The need to go missional
Mission. It's at the very heart and nature of God. Just as God broke through time and space to become flesh, live among us, love us and save us, God also calls the Church to "go" and be Christ's ambassadors, living lives of sacrificial love.
"The Church is the one institution that exists for those outside it," noted William Tyndale. But while God's call to mission is as old as the gospel, the language of "going missional" is more recent. Such language often emerges, however, where there is an increasing awareness about the nature of poverty, and the strong inclination that the Church needs to be more engaged in responding to poverty and the needs of people.
Perhaps that's in part behind the move toward becoming missional among many churches in Canada. Statistics tell the sad tale: more than 700,000 people turn to food banks in this country every month. We are increasingly a nation of immigrants, and one in every two children in recent immigrant families lives below the poverty line.
"In its most basic form, the missional church concept is to discern the activity of God and then to align with that activity," is how Karen Stiller and Willard Metzger explain it their new book, Going Missional: Conversations with 13 Canadian Churches Who Have Embraced Missional Life. "The task of the Church is not to first discern a vision and purpose and then to obtain God's blessing and anointing … It is instead to discover what God is already doing and then to get on board with that activity."
So what is God doing in Canada? The answer will vary, depending on who asks the question and the context in which they're asking it. But as John Bowen, director of the Institute of Evangelism at Wycliffe College in Toronto says, "We need to recognize there are a lot of people who will only encounter the gospel if Christians go to them."
I've seen the impact of going missional in my own church. People have come to faith while caring deeply about injustice and poverty. And I've seen the good that comes when churches—both here in Canada and in the developing world—engage missionally. Relationships are built, needs are met and the faith of those involved becomes more robust and reflective of the full meaning of the gospel.
It begins in the simplest of places: relationship. For as we relate to people outside our own churches and communities and learn of their needs, the natural response for the Christian is to ask, "What does God want me to do?"
Take the AIDS crisis in Africa, for example. Over the past decade, the Church, in spite of earlier judgment and stigmatization, has changed and become a leader in the alleviation of neglect and discrimination experienced by those suffering from HIV and AIDS. World Vision has trained some 300,000 community care volunteers, most of whom have come from out of Africa's churches. They are making a difference.
I remember a woman named Esther who lives in Zambia. She became a friend and caregiver to a young, 19-year-old woman who was dying of AIDS. Esther would visit her friend, listen to her and care for her practical needs. "But what I love most about Esther's visits," the dying woman told me, "is she tells me stories of hope. She reads from the Bible. She encourages me."
So it is when the Church carries out God's mission. Of course, we haven't always gotten it right. Our propensity to pursue the comfortable—long a flaw of affluent Christianity—should never be underestimated. We may have once been content to follow the line of least resistance, pursuing attractional rather than incarnational ministry. But we've learned that the gospel cannot be broken into optional parts without destroying the effectiveness of mission itself.
And in the process, we've realized that going missional not only brings grace and hope to others, it changes us as well.
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