09.02.09
organized for mission..
Remember all those debates and conversations about “organism” versus “organized,” and “institutional” versus “chaordic” or spontaneous? What was all that really about anyway? Seems to me those conversations often missed the heart of the issue which is this: being God’s people in the world is about doing what the Father is doing. In other words, at the heart of all this is the missio Dei.
Are we organized for mission?
And then perhaps the second question would be this one: as we go out together, how will we sustain this demanding journey? How are we intentional about community and spiritual formation?
The eternal rhythm of healthy ecclesial life is movement inward and outward, like breathing, community and mission.
One large church locally has entered this transition and is asking the right questions. At a meeting last week I looked at a diagram that was to represent in some measure the new reality. Immediately I wanted to redraw it. Many communities in the early stage of this conversation have not yet learned how to ask the right questions. Initially they ask church questions of God’s mission, rather than asking mission questions of the ecclesia. The diagram when I redrew it (this is a multi-campus church) looked like this. (You can click the image for a larger version).
Of course one of the looming questions, especially from the perspective of existing leadership, is governance. It isn’t necessarily the first question that should be asked, but for existing leaders it is usually the most pressing.
Moving from a centralized, context free model of a typical large, program driven community to a decentralized, contextualized, mission driven model is a big challenge. It will require a new sense of identity, a large measure of faith and courage, and some imaginative thinking. It’s a journey worth making — it’s a journey impelled by the Spirit.
I have done a very brief revision of the paper I wrote three years ago relating governance, spiritual formation and mission. You can get it HERE.
