Missional Church: Intentionally Missional - Get Ready to be Uncomfortable
By Amy Hamlin
In the last few months, there has been lots of activity surrounding YoungLife and the partnership with Reliant. As exciting as this is, I can’t help the many questions that are flooding my brain. Where do I fit in? Where do we as a community fit in? How do we get from here to there? How can we have the most impact? Are we an intentionally missional church?
Most, if not all, of us have heard about being on a mission for Christ. But doing mission is not the same as being missional. So what does it mean to be missional? Looking for some answers, I went to the web. After reading quite a few articles and blogs, I found that missional communities/churches are being called different things in different places, but the idea is the same: a group of people, doing the mission of God together outside the confines of the regular church building.
Having Googled myself silly, I came across a blog written by a guy named Rick Meigs. I love what he says about how we as a church body deal with being on a mission. "Jesus told us to go into all the world and be his ambassadors (Matthew 28:18-25), but many churches today have inadvertently changed the "go and be" command to a "come and see" appeal. We have grown attached to buildings, programs, staff and a wide variety of goods and services designed to attract and entertain people.” So true! Guilty as charged. So how do we change our “come and see” mentality to “go and be”?
All of a sudden, I am hearing this “but that is SCARY! It means that I might actually have to get uncomfortable and share my faith with someone!”
“Yes, I, too, have that knot in my stomach. But what if . . . ?”
What if you and I replace the "come to us" invitations with a "go to them" life? Meigs suggests that our mission becomes “’a life where "the way of Jesus" informs and radically transforms our existence to one wholly focused on sacrificially living for Him and others, and where we adopt a missionary stance in relation to our culture. It speaks of the very nature of the Jesus follower.”’ Sounds good to you, but you are probably still sitting in your chair, white-knuckled and gripping on for dear life. Maybe you need a little more motivation than the Great Commission. Thom Rainer is the president and CEO of LifeWay Christian Resources, which provides church health insights. Some interesting statistics about groups of people that “accept” Jesus as their Lord and Savior jumped out at me:
- 63% of people who accept Christ do so before the age of 18
- 18% are between the age of 18-25
- 26% are 26 years old or over
Wow! Are you motivated to share your faith yet? I see some head nodding, but who is going to talk to “those” people over there you ask? Jesus says, “but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8). We are the presence of Jesus in this world. Only through us, individually (that means you) and communally (that means Reliant/YoungLife), does the world see Jesus. That is a great reason why “way of life,” behavior, and practice, not just words, are important.
Welcome to the journey.
Your mission for this week, if you choose to accept it, is to get uncomfortable. You might already know this passage, but just as a refresher, Matthew 28:18-25 says, 18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” Jesus didn’t ask us if we’d like to go. To be precise, He commanded us to go. He expects it of each of us. He authorized us to do it in His stead. He provides His Spirit to guide us through the ins and outs of it – right down to providing us with the courage and the necessary words. Are you up to His task for you?
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