The missional church seeks to join Jesus on his mission. This series by Jonathan Dodson focuses on three wrong approaches to being a missional church.
Has R.C. Sproul ever been on the internet? What is the biggest upcoming theological battle? Dr. Sproul answers questions like these in this special interview series.
How NOT To Be a Missional Church series: Click | View Series
The missional church movement has been good and bad. On a positive note, let’s focus on the bad. I want to suggest three ways to not be a missional church. In continuation of the series, this post examines some of the defects of social action-driven mission.
This approach probably creates the best community of the three mentioned in this series. A socially-minded and active church attracts socially-minded non-Christians. When my City Group recently cleaned five apartments from top to bottom for some homeless women and children, we all got a little closer. There’s something about being on a common mission—the sweat, the jokes, the empathy, and the memory–that unites folks. Creating a missional memory strengthens community and mission. It also raises questions with non-Christians you serve. But is social action enough?
There are plenty of non-Christians engaged in social mission—serving the poor, the needy, the abused, and the homeless. They don’t need a church to engage in social mission. There are thousands of non-profits that can do this. What sets the church apart? If we are banking on social mission to be the unique contribution of the church, we’ll lose the game, and more importantly, the souls.
Although social action mission creates community, it doesn’t create new community. Regenerated, new creation is the unique work of God the Spirit (Tit. 2.11; Gal. 6:15) through faith in the Son (Tit. 3:6-7; 2 Cor. 5:17). If we convert people to community and social mission alone, and not to Christ, we offer a very incomplete gospel. Regeneration is both social (Matt. 19:28) and spiritual (Tit. 3:5). The Spirit, not social mission, makes men new.
When we reduce mission to social action, we run the danger of becoming a socially-minded liberal church that neglects large stretches of the Bible requiring repentance and faith in Jesus. When missional communities focus on social mission alone, they disregard their evangelistic identity, gifting, and responsibility as the church of Jesus Christ, the Jesus who died and rose to make all things new—people and products, souls and society.
This series has attempted to identify some of the shortcomings in expressions of missional church. When mission is driven by events or evangelism, or social action, we engage in incomplete mission. When we engage in incomplete mission, we offer an incomplete gospel to our neighbors, towns, cities, and world. In a future series, I will take a more positive tack by exploring three areas that promote being a missional church.
This series is based on Jonathan Dodson’s talks at the LEAD ’09 conference.
How NOT To Be a Missional Church series: Click | View Series
The missional church movement has been good and bad. On a positive note, let’s focus on the bad. I want to suggest three ways to not be a missional church. In continuation of the series, this post examines some of the defects of evangelism-driven mission.
These churches focus almost exclusively on evangelism. Their view of the gospel leads them to see social action as optional. For them, mission is synonymous with evangelism, and evangelism is highly programmatic. They focus on training individuals through evangelism training programs, apologetics, and use of evangelistic tracts. What’s wrong with learning evangelistic presentations, memorizing apologetic defenses, and using tracts?
These churches train individuals and teams “How to present the gospel” in a brief period of time. Typically, these programs look for the person being evangelized to offer a specific answer. For example, “If you died tonight and stood before God and he said: ‘Why should I let you into my heaven?’ What would you say?” Notice that the questions are answer-driven. The goal is to get someone to say the right answer and to believe the right facts, like “Jesus died for my sins.” What we need is less belief and more faith.
In his new book, The Future of Faith, Harvey Cox makes a helpful distinction between belief and faith. He writes: “We can believe something to be true without it making much difference to us, but we place our faith only in something that is vital for the way we live.” We can believe without it making a difference.
Many Americans believe that Jesus died on the cross for their sins, but it makes very little difference in their lives. They possess mere belief. This mere belief undermines the gospel. What we need is faith. Moreover, mere belief in the right answer baits people, not with Christ, but with heaven. It is heaven-centered, not Christ-centered. In evangelism-driven mission, Christ is subordinated to the treasure of heaven, instead of heaven being subordinated to the treasure of Christ. The goal is heaven, not Jesus. Answer-driven and heaven-centered evangelism leads to nominalism and distorts the gospel. Evangelism-driven mission can undermine, not advance the gospel.
