Christianity in North America

Is “Missional” Sending People to Hell?

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American Church leaders love buzzwords. Toss a buzzword around long enough and you seem smarter, more with it. “He uses that word a lot. He must be an expert.”

Past buzzwords of note include these “winners”:

Visioncasting

Transformational

Impact

Best of breed

Leverage

Organic growth

Long tail

For the past five years or so, the American Church has fallen over itself to let potential local church members and disaffected believers looking for an “active” church know that it groks its mission to the world. The answer it offers is missional.

The word missional came from the title of a 1998 book assembled under the auspices of the World Council of Churches that sought to rediscover the true mission of the Church in the 21st century. It outlined de-emphasizing the Church as an institution and instead concentrating local church purposes on the “gospel mission,” doing the things the Bible depicts the Church doing in Acts.

All that sounds great—well, except for the World Council of Churches’ involvement.

Cerulean Sanctum exists to help Christians consider what it means to be New Testament believers living in 21st century America. When someone mentions the Book of Acts, my ears prick up. Missional appears to align perfectly with this blog’s intent.

But as I’ve watched churches scamper to redo their mission statements to include the word missional, even as church after church rejiggers its advertising to ensure people know it’s missional, I get a bad feeling about this swing to focusing on mission.

Missional church?Serving the poor is great. Healing the sick is a beautiful calling. Living simply is a must. Putting the mission of Jesus central in all we do is wonderful.

Or is it?

The problem  with the massive move to missional in the Church is that Christians ARE doing a much better job of putting the gospel activities of the Church central. More and more churches are effective at being less institutional and more missional.

So how is that a problem?

Making the activities of Christian mission central is subtly distinct from making Christ Himself central.

In the midst of all this missional hubbub, I wonder if we have forgotten Jesus.

A couple weeks ago, a friend mentioned that he was seeing a massive shift in the local church ecosystem. Large churches known for their programs were banding together to be more aggressive in missional practice, uniting under the banner of a missional program known as 3DM.

On the surface, this sounds amazing. Never mind that unifying under something calls into question that something’s ultimate message, Christians have long seen a need to be both more ecumenical and more mission-focused. This looks like a possible answer.

But as my friend described what was actually playing out, it sounded to me like a lot of great work done, but without a lot of “being.” in other words, this missional thrust looks super as an action, but what is going on in the spiritual depths of the people doing all those missional activities?

One of the most startling verses in the Bible, spoken by Jesus:

And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.
—John 17:3 ESV

Jesus gives us the very definition of eternal life: Knowing God and knowing Jesus Himself.

Knowing.

Knowing is distinct from doing. It is possible to do and not to know. One can take part in activities that look and feel godly without knowing God. Fact is, this is what Protestants have accused Catholics of since the Reformation.

Is it possible to be missional and yet not know God and Jesus Christ whom God sent?

Sadly, I believe it is.

Consider the source of the word missional, a World Council of Churches book. Does a more doctrinally suspect organization exist? While that may be a “guilt by association” argument, researching the beliefs of those most ardent about missional uncovers compromises, usually with regard to traditional orthodoxy. The most missional-focused folks on the national stage often seem fuzzier about who Jesus is or what He says. They sometimes make statements that it’s OK to be a Muslim-Christian or a Buddhist-Christian. Or that the Church must embrace whatever the latest spirit of the age is to stay relevant. Relevance seems to be critical to being missional. As long as one stays relevant, one stays missional, so it doesn’t matter what happens to 2,000 years of Christian doctrine.

But if people who claim to know Jesus don’t track true to what His entire word says, in what way are they really following Him?

If a person does Gospel-looking activities but doesn’t adhere to everything in the Gospel, how can it be said that person is a Christian? How can the argument be made that such a person knows the real Jesus at all?

Jesus had a response to this:

Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village. And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.”
—Luke 10:38-42 ESV

In many ways, missional is a reaction against a moribund Church that sat at Jesus’ feet and soaked up the goodness—without doing anything with what was soaked up. But like so much that happens in the American Church, fleeing to one polar extreme after dwelling at the other is not the way to achieve balance.

Christians can’t just do works that look Christian. We must know Jesus. We must sit at His feet and dwell there.  It is as important to be as it is to do. In fact, as we see in the above passage from Luke, it may be MORE important.

We can do everything that looks like Christian mission and yet not know Jesus. The Muslim world has studied how Christian ministry works and now models many new Islamic charities off their Christian counterparts, which is winning converts to Islam. In short, missional success, just without Jesus.

Jesus is the difference. We must know Him. We must know what is truth. A Christianity that acts like the early Church but doesn’t know Jesus well—or at all—will fail because it is the arm of flesh and not the working of the Spirit.

How tragic to someday find yourself before the Lord and hear Him say He never knew you, despite all the missional things you did.

People are dying to know Jesus. Really, that’s all that matters. If our churches neglect to give Jesus to people in ample measure, all the missional in the universe will not save them.

God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America

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God's Forever Family @ Amazon.comI came of age in the late 1970s. Amy Grant’s song “1974” was for me closer to January 1977, but the sentiment was the same. My spiritual life up to that point reflected the influence of the Jesus People Movement (JPM) that began in the late 1960s and eventually faded away by 1979. The Lutheran Church I was raised in channeled some of the movement and had even begun to change its musical styles for youth before the JPM hit, incorporating folk-styled worship songs that emerged from Roman Catholic youth revivals that erupted post-Vatican II.

