Missional Church

Many of you know Sarah and I have been part of a group that has been "rethinking" the way we do church. Our goal is to be a small community of believers that become the gospel or good news in Fort Wayne. On Saturday myself and two others from our group spent the day in Chicago and got to meet and hang out with around 15 other "missional church planters" from throughout the Midwest. The meeting was initiated by David Fitch (read his blog) who pastors a missional church in Chicago. David wrote a book that is kind of a primer for this way of thinking or church planting, its excellent I recommend it to you all (The Great Giveaway). Anyways, the day was spent discussing different aspects of church life and I thought I'd share some of my notes:

Leadership: We discussed a leadership model that focuses on a team of leaders rather than "one guy" aka senior pastor through whom everything happening in the church must go. The idea is that tension within leadership can actually be beneficial when leaders learn to mutually submit to one another and where humility and honesty are practiced. Each leader or member of the church for that matter operates in their gifting for the building up of the church and to prepare us for works of service (Eph 4). This model lightens the load so that everything doesn't hang on one person whereby this person always ends up burning out.

Liturgy: We talked about how our services should be structured around liturgical forms. Liturgy means the "work of the people" where we come as one body participating together in confession of sin, adoration, prayer, proclamation of the gospel (preaching), reading Scripture, and sharing the Eucharist (communion). The goal of the worship service is to form and shape us into the body of Christ rather than to "get something". Liturgy keeps us from the temptation to be anonymous in church or treat worship services as personal experiences that can be kept to ourselves apart from the rest of the body. We all come participating together.

Preaching: Preaching and teaching are not the same thing. Most sermons in church can be categorized in one of two ways: expository (think of a lecture) someone dissecting the text giving you the historical critical background to the text, parsing the Greek and Hebrew and coming to the "real meaning of the text". The second category would be "self-help" which could only be distinguished from an episode of Oprah or Dr. Phil by the few mentions of God. This way of preaching seeks to empower people to become a "better you" using principles from the Bible. Both of these categories focus on giving the congregation something they can take home and own, however they fail to accomplish the goal of preaching, which is a proclamation of the gospel (Lk 4: 20-21). Preaching should instead proclaim the reality as it is in Christ and invite people into it. It should fund our imaginations. It should treat the scriptures as a drama and not as a textbook, as a reality to be lived and not a commodity to be consumed.

House Fellowships: In an increasingly post-christian society it is no longer adequate to evangelize with tactics and programs which seek to bombard non-christians and force a decision in a matter of minutes. These tactics presuppose so many things that can longer be counted on such as: the Bible is true, the Bible is God's word, God is real, God is good etc... Evangelism in a post-christian society will take time and require relationships. One way of accomplishing this is to rediscover the art of hospitality. This can be practiced by meeting together in homes as a community. A house fellowship would be a small group of people meeting together to practice the kingdom and represent the gospel. Groups would eat together, share with one another, pray for each other, practice hospitality and justice, and be transformed together for the sake of the gospel.

Exciting times for the church!!