Training in apologetics has its place; however, when our approach to non-Christians is driven by apologetics, we very often reduce people to projects. Apologetic mission can foster too much defense and too much offense because it aims at the head to the exclusion of the heart, to change someone’s mind, but not their lives. Just because someone agrees with our facts and embraces our logic doesn’t guarantee true conversion. We need to be prepared, not only to defend the faith, but to love people intelligently. Most objections to the gospel have existential and personal roots. If we can get beyond the arguments to the idols of the heart, we can show just how tremendously superior and satisfying Jesus is to whatever they love, desire, and pursue most!
The methods used are often prepackaged and outdated. Evangelistic programs falsely assume that our listeners still understand the meanings of sin, Christ, and faith. But very often, they hear something very different, like legalism, moral teacher, and mere belief. When we fail to express the gospel in context and vocabulary that our listeners can understand, we fail to share the gospel. Christ dated and contextualized himself to all kinds of people so that his message would make sense and connect with their deep needs for redemption. Using packaged illustrations and methods assumes a one-size-fits-all, but the Incarnation reminds us that the gospel is much more personal and dynamic.
This approach to mission trains individuals, not communities. It reduces the gospel to a conversation between two people, without focusing on embodying the gospel in communities. Statistics have shown that individuals are consistently converted to communities before they are converted to doctrines. Our methods are often doctrine-driven and individualistic.
Jesus prescribed a kind of communal evangelism in John 17, where our community is so redemptive and rich that it points people to Jesus. Paul called for a distinctive discipleship in churches that set the community of faith forth as an example, as salt and light in their cities, attracting others to them. Individualistic evangelism doesn’t create community because it doesn’t convert people to the church. It aims at converting individuals to a set of answers and to heaven. Evangelism-driven mission has very little to do with the Jesus of the Church, the Head of the Body.
To be continued.
This series is based on Jonathan Dodson’s talks at the LEAD ’09 conference.
Re:Lit is a ministry of Resurgence. There you will find a growing line of books to help guide the resurgence of the new reformed. Find out more.
How NOT To Be a Missional Church series: Click | View Series
The missional church movement has been good and bad. On a positive note, let’s focus on the bad. Over the next few posts, I want to suggest three ways to not be a missional church. We’ll organize these reflections under three headings:
These are churches that, in the name of mission, throw block parties, do Easter egg drops from helicopters, hand out water at intersections, do gas buy-downs, or even, as was recently suggested to me, do coffee buy-downs. What’s wrong with these approaches to missional church?
It begins on the wrong foot, the foot of action instead of the foot of identity. It makes mission out to be an act of man, not a participation in an attribute of God. Mission is something we are before it’s something we do. Event-driven approaches to mission turn mission into an event, something that is optional for the super-spiritual, gets us points with God, and gets him on our good side. But God can’t be bribed by mission or anything else. Event-driven mission builds mission on works, not grace.
The event approach to being a missional church often appeals to consumerism, not to genuine social or spiritual needs. It aims at the consumer-in-want-of-stuff, not the sinner-in-need-of-grace. These attempts at mission appeal to the consumerist longing for a deal, instead of the sinner’s deep down longing for redemption. They try to buy people off: “I’ll give you an Xbox if you come to my church. I’ll pay for your gas if you visit on a Sunday.” If you have to pay people to come meet Christians, something is seriously wrong with your understanding of gospel and mission. Event-driven mission makes appeals based on idolatry, not grace.
In urban contexts, people can smell a bait and switch a mile away, and that is exactly why they left the church (if they were in it in the first place). If we want to reach non-Christians in a post-Christian context, then we will have to prove to them that they cannot be bought off, that we are a real community, and that we care about them enough to live next door to them, eat with them, work with them, suffer with them, rock out with them, and be with them. Event-driven mission is a bait and switch.
To be continued.
This series is based on Jonathan Dodson’s talks at the LEAD ’09 conference.
Every dad is a pastor. The important thing is that he cares for his flock well. Pastor Mark Driscoll's new eBook offers spiritual insights on fatherhood. Get it here.
The Resurgence is a reformed, complementarian, missional movement that trains missional leaders to serve the Church to transform cultures for Christ.
