A Missional Church -- Part 1

One of my biggest passions both personally and professionally (as a pastor) is to help to form a truly missional community/church that transforms a culture with the gospel: the good news of the kingdom of God, and of the King who gave his life, was raised again, and rules with goodness, mercy, love, and justice.

So I thought I would start a new series of posts on my blog to tell a story . . . my story, but not mine alone, it is a story about my church . . . better yet it is a story about God. Some of this story has already been written, some is yet to come about, but I hope and I dream.

Allow me the freedom to begin telling my story with the analogy of falling in love. For those of you who have been in a lasting relationship you know what it is like to fall in love. When you first start a relationship you enter what I call the cloud 9 phase, where you see only the best in the person. Life could not be any better, you think about that person all day long, your life is consumed with them: they have no faults. This phase can last months and for some even years. But one day you hit the second stage, and disillusionment sets in . . . You begin to see the faults of the other person. The newness of your love has worn off, and you finally see that person for who they are: messed up (let's be honest, we are all messed up). This then brings us to the 3rd stage of a relationship if you make it . . . Recommitment. This is when love that lasts finally begins forming. When you love a person despite their weaknesses.

This is my story. Not about a relationship with a person but with the church. For about the first 27 years of my life I had largely been in a cloud 9 relationship with the church. At the age of 12 I wanted to be a pastor, and I pursued that with my life. I went to school, got a bachelor's in Ministry, a master in divinity (whatever that means), and even got a job as a pastor (which I still have an am very thankful for).

But a few years ago I began reading some books, taking some doctorate classes, noticing things in the Bible, and I came to some simple conclusions. 1) The church exists to reconcile the world back to God. 2) The Church (at least the Western Church) is doing a terrible job in this. Not only are we not gaining ground we are losing ground. 3) A question: What I am giving my life to? Is it worth it? Can I say I actually pleased God with all of this? This is all meaningless if we are not the church God wants us to be.

It was at this point that disillusionment set in for me. Though I personally attended (pastored) what I would consider to be a great church, but we had so few stories of making a difference in our community (BTW, I use the past tense, only because I believe we are a different church now then we were a few years ago). When asked the question, "If your church were to just disappear, would your community cry, would they miss you?" I did not know how to answer that. If this was all there was, I was done.

I hear of so many stories of disillusionment with pastors, and with Christians over the church (universal) now days. But different people react differently to disillusionment. Some leave and only talk about what the church is doing wrong, others leave and are actually hostile to the church, still others leave and just try to start over and plant other churches but at least are gracious about it, and yet others recommit. They recognize that the church is the bride of Christ, that He loves her, has not neglected her, and deserves His best, so they stay and love and try to turn the ship.

This is what happened to me. My disillusionment turned into a recommitment: a deeper love, a deeper devotion, a deeper passion to become, and help form the church into what it is support to be. A church focused on Jesus which lives out His mission in the world, and actually transforms the world. In a word a Missional Church.

This was where my passion was born . . .