Much has been written about the fact that God is by nature “missional,” that God is a “sent” God in that Jesus was sent (John 1) and that the Spirit is now sent (John 14) to carry out the mission of the Father. Thereby, the church is called to participate in this sending nature of God. The church is a “sent” people.
This is a necessary corrective and challenge to a church that has been stuck in a “come and see” mire, one that has been labeled as “attractional.” By this I mean that the onus is put on the seeker to come to the church to find out about God. And it puts pressure on the church to develop something that is good enough for people to want to come. This is a centripetal strategy because the efforts of the church are directed toward the center. In my book Difference Makers, I wrote:
I grew up a mile away from the church where my family attended, and I could see the steeple from my bedroom window. I spent more time in that building by the time I was 14 than in any other building besides my house. That was the place where God-talk happened. It’s not that we were ashamed to talk about God outside the building, but when we talked about God working in our world, we focused on getting people to come to the building (92).
In contrast, to be missional is to be centrifugal, to move out from the center. The church exists for the sake of the beauty of the world. The people of God are sent to display beauty in the midst of everyday life. I illustrate it with this simple diagram in Difference Makers.
So how do we do this? A common approach might follow this simple three-step pattern:
Step 1: We learn about God’s missional (sending) nature and see how the church is called to be missional.
Step 2: We research methods that other churches have used to be missional. This might include things like structures, resources and specific outreach strategies.
Step 3: We go and do something that reflects this missional activity.
However, this approach assumes that the key to being missional is rooted in activism and pragmatism. As I read various writings, it seems that the call to be missional is all about what we do. Quite honestly, after reading on this topic, I get exhausted from all their “make-something-happen-for-God” talk. It’s easy to transfer the pressures that coincide with the “come and see” strategy to the pressures intrinsic to “go and do” approaches.
Here’s my question: When we approach “missional” with an activist and pragmatic lens, are we creating a way of being the church that is beautiful, one that is attractive and winsome, or are we just wearing ourselves out?
The opposite of the attractional is not a call to be unattractive because we are trying so hard to be missional. The Kingdom of God is a beautiful way, and if the way that we are living as we seek to be on mission with God is less than beautiful, then we need to rethink what we are up to.
