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Missional.

As Ed Stetzer has said, it is a theological junk drawer word. If you want to give the illusion that you are an individual or a church that “gets it,” just slap “missional” in front of it and you are good. Or so one would think.

Let’s try this. Missional church. Missional community. Missional lighting. Well, okay, maybe not missional lighting but you get the idea.

The truth is that, yes, missional finds its impetus in the mission of God or the missio Dei (John 17:18) but missional is not missional without an outworking of the mission of God in orthopraxy. In practice. In real-life, gritty, in-the-trenches operation. No aftereffects, sorry, you’re not missional. You may bloviate but it’s not authentic or integrous.

The majority of those who make up the priesthood of believers are not vocational ministers. That means the primary sphere that most of the Christians in the world are on mission in is their workplace.

For those of us that have worked outside of the confines of the local church, we know the gap that exists between what people know of our faith and what they do not. Living out our Christianity in the workplace is a difficult endeavor.

Below are 30 ways to bless your workplace (read “engage missionally). I think these are brilliant. Read them and maybe find one or two that you can enact in the coming weeks to bring the gospel to bear on your primary mission sphere.

Josh Reeves:

…I have compiled 30 ideas for engaging people in your workplace. The workplace is an everyday context where many people spend the majority of their time. It is important for us to know what it looks like to bring gospel intentionality to our jobs. Hopefully this will help spark a few ideas for connecting with and blessing your coworkers.

1. Instead of eating lunch alone, intentionally eat with other co-workers and learn their story.

2. Get to work early so you can spend some time praying for your co-workers and the day ahead.

3. Make it a daily priority to speak or write encouragement when someone does good work.

4. Bring extra snacks when you make your lunch to give away to others.

5. Bring breakfast (donuts, burritos, cereal, etc.) once a month for everyone in your department.

6. Organize a running/walking group in the before or after work.

7. Have your missional community/small group bring lunch to your workplace once a month.

8. Create a regular time to invite coworkers over or out for drinks.

9. Make a list of your co-workers birthdays and find a way to bless everyone on their birthday.

10. Organize and throw office parties as appropriate to your job.

11. Make every effort to avoid gossip in the office. Be a voice of thanksgiving not complaining.

12. Find others that live near you and create a car pool.

13. Offer to throw a shower for a co-worker who is having a baby.

14. Offer to cover for a co-worker who needs off for something.

15. Start a regular lunch out with co-workers (don’t be selective on the invites).

16. Organize a weekly/monthly pot luck to make lunch a bit more exciting.

17. Ask someone who others typically ignore if you can grab them a soda/coffee while you’re out.

18. Be the first person to greet and welcome new people.

19. Make every effort to know the names of co-workers and clients along with their families.

20. Visit coworkers when they are in the hospital.

21. Bring sodas or work appropriate drinks to keep in your break room for coworkers to enjoy. Know what your co-workers like.

22. Go out of your way to talk to your janitors and cleaning people who most people overlook.

23. Find out your co-workers favorite music and make a playlist that includes as much as you can (if suitable for work).

24. Invite your co-workers in to the service projects you are already involved in.

25. Start/join a city league team with your co-workers.

26. Organize a weekly co-working group for local entrepreneurs at a local coffee shop.

27. Start a small business that will bless your community and create space for mission.

28. Work hard to reconcile co-workers who are fighting with one another.

29. Keep small candy, gum, or little snacks around to offer to others during a long day.

30. Lead the charge in organizing others to help co-workers in need.


One of today’s brightest thinkers on the issue of missional communities is Jeff Vanderstelt, lead pastor of Soma Communities and Vice President of the Acts 29 Network.

Recently, Jeff sat down with Scott Thomas, president of A29, and shared his thoughts on the ethos of missional communities and the interviews were posted on the A29 blog. Watch these four videos and let them challenge your thoughts about what being in community and mission look like:

Life on Mission

Life on Mission from Acts 29 Network on Vimeo.

Being on Mission Together

Being on Mission Together from Acts 29 Network on Vimeo.

How To Share Your Faith

How to Share Your Faith from Acts 29 Network on Vimeo.

A Life That Needs Gospel Explanation

A Life That Needs Gospel Explanation from Acts 29 Network on Vimeo.


For all the adjectives out there to describe the church – total church, deep church, simple church, essential church – I’m convinced that for those planting organically, the only adjective that fits is “slow.”

