Missional Identity: Some Initial Reflections

Written by Michael R. Walker

Thursday, 14 September 2006 18:00

Tons of folks have been asking me recently to describe what it means to be a “missional church” or to be a “missional leader.” So I’ll try to start offering my thoughts on these important questions.

Today I’ve been thinking about “identity issues,” our assumptions about who we are and why our churches exist, which in turn inform why we choose to do the various activities, programs, etc. that busy our calendars. One of the most important and difficult challenges facing our congregations is their need to develop a new missional identity. For most of us, becoming missional will require a deep re-orientation of personal life and a transformation of the leadership style, foci, and even structures of our congregations.

In my recent forays into literature on life in the church I’ve found some fascinating statistics that get at why becoming missional is first and foremost about identity issues. Someone’s figured out that on average it takes about eighty-nine members of an established church to bring in one unchurched could be follower of Jesus. Yet in a “church plant” it takes only eight members. The reason for this is obvious. New churches know without a doubt that they exist by definition to reach out. They know they exist to live the gospel of Jesus Christ so that those who have yet to experience his forgiving and healing power may come to know him. That’s why God has put them where they are. It’s an identity issue.

New churches by default pay close attention to their context. They are eager to be good neighbors, to find and get to know those who need Jesus. The focus of a church plant is to make a new space where the Gospel of Jesus Christ can be heard, believed, celebrated and lived out; a place where beggars can tell other beggars where to find bread, bread from heaven. New churches take risks, they cross boundaries, they are forced to do ministry in ways that often push them far outside their comfort zone.

Most of our congregations, however, were initially formed with a different sort of identity. Most of our churches came to life in a time when they could assume they’d serve a certain indispensable maintenance role in the life of the community, where the world would come to the church and the church need not go to the world in order to survive or even thrive. A culture with largely Christian assumptions would need the church’s facilities, its professionals (“clergy”) and on occasion the rest of the community of believers in order to get through life in a manner that seemed normal and acceptable to the surrounding culture.

It seems obvious to many of us now that we never should’ve assumed that we existed to serve certain special needs of a culture that we thought was by and large “Christian.” We should have always been a “contrast community” sent into our own culture to proclaim and embody the life-transforming Gospel of Jesus Christ. But we often settled for the role of chaplains to a culture we tacitly assumed already had the substance of life. And when the “Christian” culture needed chaplains, our congregations survived.

But now that we live in an increasingly “Post-Christian” culture, many if not most of our churches are dying (I'm thinking of mainline churches in particular). The world is not coming to us anymore; and we are only now beginning to face the deeper identity issues by which I hope we come to understand anew that we exist to go into the world as agents of the Gospel called by God to join him in his work of redeeming and restoring the world. Our congregations exist to be mission communities. Our calling is to bring the whole Gospel to the ends of the earth, and we recognize that every human culture, perhaps now especially our own western culture, needs the church to engage it with a different way of life shaped by the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

How can congregations go through a change in self-identity so that they understand themselves to be God’s sent people? How would it change the way they spend their time, what activities they do and how they do them? Is it possible to really step out in faith and become outwardly focused, even if that means taking great institutional risks? And what kind of leadership is needed to catalyze this kind of change?

These are the questions we've really just begun to wrestle through. And as far as I can tell, the future of mainline churches depends upon how we answer these questions, and for most of us it will mean making some major changes by the grace of God.

The Notebook

Calvin quotes

Here are a few quotes from Calvin's Institutes that I selected for inclusion in a church magazine to reflect the basic posture of Calvin's piety, oriented as it is toward magnifying the glory of God and subordinating self-concern. Unfortunately these don't convey the Christological centered-ness of his piety, but they convey where Christ leads us by the Spirit:

"We are consecrated and dedicated to God in order that we may thereafter think, speak, meditate, and do, nothing except to his glory."

"We are not our own: let not our reason nor our will, therefore, sway our plans and deeds. We are not our own: let us therefore not set it as our goal to seek what is expedient for us according to the flesh. We are not our own: in so far as we can, let us therefore forget ourselves and all that is ours. Conversely, we are God's: let us therefore live for him and die for him. We are God's: let his wisdom and will therefore rule all our actions. We are God's: let all the parts of our life accordingly strive toward him as our only lawful goal."

