Transforming Christian Theology: For Church and Society

16. From Church Ministries to Missional Churches

125 16. From Church Ministries to Missional Churches W e’ve made a good start. Subdividing the church into the opposing camps of liberals and conservatives and then allowing them to engage in a fight to the death was a recipe for disaster. However, the rethinking has to go much, much deeper. It turns out that the whole idea of separating “the life of the church” from its “external” ministry programs—which was the dominant pattern in the modern period—is neither biblical nor effective. As churches have slid more and more to the margins of our society, this strategy has proven increasingly damaging. Truly transformational theologies, and the activism that accompanies them, will have to set out from a completely different set of assumptions about church and society. How Things Used to Be The new paradigm is so different from the assumptions of the modern approach to missions that it’s difficult to find common language to talk about the two together. What’s happening today is definitely not the same as the “calls to mission” that we would hear as students at my conservative evangelical college several decades ago. The speaker would generally describe some area of the world—hopefully as exotic sounding as possible— where most people were not Christians. He would tell us that God’s work was to win these people for Christ. We and the speaker knew that there were multiple “means” for winning people for Christ. They had names like “friendship evangelism” or “tent-making ministries.” One might begin with acts of charity or with social justice ministries. But eventually one would be able to tell the people why he was doing all these good things or why the love 126 | Transforming Christian Theology that he and his fellow Christians showed was so distinctive. At that point he would “proclaim Christ,” which we all hoped would lead to the conversion of his non-Christian listeners. The new approaches to mission are also not like the “social justice ministries ” that played such a major role in the mainline churches during the twentieth century. Although the popular conception of liberal churches is that liberals never depend on the Bible, in fact social justice ministries often began with Scripture verses such as Matthew 25 (to which we return below) and with theological concepts such as the kingdom of God, the special call to minister to the poor and downtrodden, and Jesus’ own examples of ministry . The social justice model usually begins with one’s home base in the church, where preaching, fellowship, and teaching make members aware of the “preferential option” for the poor and needy. Church-based ministries then identify where the downtrodden and outcast are in the community or society; a church or para-church ministry is planned to reach out to these people; and much of the financial support comes from the church communities . Those working for social justice return regularly to their home church community, often exhausted and discouraged. There the preaching of the coming kingdom of God and the eschatological hope buoy them up again so that they can return to the work. The immediate goal of social justice ministries is not to convert people to Christ and to pray the Sinner’s Prayer with them. But I think it’s generally assumed that at least some of the people affected by social justice ministries will eventually start attending a local church. Now both of these traditional forms of ministry may have their drawbacks and abuses. But neither of them is inherently bad. It’s just that there are some radically new ways of conceiving ministry afoot today, which are closely connected to the “postmodern believing” that we discussed earlier. This chapter is about this new understanding of ministry. Rather than inventing a new term to confuse people, I follow standard practice and speak of them as missional approaches. How Things Are Now Tom Sine is the author of the immensely popular book, The Mustard Seed Conspiracy (W Pub Group, 1981). In 2008 he published a sequel, The New Conspirators (InterVarsity), in which he offers instructions for “creating the 16. From Church Ministries to Missional Churches | 127 future one mustard seed at a time.” In Conversation One he urges churches to become “emerging, missional, mosaic, and monastic.” This means developing much deeper connections between the everyday practices of “church life” and a missional, outward-directed orientation. The emerging churches...