(As a general rule, organic planting is moving from a core to a crowd vs. a crowd to a core; for more on this, see Ed Stetzer’s Breaking the Missional Code: Your Church Can Become a Missionary in Your Community, Chapter 11 “Planting Missional Ministries”)

I’m not the first to come up with this idea. Tim Chester recently wrote on this and it really hit home. He says:

In recent years we have been offered all sorts of options for church: organic church, messy church, simply church, total church.

Let me add another: slow church.

There is a slow food movement that extols the merits of hand-cooked food made from local ingredients cooked for as long as takes – an antidote to fast food. The slow food movement has extended so that people are advocating slow cities.

I’ve reading through Proverbs over the past few weeks and have been struck by how many call for us to slow down.

I think Tim is onto something…

Planting organically is a very different approach than the traditional form of planting. Traditional planting isn’t wrong – it is a way – just as organic planting is. And yes, these are very general terms. But I’m finding that planting organically is, well, slow.

Echoing our experience, a church planter tells of how slow church looks in practice:

–not worrying when the church is apparently growing slowly, or not at all
–learning to value and be thankful to God for the ‘small’ actions of his grace: The idea grasped in a bible study, the godly resolution of a…conflict, the provision of work, the opportunity to bless our neighbors by doing their garden, the chances to speak about Jesus in the workplace, the unity in song, the growth in a desire to see people come to know Jesus, opportunities to look after each other, the conversation…
–praying for God to act to bring change and for the Spirit to open eyes to the truth of gospel
–our interventions in one another’s lives being focused on lovingly commending the good news of the gospel, rather than driving only at behavioral outcomes
–patience and persistence in prayer
–joy and hope coming not from activity or success ( which struggles when faced with a quiet life or failure) but from knowing the Lord Jesus
–learning to be thankful for the people God has put you with…

I think if I had to sum up the difference between the two approaches, it would have to be the issue of the “buffer.”

In the organic model, there is no stage, no lights + sound systems, and very little space between the leader and the community.

Instead…

There is a living room.

There are strangers facing one another, beginning to work through the uncomfortable stages of community.

There is lots of conversation.

There is a leader – but he is more of a harmonizer, integrating his vision with burgeoning vision of the community.

In short, there is very little “buffer.”

Here is what I think (in my humble opinion): The secret to developing concrete community in the infancy of a church may be found in the lack of a buffer.

I have nothing against preaching, corporate worship, preview services, etc. but if church leaders generally agree that 80% of true discipleship and spiritual growth come from smaller groupings [1], I’m afraid we might be skipping over something so essential in the formative stages of a church that may be difficult to backtrack and find again.

We think how you start means everything. It says a lot about who you want to be and how you want to be known.

We think whether you are a part of an established church or trying to birth a new church community, the end game is to be in rhythmic gospel formation in the context of community on mission. Everything else is periphery.

So we are choosing little to no buffer for the sake of instilling the DNA of deep gospel formation in community. It’s messy and measured. And there is no question that this means the birth of mercyview will be a slow simmer.

And that is just fine.

==============

[1] Dan Kimball, Emerging Worship: Creating Worship Gatherings for New Generations (El Cajon, CA: emergentYS, 2004), 29.

Photo by KaiChanVong // reprinted under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license


“We do not need to tell people the whole gospel every time we get the chance. This is because evangelism is not an event, but a lifestyle. It takes place in the context of an on-going relationship in which other opportunities will arise. We believe God is the great orchestrator of mission. So we look for opportunities to talk about Jesus, but we need not be overbearing when those opportunities arise.”

-Tim Chester, “Answering People’s Questions” from his blog, Reformed Spirituality and Missional Church

Photo by russeljsmith (covered under Creative Commons/Attribution 2.0 Generic)


Must-watch videos for missional conspirators:


10 VERY helpful tips for missional community leaders from Nate Navarro, Director of Missional Community @ Austin City Life in Austin, TX:

1. Know God
2. Know your people
3. Know your neighborhood
4. Don’t go alone
5. Say who you are (and who you aren’t) every week
6. Get out of the living room
7. Live missionally
8. Eat, laugh, pray, and serve together
9. Share your stories
10. Come to serve (not just be served) on Sundays

Read the entire post here and see how Nate expounds on each of these tips…


In a recent post, J.D. Payne, Associate Professor of Church Planting and Evangelism in the Billy Graham School of Missions and Evangelism at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, talks about finding a “person of peace” — a concept that finds support from passages such as Luke 10:5-6; John 4:28-30, 39-42; Mark 5:18-20; and Acts 10:24; 16:15, 30-34; 18:8.