"We ought to we seek not the things that are ours but those which are of the Lord's will and will serve to advance his glory. This is also evidence of great progress: that, almost forgetful of ourselves, surely subordinating our self-concern, we try faithfully to devote our zeal to God and his commandments. For when Scripture bids us leave off self-concern, it not only erases from our minds the yearning to possess, the desire for power, and the favor of men, but it also uproots ambition and all craving for human glory and other more secret plagues. Accordingly, the Christian must surely be so disposed and minded that he feels within himself it is with God he has to deal throughout his life. In this way, as he will refer all he has to God's decision and judgment, so will he refer his whole intention of mind scrupulously to Him. For he who has learned to look to God in all things that he must do, at the same time avoids all vain thoughts. This, then, is that denial of self which Christ enjoins with such great earnestness upon his disciples at the outset of their service."

Ecclesiology and the Cartesian Turn

Janos Pasztor offers a packed summary of some of the ecclesiological consequences of the so-called "Cartesian turn" - the rise of the anthropological starting point -- and often endpoint -- in the pursuit of knowledge that became dominant among philosophers in the 18th century and has characterize "Modern" thought):

"Theology itself was very considerably influenced by this development. It was a 180-degree turn: it began losing its theocentric character and became more and more anthropocentric. For these kinds of theologies it was not God who would come to man addressing him in his life-giving Word, but man would make attempts to approach God by means of an intellectual enterprise. A late twentieth-century representative of this trend of thought says: 'God is the object of my consciousness which I perceive in so far as I perceive something, that is I allot him a place within the framework of a sign-system, in order to be able to talk to others about this matter.' Consequently, the church is the people, who, by virtue of having accepted the common sign-system, are seeking common answers to the meaning of existence.

"These trends of thought, however respectable they might have been otherwise, have rejected most of the things the Reformers stood for. The divine Logos, the eternal Son, 'true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father,' became the Logos of the philosophers, a principle and idea, or a set of thoughts. As Blaise Pascal put it, here one has to deal with the God of the philosophers instead of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus Christ. Instead of listening obedience to the Word of God, one meets the rule of reason in rationalism; instead of the freedom of God's liberated children, one gets the freedom of the individual thinker in liberailsm. These ideas had a devastating effect on the field of Christology. They brought about what has been termed by Hungarian theologians, a Unitarian theology in everything but name."

"...the church is nothing but one of the many human organizations dealing with issues like religion and morals."

"....For people with that kind of idea, catholicity meant 'as opposed to confessional catholicity...the universal kingdom of spirit, but something other than the Holy Spirit,' if it meant anything at all."

Janos Pasztor, "The Catholicity of Reformed Theology," Toward the Future of Reformed Theology (Eerdmans, 1999), p. 29.

Recovering the Wounded: Healing a Church in Exile

Psalm 147:2: "The Lord builds up Jerusalem; he gathers the outcasts of Israel."

Commenting on this verse, Calvin expreses confidence that God would ultimately restore the Church from the ruinous state that formed so much of Calvin's own life:

"In calling God the former and architect of the Church, his object is to make us aware that by his power it remains in a firm condition, or is restored when in ruins. Hence he infers that it is in his power and arbitrament to gather those who have been dispersed. Here the Psalmist would comfort those miserable exiles who had been scattered in various quarters, with the hope of being recovered from their dispersion, as God had not adopted them without a definite purpose into one body. As he had ordered his temple and altar to be erected at Jerusalem, and had fixed his seat there, the Psalmist would encourage the Jews who were exiles from their native country, to entertain good hope of a return, intimating that it was no less properly God’s work to raise up his Church when ruined and fallen down, than to found it at first. It was not, therefore, the Psalmist’s object directly to celebrate the free mercy of God in the first institution of the Church, but to argue from its original, that God would not suffer his Church altogether to fall, having once founded it with the design of preserving it for ever; for he forsakes not the work of his own hands.

This comfort ought to be improved by ourselves at the present period, when we see the Church on every side so miserably rent asunder, leading us to hope that all the elect who have been adjoined to Christ’s body, will be gathered unto the unity of the faith, although now scattered like members torn from one another, and that the mutilated body of the Church, which is daily distracted, will be restored to its entireness; for God will not suffer his work to fail.

In the following verse he insists upon the same truth, the figure suggesting that though the Church labor under, and be oppressed by many diseases, God will speedily and easily recover it from all its wounds. The same truth, therefore, is evidently conveyed, under a different form of expression — that the Church, though it may not always be in a flourishing condition, is ever safe and secure, and that God will miraculously heal it, as though it were a diseased body."

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