One of my chief concerns, both intellectually and practically, has been the relationship between church and mission. Since 1997 I have been trying to connect the two in both understanding and practice. I have, for the time, settled the understanding part. For me, church cannot, should not stand alone, apart from mission. Greg Leffel offers a great summation of where I have landed.
What has changed through this transformation in thinking about the church is that the church can no longer be thought about apart from mission. Indeed, it can only be understood through its participation in mission. The concepts ‘mission’ and ‘church’ have converged into a new idea, something like ‘mission/church’. This shift in perspective is of great consequence for imagining what the church might be and how the mission of God might be worked out through the church as Christianity confronts its global context. (Faith Seeking Action: Mission, Social Movements, and the Church in Motion (Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, 2007, 19)
Such an understanding is a huge, crucial step, but it does not answer the harder question – How does ‘mission/church’ look as it is danced out in the world?
There was a day when we thought the mission dance was simply giving to an annual offering, going through the seasonal promotion, and rallying behind an uncomplicated, crisp slogan. In that day, every church could be ‘mission-involved’ or ‘mission-minded’. Well, the simpler days of such simple (and tepid or cheap) involvement are over, and it is for the good that they are.
The church of my youth lived in the illusion that they were right in the middle of the mission endeavor, when in reality, they were barely at the margins. Mission involvement was promoted as prayer and payment; prayer for missionaries and payment for mission. And while prayer and funding are necessary components, they are not mission. They may be sponsorship, assistance, support, trusteeship – but they are not mission. The distinction is real and substantial, and must be made, if mission and church are to be truly reconnected.
Mission means doing missions, not merely funding or supporting missions and missionaries. It means the hard, complicated, and expensive work of preparing people, raising funds for them, commissioning them, nurturing and caring for them, holding them accountable, and participating with them. It means missions not done by a few for the whole, but the whole of the church doing missions in every location, through each relationship, and within all vocations. It means working through difficult issues, such as appropriate witness to other faiths, financial dependency, leadership training, appropriate activities, the place of evangelism and social action, strategic involvement, etc. Mission means doing missions, not just thinking, talking, or promoting the idea of mission.
Even though the traditional machinery that marginalized the church in mission no longer works for many, I see churches and church leaders looking for new ways of locating the church at a safe and inexpensive distance from real and costly mission involvement. Some are waiting for new machinery to emerge that will re-establish for them, under a new name and with new language, old illusions of mission involvement.
We need to be clear and honest – ‘mission/church’ means the church exists for mission preparation, sending, implementation, and engagement. It is no longer a question of whether these activities are what mission entails for the church. The question is, Will the church take her place in the mission of God and do missions? It is only through costly and complex action that mission and church converge, that they become the new idea. For me, the answer to the ‘mission/church’ question is to be found in those courageous, pioneering churches who are innovating, doing, and dancing out mission.