Frost Explains Missional

Here are a couple of powerful videos of Michael Frost explaining what missional means and how that works out into the life of a congregation (HT: Rick Meigs). In case you don't have the time to watch these powerful videos, I have listed a few key concepts.

"It is not a new model, not a new approach, not a new style. Missional church thinking is a fundamental and prophetic call to the church to orient everything it is doing around the agenda of mission."

"I am anxious, my friends, that you not domesticate the idea of mission, that you not turn it into something that is palatable, which is not dangerous, which is simple and straightforward and you can just add missional language on to business as usual."

If you embrace missional thinking,

You will see God differently. "God is the sending and sent God."

You will see the church differently. "We participate in the work of Christ. We see where he is at work and step in to cooperate with him."

You will see the world differently. "All people share the image of God."

If you are serious about stepping into this missional paradigm,

You will be committed to building missional proximity with those who've not yet been set free. "Mission has to happen up close and personal." "Platforms [in church] are not where ministry happens. Ministry happens in the neighborhoods."

You will practice the presence of Jesus right under the noses of those who've not yet encountered him. "To the poor it would mean alleviating suffering." "To the rich it might actually mean bursting the bubble of consumerism." "You cannot know what it looks like to be Jesus in any context unless you are an absolutely obsessive student of the gospels."

You will embrace powerlessness. "We don't need our buildings, or our money. We don't need the accoutrements of some kinds of institutional power. We have spiritual power which transforms us from ordinary people into a movement of grace and love and power." "Imagine if we could prove to Americans that the following of Jesus is worth more to us than the stuff of religious institutionalism."

You will proclamation the person of Jesus. "You get close to people, you practice the presence of Jesus, you go empty-handed and naked just as our Lord did, [and] I defy you to not proclaim the person of Jesus."

"Being missional is not another cool strategy. Being missional is not another clever way of worshipping. Being missional is not just another thing you can add to your mission statement on the front of your church newsletter. Being missional mean moving into the neighborhood and it means looking like Jesus."

Take the time to watch the videos. Let me know what your reaction is.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Missional “in quotes”

Willingness to partake in corporate vision is the greatest compliment that a person can pay to leadership. It is holy ground and should be treated with reverence.
Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come, p. 188

Leadership within the Body of Christ is widely misunderstood. It is too often confused with the ability to get things done. But project management and leadership have little in common.

In our society, everyone wants to be a leader.

• Employees are encouraged to be "leaders" so they can move up the corporate ladder.
  
• All prospective college students are "outstanding leaders."
  
• Athletes try to be leaders on the field.
  

But leadership is not the glamorous privilege that many think.

People who want to get their own way should never seek to be leaders. True leadership is not selfish. A follower has a better chance of "getting his own way" than a leader does. And leaders who abuse their position for selfish ends are dangerous, to themselves and others.

True leadership is costly. And not in the way that most think. True leadership will often require the sacrifice of

• Personal preferences
  
• Security
  
• Popularity
  
• Self-esteem
  
• Confidence
  
• Success
  

We hear a lot of talk about servant leadership. But that doesn't go far enough. We must have sacrificial leaders in the church. People who are willing to seriously follow the example of Jesus Christ, not just pay lip service to caring for others.

Effective leadership cannot be done (well) without massive quantities of empathy. And empathy costs far more than most are willing to give. It's easier to bend others to your will. Most self-styled leaders can't even let other people voice their opinions in a conversation. Control is not leadership.

Leadership is a sacred charge and should never be abused.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Missional “in quotes”

True friendship is God's calling, in and of itself. If people find friendship with Jesus through our friendship with them, that is the work of the Holy Spirit.
Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come, p. 99

If we cultivate relationships with non-believers solely for the purpose of converting them, then we are not doing the work of God. We are doing the work of God a disservice. We must care about people because they are important to God, whether they acknowledge him or not. True friends are not manipulative and scheming.

If God is at work in our lives, we don't need to orchestrate "opportunities" to "share Christ."

If we are living lives that require explanation, there will be plenty of opportunities.

If we are serious disciples of Jesus Christ, our lives will proclaim the gospel more powerfully than any prepackaged presentation.

Of course,

• if we don't really know God
  
• if we are not producing the fruit of the Spirit in our lives
  
• if we aren't willing to deny ourselves, to take up our crosses every day, and to follow Jesus as serious disciples
  

then maybe we'd better work on our sales techniques.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Missional “in quotes”

Today it's two for the price of one:

So if we take the incarnation seriously, we must take seriously the call to live incarnationally—right up close, near to those whom God desires to redeem. We cannot demonstrate Christlikeness at a distance from those whom we feel God has called us to serve. We need to get close enough to people that our lives rub up against their lives, and that they see the incarnated Christ in our values, beliefs, and practices as expressed in cultural forms that make sense and convey impact.
Michael Frost, Exiles, p. 55

It is our point that socializing must be intentional, missional, grace-filled, and generous. It must be seen as part of a broader pattern of infiltrating a community.
Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come, p. 57

So what do you think? How do we do this? Why has the North American church been so terrible at this?

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Community or Communitas?

There is a lot of talk in the church about community. But there seems to be too little experience of true community.

Anthropologist Victor Turner suggests that we should think about this somewhat differently. He offers the concept of communitas instead of community. According to Turner, communitas grows out of liminality.

