Week 1 - A Missional Conversation
My 2 friends pictured here are doing church in their own strength. What does that mean? Take a look at the cartoon. A wagon with 4 square wheels carrying round wheels. They are devoted, hard workers, but their job is slow , tedious, and frustrating.
The church is moving but at an extremely slow pace. Why? If you ask the 2 workers, they would probably say, "it is because of the stiff resistance we face" or maybe we are going up hill. Yes! We do encounter resistance at times and the church's work can be steeply uphill. But their chronic frustration is not caused by resistance or going uphill. It is those square wheels.
This illustration teaches us that God has provided everything we will ever need for His church to be "on mission with Him".
The Missional Church is looking for organic growth. Jesus used many examples from nature to illustrate how the kingdom of God grows and develops.
Mark 4:26-29 says, 26 He also said, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. 27 Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. 28 All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. 29 As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.”
Matthew 6:28 tells us to "consider the lilies of the field, how they grow." Is there something inherent in the seed of our new life in Jesus that is organically "Missional"? Have you ever wondered about the children of Israel after miraculously crossing the Red Sea, how quickly they turned to "murmuring" and spent 40 years wandering around in the desert because of thier unbelief? Or the church at Corinth? Or the church at Ephesus? Heb 2:1 says, 1"We must pay the most careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away."
We often see the Great Commission as just one of many ministries that a church does. Simply a piece of the pie!
A Missional Church puts the Great Commission at the hub of the wheel. Yes! We are all ministers but we are all witnesses or "sent ones". Jn 20:31 2 Cor 5:20 says, we are all Ambassadors for Christ, God is making His appeal through us. Throughout Biblical History, God has accomplished His work through His people. We are"on mission with God", very much like Jesus when he came to the world said, I look to see where my Father is at work and then I join Him in that work." Jn 5:29
Our fist step on the journey will be very foundational;
December 11th - the Biblical Basis of being Missional
December 18th - What others are doing "on mission with God"
January 1st - "catch up"
January 8th - What is God saying to us?
<> Decision point
The second step of the journey will deals with the DNA questions of Who am I? Who are we? What is it that God wants us to FOCUS on? Who can we partner with in the process?
<> Decision Point
The third step will focus on Experimentation.
Our desire is to help each one of us to grow in our understanding and application of a Missional lifestyle. We also want to focus in on a FOCUS approach as a community of believers to be involved in.
This video depicts working cross culturally where we must present the Gospel in a culturally relevant way that is Biblically accurate. With the coming of the post modern age in America and the multitude of various classifications of people, we must go and do the same.
We want to come alongside people right where they are at, develop a sincere relationship with them trusting God to speak through us to them. We may even get to the point that we sometimes need to use words.
As we develop relationships, we initially see some of a person's behaviors and thing around him. After some time we being to see some of their feelings, values, and beliefs learning how they evaluate life around them. We rarely see or understand them at the Foundational level, but this is the very level that must be reached for an eternal life change. It is the work of the Spirit to convict of sin, righteousness and judgment.
We are on Mission with God and God uses us in the process but real life change is the work Of God.
My friends took the time to stop their efforts, change the wheels on the wagon. In the process they found a sail that they mounted. They were carried along by the Holy Spirit as "living epistles" that are written and read by all men. Very much like the Biblical authors, "For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit."
Unless you get discouraged by the American church scene, look at what God is doing world wide. It took 18 centuries for practicing Christians to grow from 0% of the world’s population to 2.5% in 1900, only 70 years to grow from 2.5% to 5% in 1970, and just 40 years to grow from 5% to 12% by the year 2010. Today, there is one practicing Christian for every seven people worldwide who are either nominal or non-Christian. cf Joel 2
May our hearts be welded together to be the Missional Church, He has designed us to be.
