Below is a copy of notes presented on the “missional church.” “Missional church” is a popular buzzphrase right now. Here is a Presbyterian take on it.
I think there is a lot of good here that we need to be discussing.
“MISSIONAL FOR DUMMIES”: AN INTRO TO PGF
The following Power Point presentation was recently made to a couple of congregations in the Atlanta area as an introduction to the work and mission of PGF…
A few weeks ago somebody was telling me about a church conducting a search for a new pastor. Apparently, this congregation is in a bustling and growing suburb of Atlanta. More and more people are moving into the area; local business and real estate are showing similar signs of new life; and the congregation itself is excited about the prospects of adding more people to its rosters.
But there is one big catch. The church is dying: each year more people leave, the budget shrinks and morale gets worse. In short, this little congregation in an Atlanta suburb is just one more casualty among the fastest dying breed of mainline Christianity…the Presbyterian Church U.S.A.
[Slide 1: The Presbyterian Church U.S.A. is dying.]
I asked my friend for his take on why the church is dying. My friend’s answer was eye-opening. He told me that the congregation keeps focusing on keeping its building pretty and finding a nice, friendly pastor to offer spiritual care, all the while thinking that by making their church more “attractive,” people will start coming to their church in droves…
[Slide 2: The Old “Attractional Church” Model..."If you build it, they will come."]
…But people aren’t coming. They’re not coming because what may’ve worked fifty years ago, when the “Sunday Christian” phenomenon and “Christian” values were still big, when going to church was still the mainstream, conservative, culturally acceptable, suburban activity of a lot of Americans, no longer works…and, for good riddance, too, because that kind of staid, boring existence, can’t come close to measuring up to the suspense and adventure of following Jesus where He goes– on a great, big mission from God to heal the sick, cast out demons, forgive sin, and fight evil and injustice. That, after all, is the story of Jesus we read about in Scripture…(and it’s supposed to be our story, too.)
So the death of mainline Christianity as we know it is actually an opportunity! It’s an opportunity because it frees us up to be the “church” God intended us to be in the first place—a people sent out right behind Jesus to be salt and light to a needy world and caught up in the great drama of the missio dei, the mission of God to redeem His world.
PGF: Our Origins
Well, if we mainline Presbyterians are going extinct, as illustrated in my introductory example, you’re going to hear today about how the movement called “Presbyterian Global Fellowship” (PGF) will get us off the endangered species list and back into the arena where God is at work breathing life into fresh, creative expressions of “missional church.” But before we talk about where we in PGF believe God is calling us to go, I want to remind us a little about where we come from.
[Slide 3: “Dangerous Memories” (Brueggemann)]
And that story, as I’ve already intimated, begins back in the Good Book that tells us who we really are: beloved children of God, friends of Christ, partners with the Holy Spirit, a chosen people set apart to be a blessing to the nations. We know this is our identity, because God deigned to become one of us in the person of a man named “Jesus,” thereby crossing all boundaries of space, time and the sin that leads to death just to show us how much He loves us.
[Slide 4: “Dangerous Memories” continued]
And this Jesus was a radical, subversive revolutionary who in the act of living, dying and rising from the dead overturned all of the tall tales we human beings have told ourselves since the beginning of time– that our lives don’t have eternal significance, that our world is beyond repair, that we can’t make a difference, that our lights are better kept hidden under a bushel…the list goes on.
As is often the case, the tall tales can tend to win out, at least for a time. To be sure, the early church, basking in the dazzling aftermath of Jesus’ subversive story, chose to live on the margins of the Roman Empire as a peculiar people. The church of that time was known as people of “the Way”—they were on the move and on a mission, following the One who called Himself “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” (We can catch a glimpse of the excitement of those early days from reading the book of Acts, where ordinary men and women, none of them ordained, none of them CPM-certified, were doing extraordinary things in Jesus’ name.)
[Slide 5: “Christendom”: A Working Definition]
But starting in the fourth century, the church in the West began to settle down to a more comfortable routine: under the auspices of Emperor Constantine the church sidled up to the institutions of state and culture and stayed there, cozy, well-fed and comfortable, like a great big bear in hibernation…And she stayed there for centuries, in a state dubbed “Christendom.”
Of course every metaphor has its limits, and by comparing Christendom to a bear in hibernation, I don’t want to forget the many contributions to mission that took place during the life of Christendom—many of them made by Presbyterians. In fact, the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. is itself historically rooted in an understanding of the church as a “missionary society.”
[Slide 6: “Christendom” Images]
But, if you will permit me to indulge the metaphor, only recently did the great bear begin to come out of her hibernation. Some fifty years ago, expressions of “Sunday Christianity” were still as woven into the fabric of American culture as “Leave it to Beaver” and mama’s apple pie; but today, as evidenced in my opening story, the last props of Christendom have collapsed. We now live in a secular age in which the church is once again on the margins of what constitutes “mainstream” America.
[Slide 7: “Are you an exile?”]
This post-Christendom context has left many feeling exiled, with one foot in the church and the other in the world, with no sense of real belonging. In fact, there is a whole crop of exiles out there. If you’re an exile, you’re somebody who no longer feels at home in church when “church” constitutes little more than quaint, lifeless buildings and empty theatrics for “Sunday Christians.” You’re somebody who feels shipwrecked in a sea of “cultural” and “consumerist” Christianity, where the gods of Western culture, gods like sex, power and materialism, often claim our allegiance over the cross of Jesus Christ. And if you are an exile, you are uncomfortable offering skin-deep answers to the deep cries for help all around us in the forms of human suffering and injustice and alienation from God.
