to bring these horizontal aspects out more clearly we deny the classic doctrines of grace, then the result will be a destructive imbalance. The classic Protestant understanding of the gospel includes the notion that God is holy and we are under his wrath and curse, but that Jesus bore in our place that wrath, curse, and punishment. When we repent and believe in him, we are given both pardon and Christ’s righteousness. This electrifying experience of God’s grace makes a Christian passionate for doing justice - for pursuing the horizontal aspects of the gospel. A Christian’s zeal for justice comes from a transformed identity that flows from a grasp of the gospel — a gospel proclaiming that salvation is by faith alone, not by works.

THE MARKS OF A MISSIONAL CHURCH

Where does this bring us? I am arguing that a church can robustly preach and teach the classic evangelical doctrines and still be missional. That is, it can still have a missionary encounter with Western culture and reach and disciple unchurched, nontraditional nonbelievers in our society. How so?

1. A missional church, if it is to have a missionary encounter with Western culture, will need to confront society’s idols and especially address how modernity makes the happiness and self-actualization of the individual into an absolute. One of the manifestations of this idol is materialism — consumerism and greed that lead to injustice. As we have seen, many believe that in order to have this confrontation we must recast the gospel, but as I explained elsewhere at length, the classic messages of substitutionary atonement and forensic justification provide both a strong theological basis and a powerful internal motivation to live more simply and to do justice in the world.16 Rejecting these doctrines, then, does not aid us in this encounter with Western culture. In fact, nothing challenges and confronts the modern idolization of the “expressive, autonomous individual” like the simple and ancient gospel message that we all are sinners under God’s wrath who need to repent and submit to him.

A WESTERN CULTURE APOLOGETIC When Lesslie Newbigin spoke of a “missionary encounter” with the West, he included the idea of apologetics — of making a case. Almost all people in the contemporary missional conversation cite Newbigin’s call for the church to be a “contrast community,” but they generally ignore what he said about engaging people intellectually. Many missional theorists today say that using arguments and reason to persuade people simply will not work in a postmodern situation. Instead, people will be won by the quality of our community and the vividness of our stories. But just as all people are unavoidably emotional beings, they are also unavoidably rational beings. It is obvious that the most forceful enemies of Christianity—the “new atheists”-use reason to undermine the faith, and these arguments are having some effect.

Newbigin believed that Christians need to expose the myth of the modern world—that a person can jettison any faith in God and rest only on science and naturalism, and yet still have meaning in life, a basis for human dignity, moral consensus, hope for the future, strength of character, shared values, and a strong community. A Western cultural apologetic means showing the world that it cannot have these things without faith in God. 17

2. A missional church, if it is to reach people in a post-Christian culture, must recognize that most of our more recently formulated and popular gospel presentations will fall on deaf ears because hearers will be viscerally offended or simply unable to understand the basic concepts of God, sin, and redemption. This fact does not, however, require a change in the classic Christian doctrines, but rather skillfulness in contextualizing them so our gospel presentations are compelling even to people who are not (yet) fully persuaded by them. Within Christendom, it was possible to simply exhort Christianized people to do what they knew they should do. As I explained at length in part 3, Christian communicators now must enter, challenge, and retell the culture’s stories with the gospel. And, as I argued there, it is the traditional gospel of salvation by sheer grace that gives us both the internal confidence and the humility to do contextualization.

3. A missional church will affirm that all Christians are people in mission in every area of their lives. We must overcome the clericalism and lay passivity of the Christendom era and recover the Reformation doctrine of “the priesthood of all believers.” Again we can see that classic doctrines of salvation do not obscure this critical idea. Its great proponent was Martin Luther, who associated this “ministry egalitarianism” with the doctrine of free justification rather than through works and merit, which can lead to a hierarchical view that ministry is only for the holy and for those removed from the world. 18 To be missional today requires that lay Christians be equipped by their churches to do three things: (1) to be a verbal witness to the gospel in their webs of relationships, (2) to love their neighbors and do justice within their neighborhoods and city, and (3) to integrate their faith with their work in order to engage culture through their vocations. A missional church will be more deeply and practically committed to deeds of compassion and social justice than traditional fundamentalist churches and more deeply and practically committed to evangelism and conversion than traditional liberal churches. This kind of church is profoundly counterintuitive to American observers, who are no longer able to categorize (and dismiss) it as liberal or conservative. Only this kind of church has any chance in the non-Christian West. A church that equips its people in this way will not only be something like a lay seminary in discipleship and training; it will also find ways to strongly support the people in their ministering “outside the walls” of the church. 19 This aspect of missional ministry is so important that I am devoting the next chapter to it.

4. A missional church must understand itself as a servant community — a counterculture for the common good. For centuries in the West, churches could limit themselves to specifically “religious” concerns and function as loose fellowships within a wider semi-Christian culture. Now, however, becoming a Christian involves a much more radical break with the surrounding non-Christian culture. The church can no longer be an association or a club but is a “thick” alternate human society in which relationships are strong and deep -and in which sex and family, wealth and possessions, racial identity and power, are all used and practiced in godly and distinct ways. However, while the Christian church must be distinct, it must be set within, not be separated from, its surroundings. Its neighbors must see it as a servant society, sacrificially pouring out its time and wealth for the common good of the city.