So when Christianity Today magazine named God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America by Larry Eskridge its book of the year, I snapped it up and immediately started reading. A historical overview of the  Jesus People Movement, the book traces the movement’s rise among Haight-Ashbury hippies in San Francisco circa 1968, covers the establishment of countercultural Christianity across the country, looks at Christian communes, notes predatory pseudo-Christian cults that arose alongside the movement, discusses the genesis of Contemporary Christian Music, and concludes with how the JPM changed the American Church.

For Christians who came of age in the late 1960s and 1970s, I’d call it a must read. You might even see people you know discussed in the book. (I know I was surprised to see a pastor of a church I formerly attended named in the acknowledgments as a contributor of material and background info.) The story Eskridge lays out for readers has a bittersweet taste for those of us who recall those innocent days and wish the best parts of that JPM mentality had not gone missing from the modern American Church.

For those too young to remember the 1970s, God’s Forever Family serves as a history to explain why the Church today looks and acts like it does, for good and for ill. I even learned a few things.  I did not know the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship graciously bankrolled many of the most influential JPM ministries, or that Pat Robertson had a hand in establishing and legitimizing Christian rock music. The history depicted in God’s Forever Family will help make sense of contemporary evangelicalism and may de-vilify Christian leaders and their ministries that started with good intentions but somehow went off course or moved the entire Church in a direction that has not best served the Lord. In the pages of this book, we see how good intentions sometimes lead to less than ideal outcomes.

I won’t offer a review of the book other than to say I wish author Eskridge had delved deeper into more of the issues closest to my heart. But as an overview, it’s essential reading, covering a tumultuous era, the movement it spawned, and the impact it still has today. The JPM has been forgotten in recent years, so a contemporary revisit is most welcome.

The best Christian book published in 2013? Whether it is or not, you would do well to read it.

The Surefire Way to Fix the Church’s Every Problem

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Covered with Band-AidsApparently, my solutions suck.

One of the first things you learn about tackling intractable problems: People will hate your ideas for fixes. Not merely disagree with, but full-on hate.

You would think that when we bring difficult topics into the sphere of the Christian community the hate would go away. Well, maybe a little. What you get as a replacement is this: “Your fix will never work.”

Christians can be some of the most pessimistic and nihilistic people when faced with nasty issues. Anyone who even tries to speak to a tough issue has that idea chastised. It’s one reason why so much of the American Church is adrift.

What makes me more upset than having unusual ideas shot down by perpetual naysayers is that God never set up His Kingdom to be dominated by a loose collection of wandering idea people. Yet that is the model we Americans endorse.

Wakeup call: This mentality of a Moses-like character who emerges onto the national Christian scene to lead us in the way we should go is just a big pipe dream. Sure, now and then some Christian with a great agent lands a great book deal and writes a great book we talk about for two months before we forget what the hubbub was about. That’s not the way the King expects the Kingdom to work, though. Looking to any one human being for solutions won’t work.

I know it’s hypocritical of my entire post to say this, but here’s the only answer:

Every local church needs to sit down as a whole church—leaders, non-leaders, the elderly, the teens, whoever the church deems a communing member—and present to the assembly the problems facing the church and its local area. Then the whole church works together as One Body to seek, find, and present answers.

I don’t care what the problem is. I don’t care how difficult it might seem. Each local church needs to convene as a whole church and get solutions.

Of course, within a Christian context, this means operating as the Body of Christ plugged into the Head.

God gave each of us gifts, both innate talents and spiritual gifts. The entire Church model presented in the New Testament depends on that Body model Christ left us. If we do not operate as a Body, we do not operate as intended. If we reduce the Church to nothing more than a loose affiliation of individuals, then we should not be surprised when we achieve no results or cannot deliver solutions.

If we truly believe our own teachings, then it’s about time that each local church gets its leaders focused on what the problems are that face the church and put those problems before the whole church.

I don’t believe there is a problem too hard for the Lord to fix if we Christians in our local churches meet as a body (and THE Body) to hash them out, so long as we let the Spirit guide us.

I’m fed up with excuses for why such and such never gets fixed, aren’t you?

Last week, at another site, I took the author of an article to task for thinking too small. When I proposed a solution, the naysayers came out in droves.

But you know what? I don’t care if my offering is outrageous on the surface. Many solutions that eventually work start off outrageous. No, I don’t have proof such and such will work; all I know is that no one has made the attempt.

And if my answer is outrageous and left untried, how many other believers in a local church may have equally outrageous answers to tough problems that everyone beefs about but no one ever attempts to fix?

Why are we not brainstorming outrageous answers as a local church? Why do we always look to our leaders for solutions if that leader is the “foot” part of the Body or that one is a “nose,” but we need an “eye” solution? Wouldn’t the “eye”-gifted people possibly have better insight?

And why is it that we have no confidence that the Holy Spirit can speak spiritual answers through the bohemian single mom who just became a believer a couple weeks ago? Why is it the Holy Spirit can’t speak through the shifty-looking teen guy? How is it that the people in the seats have zero ability to cast light upon a dark issue, only the “experts”?

When we discredit what might be spoken through a “nonstandard vessel,” we’re not just discrediting the vessel; we’re discrediting our Lord’s ability to use whomever He so pleases.

I believe a surefire fix exists for problems the Church keeps saying can’t be fixed. Or if not a total fix, then a good bulkhead for keeping the worst of that problem at bay. We just don’t trust the Lord to work through other believers the way He said He would.