If you belong to this category of “exiles,” then you are not alone…because among the ruins of our denomination and greater mainline Protestantism, a growing number of individuals and congregations—we call ourselves “Presbyterian Global Fellowship”—have wondered the same things. We’ve asked ourselves whether all we can or should do as members of a dying institution in the West is to cloister ourselves away in our pretty buildings, demand spiritual “T.L.C.” from our leaders and offer little more than shallow answers to the plight of our world…And we’ve concluded that we can and should not do that, because of our origins in the life, death and resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. His is an answer not just for his church but for the whole world.
We believe that if what Jesus says of himself in the Scriptures is true– that he really was sent by God on an unprecedented mission to take away the sins of the world, and lived, died and rose again to show us that– then we have a living Answer that is so convincing, so urgently needed, so life-saving, that we can’t hide it any longer under the bushel of insular denominational squabbles and captivity to other gods. We believe that God has summoned us back to the drawing board, back to the basics, of following Jesus and of looking around, beyond the walls of our congregations, both overseas and locally, for where God is already at work in fields ripe for harvest…so that we might join God in the great adventure of seeing Him transform lives.
So PGF has emerged from the grandest and most important story there is, of a God at work redeeming the world in the person of Jesus Christ, and at a critical time in history when our old ways of existing as “church” no longer make sense.
Our Identity
[Slide 8: Who the heck is PGF?!]
So a closer look at who we are. We are Presbyterian: we are a movement that has taken root within the context of the PCUSA and as a constructive response to the challenges facing our denomination and mainline Protestantism in the West.
We are global: we believe that in the 21st century, we have much to learn about where God is at work all around the world, and we can learn this best by strengthening relationships with our brothers and sisters in Christ overseas.
And, we are a fellowship: we are not another organization trying to restructure the PCUSA back to health; nor are we a mission agency—we have able partners like The Outreach Foundation and Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship to do that good work; and, we’re not trying to start a whole new denomination. What we do believe, as a movement of congregations, is that God has called us to “get on with the mission of the church” and that we can do that best together, in finding news ways of connecting.
Our Destination
[Slide 9: Where are we going?]
So we’re on a journey together to relearn Jesus and the exciting challenge of following Him with the goal of furthering God’s mission to the world.
[Slide 10: End destination]
The end destination of that journey will be congregations like First Presbyterian Gainsville living as missional communities following Jesus Christ.
[Slide 11: And, what the heck is ‘missional,’ anyway?]
But what does that mean, really, and what does that look like? If ‘mission’ is, simply put, the outward impulse of God’s people ‘sent out’ to declare the Lordship of Jesus Christ in all and over all, then ‘missional’ describes what happens when ‘mission’ becomes the central, organizing principle of our lives.
We want to see each and every member of the body of Christ, with his or her unique gifts, serving as an apostle (the word in Greek, after all, connotes being “sent”) to the world…We want to see God’s people living with one primary purpose—to be messengers of the Gospel, ‘little jesuses,’ in their families, communities, neighborhoods and world, because that, not the tall tales, is their only real story line.
Some helpful images for understanding ‘missional’…
[Slide 12: ‘Missional’: from ‘picture people’ to ‘drama people’…which are you?]
The late Raymond Nogar distinguished between the “picture” people and the “drama” people.” The picture people view the Gospel safely and from afar, as one might view Salvador Dali’s “Last Supper” in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The drama people are not satisfied with being mere spectators: like the audience engrossed in a great play they are caught up personally in the drama of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.
[Slide 13: ‘Missional’: from ‘Love Boat’ to aircraft carrier…which is Conyers Pres?]
Another way to describe what ‘missional’ looks like is to borrow from a naval metaphor: churches need to go from being cruise ships to being aircraft carriers. The typical church today, Vic Pentz says, is a cruise ship, like the Love Boat. We all get together to have a swell time with the pastor as cruise director. We love each other. We love our ship and, of course, we love God too. But the aircraft carrier launches God’s people out into “enemy territory” with the purpose of extending God’s kingdom. (Of course, the military image is not perfect because our enemy is not flesh and blood, but realms of injustice and exploitation, the abuse of power, hopelessness, unbelief, materialism and all the false gods that stand against the righteousness of God’s kingdom.) In this model, Pentz likens elders and pastors to naval officers who train the pilots to launch and establish air dominance, thereby extending the influence of God’s kingdom throughout the city. Each goes out to fulfill his or her mission to extend the reach of God’s love, authority and kingdom, in Conyers, Georgia and beyond…
And the real-life stories of when this happens are contagious! There is Julie Riggs, a recent University of Georgia graduate who has made her vocation ministering the Good News of the Gospel to the women who work in the strip clubs of Athens, Georgia. And there is John Armbrust, a young man who used a winning knack for poker to raise a big sum of money to support the good work of Presbyterian Education Board of Pakistan. Then there are folks like Bill and Nancy Warlick who have devoted their whole life to serving in various capacities as missionaries to Africa…and congregations like North Avenue Presbyterian, who discovered that they happen to be on one of the busiest corners for child sex trafficking in Atlanta and began to do something about it. Further abroad there are stories like that of a handful of Catholic nuns who decided to move into a run-down tenement building in a poor, low-income section of England just to be closer to the people they were ministering the love of Jesus to.
