A missionary thinks about missional

I thought that I was still “in the loop,” even after four years overseas. After all, with the internet, blogs, webcams, and amazon.com, there should be no shortage of information no matter where you are. Right? Wrong!

I’ve missed out on “missional.”

In the spring of 2001, I was working through an independent study on church planting with then Southern Seminary professor Ed Stetzer. I can remember sitting at my desk, looking out at the small town where I was pastor of a Southern Baptist church, and thinking, “how is Smyrna Baptist Church going to reach all of these people who are moving here?” At that same time, we were preparing to go overseas, so I was reading everything I could get my hands on about people groups, cross-cultural ministry, strategy coordinators, international church planting, and anything else the IMB would send me. The thought struck me, why don’t we look at our town like I would look at Paris or Rio or Jakarta? Why not consider the truth that autoworkers from Michigan, dairy farmers from Tennessee, and young families fleeing the city are as much people group segments as Chinese students and Parisians? As I thought about planting a church in our small town, I wondered, what will church look like for these families? What will evangelism look like? I was teaching on living out our lives in worship because I was also asking, how can we share the gospel across our own lives in our own neighborhoods?

These next couple of weeks, I really want to think about this thing, “missional.” I know I’m behind. I know that Stetzer is now, as Darrin Patrick said on this excellent presentation, “freaky smart” and the “yoda missiologist” of the movement. He’s writing on his blog about what “missional” means, and I want to interact with that, with Patrick’s presentation, and with anything else I come across.

I’ll look forward to both of you who read this blog joining me…

Theology, Methodology, Ecclesiology, Oh my!

As I was preparing to write more about J.D. Payne's article on ecclesiology and church planting, I decided to check out an article he refers to in the first few paragraphs. In the April 1998 edition of Evangelical Missions Quarterly, Tom Julien, of Grace Brethren International Ministries, addressed the question, "what is a local church?" Going further, he distinguished between the essence of the church as revealed in the New Testament and the expression of the church in cultures. The gist of his argument is that church planters must distill the essence of the church in order to plant a culturally appropriate expression of the church. Dr. Payne agrees, saying that ecclesiology, our theology of the church, is the "most critical issue in church planting today."

As I was thinking about all this, I was also involved in an online discussion for one of my doctoral seminars on the emerging church movement. We were talking about whether the "conversation" is more about theology or methodology (maybe I can tell you more about that discussion and its origins in the future). I suggested an article that I found through Joe Thorn's blog: Mark DeVine's discussion of the emerging church movement and Southern Baptists. In that article, DeVine says that leader "Scot McKnight insists that the movement is about ecclesiology, not theology."

But what is ecclesiology if not theology? My classmate Lloyd caught that contradiction immediately. Certainly, our ecclesiology plays itself out in our methodology, and our methodology reveals our theology. Can those be separated? If you add our emphasis on strategy to the mix, things really get interesting. Does our strategy, which includes our methodology, line up with our theology, especially our ecclesiology? Maybe it does, but I'm not sure.

I want to work on these questions, though maybe with fewer words ending in "-gy." We'll see where it goes.

The CHURCH in Church Planting

Church planters must take the time to search the Scriptures to answer the question, "What is the church?" Since the scriptures do not bow to the gods of this age, for some church planters this process will be painful, requiring them to surrender their visions, dreams, passions, desires, finances, and prestige that have developed over the years from Western cultural definitions and expectations for what constitutes a "healthy" church.

This brief excerpt from Dr. J.D. Payne's paper, "Ecclesiology: The Most Critical Issue in Church Planting Today," (available here) expresses well some of my concerns over our efforts to plant churches. I'll comment more on Dr. Payne's article later, but I have often written that our time in Western Europe has done much to strip away our "visions, dreams, passions, desires, finances [oh, yeah], and prestige" and give us a fresh, clean, simple, and, I believe, biblical idea that answers the question, "What is the church?"