More On Missional Community
Having had a month of intense, over- book schedule, I was a tad nervous going into last week of teaching on our Discipleship Training School (DTS), where I would be helping the students engage the ideas and practices of what it means to be a truly missional community. A core theme of my teaching is building authentic and true community through a process of brokenness and restoration through the pattern of the cross (see this post for a general overview). I tried to instill in them a sense that the depth and quality of the community’s relationships, lived openly before the world, is a central expression of missionality.
During the weeks teaching, one of the students was moved emotionally as they worked to break through the challenges that kept their relationships stalled. Frustrated, passionate and crying, she said:
“How can we expect to be missional in the world if we cannot have open relationships with each other?”
It is an excellent question. If the Gospel we proclaim is the promise of restoration and salvation in our relationships with God, each other, ourselves and Creation, yet fail to walk it out in our lives together, how can we expect our words to have any authority? We are not saved by our work, but the work of salvation, by necessity, will produce- no, demand- transformational change in our lives together.
And yet, as I considered this, the reverse question also presented itself:
“How can we expect to live in transformed and restored relationship together as community if we are living missionally in the world?”
At the end of my week of teaching, I presented our students with a project: They were to come together as a team and consider a missional endeavour they engage together. However, I required that they do so following the values and processes of true community in the process. Immediate they began hitting challenges in the relational aspects of the project. As a result, they (predictably) began to escape into organization, rules and efficiency- essentially the seeds of institutionalism.
Stepping in, I required them to go back to the the requirement that, no matter how frustrating or inefficient, their highest value was to do their task as a true community. As they pushed past the discomfort and inclination to internalize their feelings, it took only a few short minutes for several people to be weeping, sharing deeply personal areas of brokenness exposed by the process. Out of this experience, their “project” is being shaped by something far more personal, more real. They are moving past “good” program and looking at call to restoration and reconciliation that is at the heart of our missional vocation as the Body of Christ.
So in the end, we all begin to see in a very real way that to be missional community is an essentially integrated whole. We cannot be truly missional if we are not fiercely pursuing the costly process of restoration that only comes through the Cross. Equally as important is the reality that it is truly when we are thrust into the missional context of a broken world that we presented with the environment and impetus to be that community. One is not more important than the other. Neither does one come before the other. They are simultaneous and intimately integrated parts of the same whole.
To be missional community is more than simply adding a missional vision and practice into our current congregations. This is important and healthy, but because the mission of God is significantly about the restoration of a dis-integrated Creation, a reconciliation of relationships that were meant to reflect and glorify the nature of God- because of this, it necessarily must redefine the very way in which we are community. Missionality not only defines our posture towards the world, but equally towards each other within our communities and the larger Body of Christ.
In the same way, it is when we find ourselves in the dangerous and liminal reality of missional engagement with the world, if we resist the impulses to escape into institutionalism and shallow “false community”, that we are plunge into an environment that is rich for the formation of the true community. When faced with relationships and circumstances that ask questions that do not fit our formulaic approach to faith, we are given the opportunity to explore within ourselves the barriers that keep us and others from discovering God.
Suddenly, Jesus revolutionary articulation of God’s ulimately command for His people becomes clearer:
