Missional

Take a trip to your local college campus and what you’ll discover is that non-Christian religious groups conspicuously outnumber the Christian groups. Wicca, Bahai, Muslim, and Buddhist groups dot the campus landscape as never before. Religious diversity is not only encouraged but also considered supreme in this new culture. Harvard professor Diane Eck states that, “Before 1965, we could conceive of ourselves as mainly a Christian nation but the influx of people of radically different religions and conversion of others to those religions — Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism — has resulted in two kinds of change: 

• first, we must relaize that the diverisites we find in religions today are changing the face of American, and
• second, that America is changing the religions, evolving in a climate of diversity and freedom.” Newsweek Magazine recently pointed out “…young people are openly passionate about religion—but insist on defining it in their own ways.”   

In the transition from the old era to the new we have a mix of people with copious worldviews. But in the very near future we will watch a generation be born in an exclusively unique environment. The United Kingdom, Western Europe, Australia, and Canada have been post-Christian for a decade or more. America is just now transitioning and Latin America is a decade behind us in this transition. This being so, we need to see ourselves as missionaries; what do missionaries do? They cross borders.

from ReclaimingtheMission.com

Among the new missional leaders, church is the name we give to a way of life, not a set of services. We do not plant an organized set of services; we inhabit a neighborhood as the living embodied presense of Christ. Missional leaders now root themselves in a piece of geography for the long term. We survey the land for the poor and the desperate, not just physically but emotionally and spiritually as well. We seek to plant seeds of ministry, kernels of forgiveness, new plantings of the gospel among “the poor (of all kinds)” and then by the Spirit water them, nurture them into the life of God in Christ. [read the complete post]

The Culture-Driven-Church

Today I’ve been thinking about how we have traditonally done things and why we continue to do them the way we do. Maybe the greater question is why we are so resistant to changing the way we do things when there isn’t any biblical basis for most of what we do (in method, style, or format).

Think about it. “Church” is now defined for people by what we do. And this has become a gigantic barrier for the church in being the church. I am sadden by the “fruit” – shallow, inwardly focused, culture driven, priority given to the service of felt-needs, and consumer oriented. What we have in the majority of our churches are people who “go to church” as opposed to Christians who are the church.