Missional?
I regularly read Scot McKnight's blog, and this past week he profiled some discussion about the closure of Axis, an age-specific worship gathering within Willow Creek, the famous first megachurch in Chicagoland. This ministry began while I was a student in Chicago, and I remember friends talking a great deal about it. I also new people who became leaders within this ministry.
There was a link to another blog entry discussing Willow's decision to end Axis that Scot deemed a "must read." So I went to it and found an interesting discussion by Dan Kimball about how existing churches, with set worship, mission, and leadership cultures, do or do not embrace the needs and desires of the "emerging" generation.
What struck me in the entry was an assumption that makes what I am a part of seem absurd. The assumption is that worship and mission and fellowship should be aligned with whatever current trends are in culture and are in fact most "missional" when they do this.
If this is true then Church of the Redeemer is missionally impotent.
The author assumes that the best way for churches to embrace differences, be they cultural, generational, stylistic, is to encourage the birthing of new worship gatherings to cater to them. With this assumption, then, his biggest complaint is against the leadership of the pre-existing churches that seek to maintain control and only allow for independence or change that is cosmetic at best.
Dan Kimball writes:
"However, when launching a new worship gathering in an existing church, the question is - are the changes occurring out there, mainly generational (music style, appearance, language) which changes every generation? Or are the changes bigger than that in worldview(s) and more about how people learn, specific values people have, how people think of God and the spiritual world etc."
He obviously believes that for him and his peers, the latter is true. That is why he left a "mother church" situation to start a new ministry altogether.
I guess what struck me in reading his post is that we believe we are missional at Church of the Redeemer precisely because we are doing the opposite of this. And I guess I knew we were a little strange, but I am realizing more and more that our vision for mission which demands each of us to relinquish our "right" to those things that divide ("how people learn, specific values people have, how people think of God and the spiritual world etc." -- just sit in for five minutes of one of our board meetings and you will know what I am talking about!) for the sake of another is more foreign than even I figured.
I don't know a thing about Dan Kimball and I am certainly not judging him or his ministry (again, I know nothing about either) but I am wondering if the "emergent church" that he represents is not embracing yet another outpouring of the spirit of homogenous church growth principles. And maybe they are okay with that--again, I am not sure.
I'll have to do some more reading...when the nap gods smile upon me again soon :)
posted by Erika Haub @ 1:21 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
One of Dan's problems in that post is that he throws the word "missional" around without first clarifying what "missional" means.
It's an (unintentional) abuse of a word that conveys a great deal of emotional content, but has no intrinsic meaning.
I had an English professor who hated it when any of her students used the word "reality" in their papers. She would always counter with, "What is reality? You can't use that word without telling me what you mean first, and if you have to tell me what you mean, you don't need the word in the first place."
"Missional" presents exactly the same problems: it's a useful word, but it doesn't mean anything unless we first agree on what the mission is. We use the word "missional" all the time at Book of Hope. But when I look at one of my co-workers and say, "I don't think we should put any effort into X because it clearly isn't missional," I know that they are thinking to themselves, "Okay, so he's saying that X won't get us any closer to affecting destiny by providing God's eternal Word to every child and youth in the world."
Dan Kimball's mistake--and it's a significant one--is that he assumes that his mission should be everyone's mission. But he clearly assumes too much.
For my part, I believe that the mission of every church should be to spread the good news and then to disciple everyone who accepts the grace offered by Jesus through His sacrifice. In other words, we need to help people to know who Jesus is and then to know how to be more like Jesus.
I don't care if you're talking about Willow Creek or Church of the Redeemer, from my perspective, that's only possible when we are as authentic and as kind as possible. Often, that means that we have to subjugate our own desires for the greater good of the whole. And it also means that we have to learn how to communicate with each other as honestly and as clearly as possible.
But none of that happens perfectly, and "the right way" is never the same one day after another. Good community (definitly something that was near and dear to Jesus' heart) is messy and difficult. And the only way we learn to live with each other is to actually live with each other, even when we don't agree--and especially when we don't understand each other's "worldviews" as well as we should.
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