In my own experience (and in my own head), when church leaders think of church-planting, they immediately think service-planning. To plant a church is to plan a service. Church planting = planning new church services, at least initially. And churches have grown from such beginnings in the past, so of course that’s where the thoughts of church planters tend to go.
But I’ve been wondering lately if planting missional churches demands a different approach. Perhaps if we start with a church service, it will feel like a bait-and-switch to start talking about being the church 24/7 ("Hey wait, I just come here because I like the music. What’s all this about being salt and light?"). Perhaps missional churches need to be started in a different way, a way that’s more organically integrated to a missional mindset. If we’re saying that there’s more to being the church than going to a service, is saying that in a service the best way to get the message across? We might perhaps end up saying one thing while our structure says another. We would be trying to fit the square peg of a missional community into the round hole of consumerist thinking. I am more and more convinced that actions speak louder than words. What you do says more than what you say, and is the message that people hear loud and clear.
So what is the new wineskin of planting a missional church? A different kind of service? Something that doesn’t really look much like a service, but is? A small group? A class? A store-front in a mall? An activist group? A grassroots revolutionary movement? Several families choosing to live in community in order to transform a neighborhood? An informal meeting at a "third place?" Loosely connected relational webs become more connected and integrated (not necessarily by everyone physically meeting in one location at one time – online connections, smaller cluster meetings, meet-ups to bless a neighborhood, etc)? No real answers here, just some questions rattling around in my mind.
I have this sense that missional church planting will require some radically unconventional thinking and open-mindedness to stuff that doesn’t look like "church" as we’ve experienced it. We’ll need some patience to wait for fruit before writing something off as a bad idea when we don’t see full-grown trees in the first couple months.
Interesting thoughts.
I agree, and at the same time I’m also asking…well…then in that case, what is it? What would it look like.
And because it’s unconventional, does that means it has to be wierd and far reaching.
Sometimes I ask: “what would it take for my parents to be involved in a church that did this or that…” and suddenly I wonder if it’s too unconventional or not universal enough or something.
anyways, enought of my blah, blah, blah.
You raise a good point, RC. Sometimes it can be easy to assume that doing something “cutting edge” is the point. You’re right that it doesn’t have to be weird to be missional. I think there will be some expressions of missional church that look a little strange, but there are other missional churches that look very much like “normal” churches.
You actually raise another point I’ve wondered about, too. I’ll post on it some other time, but the issue is this: should we be creating churches that span generations and cultures, or should we do the “niche-marketing” thing our culture does? While the ideal may be cross-generational, multicultural churches, perhaps a more realistic starting place is some kind of niche-marketing approach. (I use marketing in the best sense). When you think about it, when a missionary goes into a culture that is foreign to her, learns a new language, and seeks to preach the gospel in a way that resonates with that culture, isn’t that niche marketing? Like I said, I’ll post on it later. You raise some good points, though. Thanks.
i look forward to your post on niche marketing.
personally…i’m okay with the niche, as long as there is concern for the other niche’s not being reached…
i.e. it is important for a white suburban church to care about the persecuted church around the world because God loves all people…
in the same way a niche-marketing church, should still be trained and taught to love all people, even if not a part of their niche. Bikers for Christ, should learn to love Cowboys for Christ, because they love Jesus and their fellow brothers and sisters.
Recently I’ve connected with some Mennonites, and I’ve been startled to learn that they’ve pretty much been doing the missional thing for years and years…but not having a name for it other than ‘church’ or ‘the christian life’. I’ve been enthused by white-haired ladies sitting in pews for a tradional church service (complete with 25 year old Vineyard ‘contemporary’ songs) then come to ‘Sunday School’ and passionately discuss Darfur, AIDS, the poor in Fort Wayne, politics, the Iraq War, loving our neighbors, etc. When I mention that there’s a whole blogsphere talking about how to be missional these days, how to engage the culture and so forth, they look at me funny as if to say “why does it need talked about…aren’t all churches passionate about the poor/oppressed?”
The Mennonite MIssion Network puts out a publication called Beyond OUrselves…the cover story and theme for the current vol. is “Why Mission? Is evangelism still relevant?” The articles range from trying to nail down the hard questions about mission in a plural world, relating to multi-faith neighbors, risking ‘weakness’ to display Jesus’ power, etc. Not what I expected from the Mennonite crowd!
cindyH, that’s a great point. There have been groups passionate about this stuff for a long time, and they haven’t needed particularly new structures to do it. Like you said, they’ve been doing this for years. We could probably learn and thing or two from their approach to church and the Christian life.
I think the challenge comes when trying to address the missional message to those who think of church as a product they consume. I doubt white-haired Mennonite women think of church in terms of “what they got out of it” last Sunday. That’s why I wonder if church should have a different “entry points”, instead of just the Sunday morning service. I wonder if people passionate about the situation in Darfur, for example, would come to Mennonite “Sunday School” classes before they’d set foot in a regular church service.
Just thinking out loud, but I appreciated your reminder that there are a lot of people out there just getting on with the job. It’s a good reminder for us all to “love not in word alone, but in action” (1 Jn 3:18).