Being the Mission

Today Paul Borden, author of Hitting the Bulls Eye and Direct Hit led a day of training for the district superintendents of Missouri and others who had been invited. He has had tremendous success in rebuilding churches and starting new ones and is widely respected. Our conference has taken the model that he offers and transformed it into what we are calling the Healthy Church Initiative, which our conference congregational development staff person Bob Farr works tirelessly to promote because of his earnest desire to see the church of Jesus Christ flourish in its embodiment in Missouri as the United Methodist Church. I have heard Rev. Borden before; this time I was even more taken with his deep commitment to turn churches around and to bring the "lost" to Christ. I put "lost" in parentheses for those reading this who would want me to do so. ;-) It is not this commitment to church renewal that I struggle with when I hear his approach. It is something else. I think I have a real rubber-meets-the-road ecclesiological difference with him, which I felt safe in voicing aloud today, and felt heard and respected.

I really cannot completely articulate that difference and don't want to start taking potshots... I am tired of hearing potshots being taken...(what is a potshot anyway?...please, don't ask Caleb !!! He might enlighten us in ways I would rather not hear!)

I will lift one thing I heard today that represents that ecclesiological difference is when I heard him say, "we need our churches to adopt a missional approach to ministry and give up a relational approach." I listened carefully to hear what he meant by being a missional church. What he means, I think, is that each church needs to be very sure of its mission---and then make the hard choices to align all its ministries with that mission. Know your mission, be able to articulate it, eliminate everything that does not contribute to that mission, add only add new ministries that do contribute to the mission.

So far, so good. Sort of at least. But to say that the opposite of missional in this sense even is relational is where I have a real issue. It may be that it is his definition of missional with which I struggle. One of the contribution that the emergent conversation has made and can make for us is that it articulates what a "missional" church is quite a bit differently. It isn't so much that a missional church is a church which has a mission statement, or a that mission a thing out there that everyone buys into; emergent folks will tell us that the church IS the mission. The church, in the way it goes about living the communal life, or in the way it approaches the community is supposed to be the embodiment of Christ, is simply by being and stiving to be a community already has its mission. Think, perhaps, less We've a Story to Tell to the Nations and more They'll Know We are Christians By Our Love....not so much lovey dovey as what I really mean is "they'll know we are Christians by the way we live". Now that doesn't mean the church sits around missioning all over everybody that is already there, but it does mean that it is as much about being as it is about doing. I realize some will say that is a false dichotomy...but when we become busy about many things and do not always attend to the inner life; or when the linear "hit the bulls eye" way of defining church is the totality of what drives and defines our mission as a church, I don't know, friends, but I guess I miss the mystery somehow....if we believe that God can do abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine (yes, many of you know I DO have a favorite scripture and this is it) can we both recognize, as Wesley would have us, that we need to ) set goals and move toward those goals as a church, while declaring that indeed, "if we want to make God laugh, tell him our plans"? This is a very basic thing about how we are going about doing/being church right now that occupies my thinkign and leading and I am willing to live with the ambiguity.

I am so grateful for the kind of determination I see in a faithful man like Paul Borden. He always gives the glory to God for what good he is doing. His heart is so impassioned by the gospel that that is what drives him. I want to stay engaged so that I can articulate better how he pushes me to define my own ecclesiology which is quite different from his. For that engagement, I am grateful.