Preservings $20 No. 25, December, 2005 - Plett Foundation

The Missional Church 1
Titus Guenther, Winnipeg, Manitoba
“A missional church is: all of God’s people demonstrating and proclaiming, all of God’s gospel throughout, all of God’s world.” 2
Introduction.
Even if you are not a student or a teacher
of mission studies chances are that you have
noticed the expression “missional church”
being used in your congregation, conference
reports, and church papers. You may be asking
if we need this expression or what advantages
the term holds over the expressions like “missionary
church” or “church with a mission.”
Some historical background is needed for
a better grasp of its innovative intent. Most
church families have used mission agencies
to administer their missionary work for a long
time. When the Protestant missionary movement
started early in the 19th century, these
agencies were called “missionary societies.”
The birth of missionary societies provided a
chance for lay Christians to become involved in
foreign missions in a time when the leaders of
historic Protestant churches generally opposed
mission outreach.
These mission agencies found it hard to
subordinate themselves to their denominations,
even after the latter rallied to the task of
missions. Perhaps more seriously, the agencies
served as an excuse for congregations from
having to concern themselves directly with
missions. Were they not supporting the agencies
precisely so that these should carry out the
missionary task for them? Christian churches
saw themselves as having many tasks, most of
which served to build up the home congregation.
Mission was merely one task alongside
others.
The Great Missionary Movement emerged
during the 19th century in a time of colonialist
expansion of the Western powers. Having
a church-centred understanding of missions,
the latter became a means for expanding the
Western church in foreign lands. But when
colonialism collapsed after World War II,
this Christendom concept of mission fell into
a crisis. Mission-founded churches rapidly
became independent and engaged in vigorous
mission work of their own. They prospered so
much that today the majority of Christians live
in the Third World.
The crisis in Western missions forced a
re-examination of our concepts of both church
and mission in the light of recent experiences
and the Bible. Biblical mission studies revealed
that mission does not belong to the church but
is God’s mission. God already revealed this
to Israel in the Old Testament but more fully
still in Jesus Christ. Jesus came to do God’s
mission in the world. After starting God’s new
humanity (the church) Jesus sent the church
into the world to continue the mission God
had given him.
Suddenly the nature and purpose of the
church look completely different. Its mission
then is not its own expansion, but rather to help
expand God’s kingdom through the church’s
90 - Preservings No. 25, December 2005
faithful witness in word and life. Its main or
only reason for being is missionary witness.
To say it with Emil Brunner, “God’s Word creates
the community in order that the community
might communicate God’s Word. ‘Mission
work does not arise from any arrogance in the
Christian Church¼mission is its cause and its
life. The church exists by mission, just as fire
exists by burning.’” 3
The early Christian church understood itself
in this way: it did not “have a mission” but
rather its whole reason for being was to witness
to the mission of God. Like us today, the early
church also did many different things: worship,
teach, help the poor, heal the sick, pray for the
world, eat together, and proclaim the gospel.
But all activities were put in the service of
the kingdom of God as revealed in Jesus’ life,
work, cross and resurrection; all served to witness
to God’s loving deeds “in Jerusalem, in all
Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth”
(Acts 1:8). Thus the early church was what we
now call a “missional church.”
Therefore, in contrast to the Christendom
church’s idea of conquering the heathen world
chunk by chunk, the “missional church”
sees its existence-for-mission as grounded in
the triune God and his reign over the world.
Western culture is then not self-authenticating
nor is it the standard for measuring other
cultures. Rather, the reign and mission of God
or the Spirit and gospel of Jesus Christ are the
criteria by which all cultures, including ours,
are measured.
For the missional church the reign and
mission of God come before church; and as
we are learning from Third World churches,
missiology comes before theology, or rather
the two cannot be distinguished. Martin Kähler
once wrote: “mission is the mother of theology.”
Western churches and universities, both
Catholic and Protestant, says David Bosch, are
only starting to learn this lesson.
The missional church is thus rediscovering
from the early church and Anabaptism the
insight that the church is not the owner but
rather God’s instrument of mission; 4 that our
missionary witness is directed toward “people
outside the community of faith [both] in the
neighbourhood and around the globe.” That
is, while the task of foreign missions remains,
the missional church must live in “missionary
encounter” with the culture that surrounds
the church. 5 This culture/society is never
fully Christianized (as was formerly assumed)
and no community of believers is ever fully
identical with God’s kingdom. That is why
our missional witness must be ongoing in the
congregation itself, in the neighbourhood and
in growing circles around the world.
In closing then, the missional church is, like
its founder, a pilgrim church, a “resident alien”
whose calling is to be in perpetual missionary
encounter with peoples in their cultural contexts,
including Western ones. The foundation
and content of its witness is Jesus Christ who
empowers his community of disciples with his
Spirit. Outwardly, the missional church may
not seem that different from one that is lacking
in missional engagement. James Krabill
characterizes the missional church thus:
“Certainly there are greeters, worship
leaders and Christian educators within the
congregation, but each from their position of
responsibility sees it as their task to participate
somehow in extending Christ’s kingdom to
people outside the community of faith in the
neighborhood and around the globe.
Congregations that smell this strongly
of mission will give missions education and
motivation a high priority in the classroom,
in Sunday School openings, in the church’s
worship patterns, in the narthex [foyer?], in the
library, in discussions about budget, and in the
general atmosphere that characterizes the quality
of human relationships and pervades every
aspect of life within their faith community.” 6
Therefore, in a missional church nothing,
yet everything is different. We will probably
continue to use mission agencies for mission
outreach. But local congregations will likely
become more active participants in various
forms of service and mission. Perhaps the
two most decisive differences are a) that a
missional church places a greater premium on
congregations being missionaries by the way
its members live and work together in communities
of disciples and b) (related to this)
since the missional church must be in ongoing
missionary encounter with its “home culture,”
it needs to study this culture as lovingly as
formerly we studied foreign cultures in order
that its gospel witness may both transform
Western culture while being contextualized or
incarnated in it.
A missional church is: “a church that understands
its purpose in light of God’s invitation to
participate in aligning all human activity with
the intentions of God” 7
Endnotes
1 First published in The Grapevine: Charleswood
Mennonite Church Newsletter, December 2001; later in
Focus: Foothills Mennonite Church Newsletter, November,
2002. The author presented it as the opening reflection at
the Missional Church Framework Planning meeting in Winnipeg,
Dec.13,2001.
2 James Krabill, ‘Does your Church “Smell” Like
Mission?’ Reflections on Becoming a Missional Church,
No. 17 (2001), 18. In MissionInsight series, Mennonite
Board of Missions.
3 Cited by Wilbert Shenk, Changing Frontiers of Mission
(Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1999), 124.
4 Ibid., 107.
5 Ibid., 122.
6 Krabill, op. cit., 3.
7 Ibid., 18.