From Dave’s Laptop March 22, 2010
Next Sunday will be very special! Not only is it Palm Sunday; not only will we baptize Mary Beverly; but Dr. Daniel Vestal, Coordinator of the National CBF and the author of our It’s Time! materials, will also be with us.
The adults will meet together with Dr. Vestal in Rosser Hall during the Bible Study hour, followed by his preaching in both services, and then we’ll eat lunch together and hear from him once more.
As we prepare for Dr. Vestal’s time with us, I thought it might be good for us to reflect on some of the things it means to be “a missional church.” These thoughts are from various sources, especially www.friendofmissional.org.
• The missional church is a collection of committed believers acting in concert to fulfill the Great Commission of Jesus Christ.
• The missional church is one where people are stretching into what it means to be on mission for the Kingdom of God as their primary identity and vocation.
• The missional church knows that they must be a cross-cultural people and must adopt a missionary stance in relation to their community.
• The missional church will be engaged with the culture (in the world) without being absorbed by the culture (not of the world).
• The missional church is evangelistic and faithfully proclaims the gospel through word and deed. How we embody the gospel in our community is as important as what we say.
• The missional church understands the power of the gospel and does not lose confidence in it.
• The missional church aligns all its activities around the Great Commission.
• The missional church seeks to put its neighbors’ good ahead of their own.
• The missional church is prayer-filled, Bible-centered, virtuous, compassionate, integrated, and spiritually powerful.
• The missional church practices hospitality that brings “outsiders” inside the love of God.
• The missional church is totally reliant on God in all it does. It moves beyond superficial faith to supernatural living.
• The missional church is desperately dependent on prayer.
• The missional church is orthodox in its view of the gospel and scripture, but culturally relevant in its methods and practice so that it can engage the world view of the hearers.
• The missional church feeds deeply on the scriptures throughout the week.
• The missional church is a community where all members are involved in learning “the way of Jesus.” Growth toward spiritual maturity is expected.
• The missional church helps people discover and develop their spiritual gifts.
• The missional church is a healing community where people carry each other’s’ burdens and restore each other gently.
• The missional church is not just about how many people come to our church services, but about how many people our church serves.
• The missional church is not just about how many people attend our ministries, but about how many people have we equipped for ministry.
• The missional church is not just about how many people minister inside the church, but about how many minister outside the church.
• The missional church is not just about helping people become more whole themselves, but about helping people bring more wholeness to their world (i.e., justice, healing, relief).
• The missional church is not just about how many ministries we start, but about how many ministries we help.
• The missional church is not just about how many unbelievers we bring into the community of faith, but about how many believers we help experience healthy community.
• The missional church is not just about counting the resources that God gives us to steward, but about counting how many good stewards are we developing for the sake of those not yet in the Kingdom.
• The missional church is not just about how much peace we bring to individuals, but about how much peace we bring to our world.
• The missional church is not just about how unified our local church is, but about how unified the Church is in our neighborhood, city and world.
• The missional church is not just about how much we immerse ourselves in the text, but about how faithfully we live in the Story of God.
• The missional church is not just about being concerned about how our country is doing, but about being concerned for the welfare of other countries.
• The missional church is not just about how many people we bring into the kingdom, but about how much of the kingdom we bring to the earth.
• See you Sunday!
Dave
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