The West Requires Post-Christian Missional Thinking
In our last installment of this investigation entitled “Church and Mission,” we grappled with an unexpected sign while exiting a megachurch parking lot. We began by wondering about how often we call ourselves missionaries in the Western church. To do this we started with our core concepts of church and mission.
With that considered first, we now need to question why people might use the word missionary to describe Christians in the West in the first place. To do that I invite you to take a seat on Newbigin's bus.
Whether most know it or not, a missionary journey sparked this new way of talking. It was not a missionary journey out, like Paul and Barnabas, it was a missionary journey back home. Lesslie Newbigin had served for many decades in India. He and his wife returned to England over land, only taking two suitcases and riding local buses the whole way (note to self: complain less in the future about my international travel problems.)
Upon return to his home country, Newbigin found that things had changed dramatically. In his autobiography, Newbigin wrote, “England is a pagan society and the development of a truly missionary encounter with this very tough form of paganism is the greatest intellectual and practical task facing the Church.” (4)
The country that had sent Newbigin out as a missionary now needed its own form of missionary-kind-of-thinking to reach. Over time, this came to be known as the missional movement in the West (many use that term without knowing of this origin). One of the particular problems Newbigin saw was that the Western church no longer seemed to understand its evangelistic task. “As time went on I began to receive invitations to take part in conferences… I began to feel very uncomfortable with much that I heard. There seemed to be so much timidity in commending the gospel to the unconverted people of Britain." (4)
Whether or not they have read any missiology (Newbigin or otherwise), many church leaders in North America subscribe to what amounts to a missional movement mindset in talking about where they live. It takes on vastly different forms, but in the end, many churches think of the area in which they live as a mission field and the people they are equipping to share their faith as missionaries in their own land. I share all this to say that the idea did not come out of nowhere. It was not invented by some pastor in his study on a Friday trying to gin up his sermon, nor was it invented by the guy who made the sign I saw on my way out of the megachurch parking lot.
The idea of approaching the culture around us in the West with a missionary mindset comes from missionaries themselves coming back to the West and declaring, with alarm, two points:
1) The culture of the West shifted and required a more intentional ministry mindset that was similar in some ways to a missionary one,
and 2) The church of the West had not taken its redemptive task seriously enough and needed to equip its members to start doing so.
So, along with the best missiologists like Bosch, we can say, "Since God is a missionary God, God's people are a missionary people." (3) and with Bavinick, “Missions is not simply a by-product of ecclesiastical life and theology. Missions belongs to the very essence of the church." (5)
But does that mean they should have called everyone who left that church parking lot I mentioned in my last article about Church and Mission a missionary?
Well, on that point, I am mulling over the notion that "If everything is mission, nothing is mission." But for that investigation, I will again need more time to think and space to write, so I will come back to this next time.
Church and Mission: A Chicken and Egg Question
I had some trouble locating my car in the megachurch parking lot. I wondered if they could add some Disneyesque labeling of the lots with Bible characters instead. Finding Samson Lot B might have been easier. As I joined the lines of cars heading for the exits, a half dozen cheerful parking lot attendants with florescent security vests signaled me along…
David, in the last years of my ministry (25) I worked primarily in a multi-cultural setting, it drastically impacted my view of evangelism and mission. I find that much of what I once viewed as mission fulfillment was tethered to my understanding of "church". As I moved among others true diversity, it required my flexibility of exchanging the tethering from "church" to "Jesus Christ." I find in the gospel that Jesus is flexible so as to connect to people that are so diverse in incredible ways that his responses to people almost seem inconsistent at times. He forgives a person caught in adultery, embraces a Samaritan woman at a well who is a serial wife, yet calls religious leaders unthinkable names. I found that evangelism tethered to the church takes a mass view of people, whereas evangelism tethered to Jesus takes a more relational view to specific people. Jesus goal was not to put people into the "church" as we now understand it, but to put them "in Christ". When we try to tether our evangelism to the "church" we are endlessly trying to adapt the church to make people fit, or adapt people to the church. The challenge of those outside of Christ is that "church" is more viewed through political sense in the US than a spiritual, moral or gospel lens right now. Jesus seems to transform people who in the end are tethered to Him, and as a result are not adaptors, but brothers and sisters in Christ with all that dynamics of family orientation. I found that views of what the church is varies drastically among diverse cultures. Does this make sense?
Man, we must set up a time to chat Newbs. I am putting together a Substack to contribute some of my own missiological reflections based on my recent work within the next couple of weeks. One of my first things is addressing the origin of "missional" and how it has come to be used for the very thing its pioneering minds and popularizers set out to critique. I enjoy reading what you put out, my friend.