Here again I would argue that this emphasis on deep and countercultural community is not undermined by the classic Reformation doctrines of justification and imputation but rather is enhanced by them. No one has argued more compellingly for this than Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his classic Life Together.20 As Bonhoeffer shows, the gospel decenters the ego and clears the way not only for far deeper and more transparent relationships between Christians (helping to make the church a contrast community) but also for humble, servant relationships with people who do not share our beliefs. The sacrificial service of a missional church will show the world, then, a “third way” between the individualistic self-absorption that secularism can breed and the tribal self-righteousness that religion can breed.

DISCOURSE IN THE VERNACULAR In Christendom, there is little difference between the language inside and outside the church. Documents of the early United States Congress, for example, were riddled with allusions to and references from the Bible, and at that time even nonchurchgoers understood theological terms. In a missional church, however, terms must be explained, and we should always assume that nonbelieving people are present. If we speak as if our whole neighborhood is present (not just Christians), eventually more and more of our neighbors will find their way in or be invited there.

So missional churches must seek to intentionally avoid tribal jargon, stylized and archaic language for prayer and worship, “we/they” language, disdainful jokes that mock people who hold different political and religious beliefs, and dismissive or disrespectful comments about those who differ with them. Churches seeking to discourse in the vernacular avoid both sentimentality and hype. Instead, their communication should be marked by gentle humor and honest realism about the leaders’ and the church’s weaknesses and mistakes, yet seasoned with a ground note of joy and hope that never diminishes. And unless all of their speech flows out of truly humble and bold, gospel- changed hearts, it will be seen as nothing more than marketing and spin.

THE CHURCH’S ROLE IN SEEKING JUSTICE I have argued in Generous Justice and elsewhere in this volume that while the mission of the gathered (institutional) church is to proclaim the gospel of individual salvation, to win people to Christ and form disciples, yet the will of God for the church dispersed― Christians living in the world — is to minister in both word and deed, to do evangelism and to do justice. If the latter does not minister in both word and deed, no one will listen to the gospel preached by the former.

So in the end, the missional church sends its people out as agents of justice in the world. However, we need to be more careful than those who see social reform as the church’s job - a view that usually leads to the politicization of the church in which it becomes identified with particular political parties and causes. Ross Douthat argues that this error has contributed to the decline of orthodox Christianity.21

5. A missional church must be, in a sense, “porous.” That is, it should expect nonbelievers, inquirers, and seekers to be involved in most aspects of the church’s life and ministry — in worship, small and midsize groups, and service projects in the neighborhood. A missional church knows how to welcome doubters and graciously include them as much as possible in community so they can see the gospel fleshed out in life and process the gospel message through numerous personal interactions.22 This will only happen if all of the above ingredients are in place and if believers inside the church are themselves “contextual” — that is, culturally like yet spiritually unlike the people in the surrounding neighborhood and culture.23 A missional church, then, does not depend on an evangelism program or department to do outreach. Almost all parts of the church’s life must be ready to respond to the presence of people who do not yet believe.

6. A missional church should practice Christian unity on the local level as much as possible. In the heyday of Christendom, churches received definition by contrasting themselves with (and constantly criticizing) other denominations and traditions. Today we should define ourselves more by contrasting ourselves with the world and our surrounding culture. The world must see churches avoiding unnecessary divisions.24

Six Marks of a Missional Church

  1. The church must confront society’s idols.
  2. The church must contextualize skillfully and communicate in the vernacular.
  3. The church must equip people in mission in every area of their lives.
  4. The church must be a counterculture for the common good.
  5. The church must itself be contextualized and should expect nonbelievers, inquirers, and seekers to be involved in most aspects of the church’s life and ministry.

  6. The church must practice unity.

    These six marks of a missional church can exist in both large and small churches of various forms and are strengthened, not weakened, by a clear grasp of the understanding of the gospel that was recaptured by the Protestant Reformers. Most of these marks have been or will be expanded on in other parts of this volume. There is one, however, that I think is the most practical single way a church can implement a missional mind-set — training and equipping the people of the church for ministry. We will focus our attention on that priority in the next chapter.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND REFLECTION

  1. Do you agree with this chapter’s assertion that no “single form of church … is intrinsically better at growing spiritual fruit, reaching nonbelievers, caring for people, and producing Christ-shaped lives?” Be honest about your own biases — which form is most popular in your context? Why? How might this form be adapted to be more missional?
  2. Consider Dieter Zander’s story in which he compares the “alien gospel” and the “kingdom gospel.” How are these two gospels similar to one another? How does the biblical gospel differ from both of them?
  3. Keller writes, “The classic Protestant understanding of the gospel includes the notion that God is holy and we are under his wrath and curse, but that Jesus bore in our place that wrath, curse, and punishment. When we repent and believe in him, we are given both pardon and Christ’s righteousness. This electrifying experience of God’s grace makes a Christian passionate for doing justice- for pursuing the horizontal aspects of the gospel.” Which do you tend to emphasize more in your preaching and teaching, the horizontal or the vertical? How are these two aspects of the gospel connected?
  4. Six marks of a missional church are presented in this chapter. A missional church should:
    • confront society’s idols and address how modernity makes the desires of the individual into an absolute
    • contextualize skillfully and discourse in the vernacular, recognizing that many people are simply unable to understand the basic concepts of God, sin, and redemption
    • recognize that all Christians are people in mission in every area of their lives
    • understand itself as a servant community—a counterculture for the common good