Payne says this:

The concept generally refers to the first few people who come to faith and are able to carry the gospel faster and farther throughout the population than the church planting team.

When approaching a large population segment, people group, etc., the church planting team should not be asking the question, “How can we personally evangelize all of these people?” Rather, they should be asking, “How can we reach a few people with the gospel, and equip and return them (Eph 4:11-12) to reach their families, friends, and acquaintances?”

Due to the landscape of post-Christendom in North America, church planters now find themselves as essentially missionaries as they plant the gospel in their mission field. To assist the planter-missionary in locating a “person of peace,” Payne encourages people to use the P.A.W. approach: Pray, Act, Watch.

Payne again:

Though this paradigm is not a linear model–but rather all three aspects, at times, are happening simultaneously–for the sake of explanation, I will address each aspect individually.

Read Payne’s description of the P.A.W. approach here.


extract’d

monkeybars

Children come into the world in a condition of complete dependence. They cannot operate as self-sufficient, independent agents unless their parents give up much of their own independence and freedom for years. If you don’t allow your children to hinder your freedom in work and play at all, and if you only get to your children when it doesn’t inconvenience you, your children will group up physically only. In all sorts of other ways they will remain emotionally needy, troubled, and overdependent.

The choice is clear. You can either sacrifice your freedom or theirs. It’s them or you. To love your children well, you must decrease that they may increase. You must be willing to enter into the dependency they have so eventually they can experience the freedom and independence you have.

-Tim Keller, from his book The Reason for God (p. 194)

[HT: Timmy Brister + Grace Baptist's graceblog]


I found this quote this morning as I was going through my RSS reader and thought this captured the sentiment of my recent post on “The Counterculture of Confrontation.” It’s powerful – check it:

“Instead of our being free to love and to plead, to warn and to rebuke, we are hung up with our own inner problems. We are inhibited. We are ourselves guilt-ridden. (“What will she think of me if I say that?”) We are not prepared to lay cards on tables or to call spades spades. . . . We beat around the bush, not because we’re tactful but because we’re cowards.”

– John White: Eros Defiled: The Christian and Sexual Sin

[HT: Ray Ortlund + Jared Wilson]


Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.

Ephesians 4:14-16 (NIV)

Those infamous words: truth in love. Isn’t it just like God to put together two things so diametrically opposed to one another and tell us this is how we should talk to one another. Man…

Here’s the problem. We don’t do a very good job with this. At all. Particularly in the area of confronting someone in love to bring moral clarity to a situation for them. My observation is that, in many ways, confrontation within the Christian subculture is actually countercultural within it. And it shouldn’t be. In other words, the very place where confrontation should be done and done well is within the Christian community and we are failing miserably.

Here’s my take. We have developed a Christian culture where it is not o.k. to be not o.k. We have locked into this individualistic idea that our sin only affects us, therefore minimizing sin as a whole. We have lowered the bar on our responsibility as friends, pastors, faith communities by saying that tough love is not support because “who are we to cast the first stones?”

Confronting someone by speaking truth in love is Kingdom work. When we call people to wholeness and commit to walking alongside them – no matter how tough those steps are to walk through – we are joining the King in his mission to restore and redeem all of creation. What a privilege.

When we stick our heads in the sand at the very moment when that person needs our voice in their life, we are actively rebelling against our King and saying to that person that as an image bearer of Christ, they are not worthy of our involvement in their life. What a shame.

The irony in this all this is that healthy confrontation in the context of the Christian community could be an amazing witness to the surrounding culture if done Biblically, but we can’t even figure out how to do this within our own Christian community. It has no potential for counterculture in the greater society when it’s countercultural within its own culture. Did you get that?

How do we expect the watching world to give a flip about our talk of personal and communal holiness when we don’t have the guts to confront each other in Christian community and spur one another to good works?

That’s just it. They are watching and they are growing increasingly apathetic. It’s time we give them something worthy of watching.
___________________

For more on this, read David Powlinson’s excellent book, Speaking the Truth in Love: Counsel in Community


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Husband and father of four, university instructor, seminarian, church planter, and conference architect.

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