Staying on Mission by planting in a missional community

Within modernity there has become a danger of church participants becoming consumers looking at what church can do for them. In this approach to ministry, the church becomes the marketer of goods and services and the pastor becomes the lead marketer trying to entice those within the church’s sphere of influence to come and receive what they have to offer in worship and programming. The gospel is sliced and diced into meeting felt needs. Long writes,

Numerous Christians are ‘double dipping.’ Instead of becoming part of one Christian community, they attend two or more churches in quest to have personal needs met. Thus they remain spectators or consumers in each church. We need to help Christians see that this path is not God’s path. He desires us to be involved in one fellowship where we can give as well as receive.[1]

The missional calling is a catalyst in shifting the church in understanding its calling as being a people on a mission or being a sent people serving in the world. It is the shift from going to church to being the church. This paradigm shift has great implications for the health and the purpose of our congregation. The community of faith is a pilgrim community on a mission to bless others and serve others through their understanding of Christ’s service to them. Wendell Berry illustrates the missional calling wonderfully in describing the ringing of the church bell in a small rural town.

My best duty was ringing the bell on Sunday morning. The bell rope came down into the vestibule through a hole bored in the ceiling. The rope was frayed where it had worked back and forth through the hole for a hundred years, and the hole was worn lopsided. Pulling the rope always felt awkward at the start, never the way I expected. You would feel the weight of the bell as it began unresponsively to swing on its creaky bearings up in the steeple. You might have to swing it a time or two or three times before the clapper would strike. And then it struck: “Dong!” And then around the sound of the clapper striking, the sound of the bell bloomed out in all directions over the countryside, into all the woods and hollows. It was never easy for me to stop ringing the bell, so I delighted in that interval of pure sound between the clapper and strokes. The bell, I thought voiced the best sermon of the day; it included everything, and in a way blessed it.[2]

The missional church is like this bell seeking to be a blessing in all of the ‘woods’ and ‘hollows’ throughout the world. The missional church is called to be a blessing to all and by doing this the missional community evolves beyond a consumerist ethos.

[1] Long, Generating Hope, 97.

[2] Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000), 163-164.