I grew up in a tradition that outsourced missions. The churches would receive three offerings each year for the purpose of supporting missions, and regularly calendared missionaries to come and tell us the stories of life serving God in some alternative hemisphere. My job was to learn to be the best Christian I could be and to leave missions to the professionals.
I find it ironic that today we’re witnessing the birth of the missional church. It’s ironic because the missional church was how church worked in the first century. We haven’t invented missional church or missional Christianity, we’re simply returning to the simplicity of mission as it was originally designed.
There is much to say about what it means to be a missional church or a missional Christian. If you search either of those titles on my blog’s tag cloud you’ll see plenty of thoughts from previous posts. But for my purposes today, I want to simply remind us that missional living is rooted in the resurrection of Jesus. Paul’s last challenge in this week’s paragraph from 1 Corinthians 15 simply says, “Become right-minded and stop sinning, because some people are ignorant about God” (1 Corinthians 15:34, HCSB).
Since verse 20, Paul has been sharing how resurrection hope extends to sustaining our faith between the time of our tranformation and our time of death. This includes our responsibility to our communities and our world, who are largely “ignorant about God.” Because of the resurrection, I have hope and can live with hope, but that hope is not isolated or self contained. It is a hope to be shared. This is why, more urgently than ever, we need to get our minds right and embrace our “sentness.” Jesus told the disciples that he was sending them into the world in the same manner that he had been sent into the world by the Father (John 20:21). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to the church sending out men and women to serve in any hemisphere. But we can’t afford to have a mentality that subcontracts world evangelism. Your calling to live as a missional Christian is as profound as those who serve in the deepest and darkest parts of the world. Embrace it! There are plenty of people who are still ignorant about God. And chances are, they may live right next door to you!
Thanks, Tim, for this great contribution to the conversation. One of the most fascinating areas for me has been to rethink not just how churches and individuals reshape into a sharper missional living focus but also how do Christian ministries do that? What does it look like for Christian care facilities for children and the elderly and parachurch ministries articulate a missional philosophy in language most believers can bite into?
Keep talking, and nice to connect with you again….