What is a Missional Church?

This paper has been written to help our leaders begin to bring some clarity to exactly what it means to be a missional church. As our culture is emerging so to is the Church. In these changing times the maps which we used to rely upon no longer hold true. The church is in need of new maps and new maps will mean new navigators who filled with courage and a deep dependence on the Holy Spirit are willing to lay down what is know so as to discover what is not yet known. The Oasis is one such church who has intentionally set sail on this journey of discovery. The Oasis is an intentional Missional Church! As leaders within The Oasis you will be expected to adopt the position of a student of life & culture, the Bible and the church as we together wrestle with what it means to be an authentic missional faith community in the 21st Century in the South East Corner of Queensland. This will involve reading relevant books, articles and attending training workshops and conferences as they are available. There will be an expectation that all leaders are committed to being life long learners. A missional church is by design and default, a Christ-following group of people (Christians) whose defining purpose is to faithfully incarnate the purposes of Christ in the present world and culture they live in. Their existence and activity is defined by their Mission (the Mission of Christ), not by their existence and activities. When trying to come to a deeper understanding of what is meant by the term Missional Church it may be helpful to make some contrasts and comparisons between some of the more popular models of church in more recent times.

The following two charts will seek to contrast and compare the:

a. Church Growth Model with the Missional Model

b. Pastoral Model with the Missional Model

The contrast between Church Growth Model and Missional Model
	Church Growth	Missional
Orientation/Perspective	Anthropocentric	Theocentric
	Practical	Theological
	Modern	Postmodern
Theological Focus	Great Commission	Missio Dei – The Mission of God
Beginning Question	What makes the church grow?	What is the gospel?
Perspective on Scripture	Propositional Truth	Narrative of God’s purposes
How does mission happen?	By Strategic Planning	By the Spirit of God (God’s ‘surprises’)
Nature of Community	People groups	Inclusiveness, unity of the body of Christ
Focus on evangelism	Differentiation between discipling and perfecting, individual salvation	Initiation of people into the Kingdom of God; holistic understanding of ‘making disciples’
Orientation toward Social Action	Priority of evangelism and church planting over social action; Reactive to the Social Gospel	The gospel, evangelism, and social action cannot be separated

The contrast between Pastoral Model and Misisonal Model
Pastoral Model	Missional Model
Pastor is ‘everywhere present’	Ministry staff operate as coaches and mentors
Practice Pastoral Care for those in need	Ministry Team equip and release people to care for one another
Pastor is reactive to people’s needs and pains	Not needs and pain reactive
Pastor provides solutions	Pastor asks questions which in turn sparks the missional imagination of the people
Preaching is didactic, telling, principles for living	Teach the people of God to engage with Scripture. Confronts them with questions, draws them into a distinctive world
The Pastor is a celebrity	The Pastor is a leader
The Pastor puts out bushfires	The Pastor makes tension OK
The Pastor is a conflict fixer	The Pastor is a conflict facilitator
The Pastor is the sole vision caster	The Pastor helps people to find the vision of God where they live/work/play
The Pastor functions as the sole manager and visionary	The Pastor creates an environment that releases the Missional imagination of the people through diverse ministries

Jason Zahariades writes in “The Missional Community” In a missional church “’Mission’ shifts from naming a function of the church to describing its essential nature. In a missional church, the church IS mission rather than does mission as a program or activity of the larger life of the church. The church’s nature is to show the world what it looks like when a community of people live under the reign of God in every aspect of daily life.”

Therefore, those who are Missional aspire to the following:

They are incarnational. They ‘live among’ rather than ‘withdraw from’ the world
They develop real relationships of integrity with non-church people, just as much as they do with church people
They practice being long term sowers, rather than commando raids into foreign territory
They are interested in the whole person as well as the soul of a person
They see through a Mission mind-set, rather than a church culture
They take time to develop what John Stott calls ‘double listening’. They listen to culture just as much as they listen to scripture

Key competencies are:

Wholly alive to Christ
Wholly alive to those not present in the Kingdom
Authentic and transparent in Christian living
Discernment – they seek to understand the times they live in, not live in the times they have been comfortable in
They seek to comfortably live with diversity
They prioritise resources and strategies for the non-churched world
Their passion is for all people to become a citizen of God’s Kingdom where they are verses becoming part of a church culture that withdraws them from their world.

Moving Toward a Missional Imagination
Common Leadership Thinking	Leaders Developing a Missional Imagination
Strategies for attraction and growth of church come from leaders or board with congregational agreement	Create dialogue and listening among people; within their stories are hints and directions for missional life
People come to church; the building is the center of religious life	Church is the people engaged in their context in relationship with others
People receive teaching, preaching, and belonging as religious goods and services	People are formed in a way of life
The church is about experts who develop programs to ‘minister’ to specific groups	The church as a center of information where people co-develop the skills they need

Traditional View

Modern View

Postmodern/Missional View

As you can see from the 3 diagrams above the church has in recent generations traversed through several shifts or paradigms. In the traditional view the church was the centre of the community. Walk around any Australian city and you will see what I mean. The church occupies the pride of place in the center of the city and usually high on the hill. This is the essential mark of Christendom. Christendom is characterized by the actions of Constantine who was responsible for transitioning the church from a fringe dwelling group of radicals to the cultured and sanitized group of model citizens who became the community leaders and pillars of their society.

Unfortunately as time has moved on the church has not and as such the church has found itself more marginalised and once again place on the fringe of society. A satellite city such as the greater Springfield region provides a classic illustration for us. Take a walk around the city of Springfield and you will see very little physical presence of the church. No church buildings, no dominate architecture. A marginalised and somewhat isolated witness exists. Churches now spend there time trying to market themselves so that people know they exist. They search for catchy themes and activities in an attempt to reconnect to the community. Unfortunately, most of the time the church is a poor second cousin to the world’s elaborate entertainment and promotional efforts. The church tends to run itself ragged trying to compete with the world for the community’s attention.

The missional church on the other hand seeks to be the incarnate presence of Christ within their normal traffic patterns of life. They seek to be connected with their world via natural and normal connections. They are not seeking to zap people out of the world and into the church but are rather concentrating their energy on being Christ in their world. This repositions Christ once again at the center of the world. However this time it is not as a result of the presence of an institutionalized church but rather as the people of God living his Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. There is nothing institutionalized or normalized about this group of people. They are diverse and dynamic. Their growth is organic and natural with an almost viral nature to it. Leadership is flattened out and has a permission giving tone to it rather than a permission seeking. People operate out of a missional imagination that have been cultivated through a healthy church culture that is more interested in the mission of God than the building of a church.

The Oasis sits within this Postmodern/Missional View of church and the world.

It is to this new paradigm of church that our Leaders in partnership with the Board of Elders and the Pastoral Team bring leadership through the intentional engagement with our community and through living and breathing the Kingdom of God.

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