Liminality is a state of ambiguity, openness, and uncertainty. This transition state opens the possibility for new ways of thinking, feeling and acting. Differences between participants also become less important.

Out of this liminal environment grows communitas, a new social structure that is based on equality and common experience.

Michael Frost discusses this in his book, Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture.

Men [the disciples] who otherwise would have nothing to do with each other are thrown together by their shared devotion to Jesus, and as they journey together, they develop a depth of relationship that literally turned the world upside down.
Michael Frost, Exiles, pp. 113–114

When the church focuses on mission, communitas naturally develops. But when the church tries to create “community,” it often goes bad.

Those who love community destroy it, but those who love people build community.
Michael Frost, Exiles, p. 108

The hunger for community is a legitimate one, but to pursue it for its own sake is the mistake. When we seek to build community without the experience of liminality, all we end up with is pseudo-community that pervades many churches.
Michael Frost, Exiles, p. 121

Many Christians have the sense that the church must balance an outward focus with an inward focus. In other words, they see mission as competing with community. The reality is that a commitment to mission is the soil out of which community grows.

The idea of worshipping with fellow believers and then bidding them farewell for the week in the parking lot—“See you next Sunday”—is the very antithesis of the experience of the earliest Christians.
Michael Frost, Exiles, p. 288

Community has an inward focus.
Communitas creates a feeling of belonging because the group has the common experience of being outside society.

Community focuses on encouraging each other.
Communitas focuses on the mission.

Community tries to create a “safe place.”
Communitas seeks to transform society making it more just and good.

Community is something to be created.
Communitas is a serendipity that happens in a state of liminality.

Community requires homogeneous groups.
Communitas cuts across all sorts of cultural, ethnic and ideological boundaries.

Communitas is most familiar in the form of battlefield camaraderie. It is what Henry V describes in Shakespeare’s play:

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
Henry V, iii

Communitas is what allowed a tax collector and a zealot to treat each other as brothers as members of Jesus’ inner circle.

Frost quotes from a soon to be published book by Alan Hirsch:

Communitas in the way I want to define it is a community infused with a grand sense of purpose; a purpose that lies outside of its current internal reality and constitution. It’s the kind of community that “happens” to people in actual pursuit of a common vision of what could be. It involves movement and it describes the experience of togetherness that only really happens among a group of people actually engaging in a mission outside itself.

Instead of liminal communities, most churches are private clubs designed for the comfort of their members, members who like to discuss religion in their spare time.

Pastor Rod

“Helping you become the person God created you to be”

Missional Gamble

Texas Hold-’em has grown in popularity over the past few years. Most people today know what the phrase, “All in,” means. I have to admit that I’m intrigued by the game. The mathematical aspect reinvigorates a part of my brain that got a lot of use in high school but little since. I am also drawn in by the psychological aspect.

Fortunately, I never play this game for money, or I’d probably be addicted. When I play with pretend money online, I can usually guess what cards the other players have. I can usually build my virtual chip stack without much difficulty. But sometimes aggressive players force me to make calculated gambles.

I am forced all-in with cards that most of the time will result in a winning hand. When I’m all-in and the cards don’t fall right, my play money is wiped out. But when the cards do fall or when I guess correctly that my opponent is bluffing, I feel a rush as the virtual chips pile up.

I can see how people get addicted to this stuff.

I think most of us would like to find something that we could go all-in over. That’s essentially what Jesus said was required to be his disciple. He said, “If you want to be my apprentice, you must go all-in. You must give up all your potential plan-Bs and follow me wherever I take you” (Luke 9:23, Pickett Loose Paraphrase Version).

But we’ve reduced following Christ to entering into a contract for an eternal retirement plan and showing up at club meetings once a week.

It’s time we went all-in for Jesus and for his kingdom.

Faith, in biblical perspective, is not the acceptance of conventional standards of behavior, and it is not primarily an effort to safe our own puny souls: it is the exciting venture of faith in which we bet that God really is, that this is his world, and that he is like Jesus Christ.
Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come.

Following Christ should be scary, risky and exciting. We should be pouring all we have into his kingdom. We should be looking for new opportunities and ways to participate in the work that God is doing in this world.

Every church should have a Research and Development department; that is, a forum for dreaming, where nothing is impossible and no thought too outrageous. And every authentic missional church will experiment like mad in order to find new and accessible ways of being the people of God.
Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come.

Now that’s something to get excited about.

What if we turned our churches into “skunk works”? What if our church buildings resembled the offices of an advertising agency more than a museum? What if we acted as if we really believed that God is all-powerful and everywhere-present? What if we took Jesus’ words seriously? What if we took Jesus seriously?

Let’s pray the prayer of the early Christians: “Sovereign Lord, you made the heaven and the earth and the sea, and everything in them. . . . Now, Lord, … enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus” (Acts 4:24, 29–30).

Pastor Rod

“Helping you become the person God created you to be”

Missional Ministry Modes

I’m currently reading The Shaping of Things to Come by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch. This appears to be an excellent blend between theory and practical ideas.

One helpful section lists four ways that missional congregations are seeking to partner with God as he works in their communities:

• Proximity Spaces,
• Shared Projects,
• Commercial Enterprises &
• Indigenous Faith Communities.

Proximity spaces are places (or events) where Christians and not-yet-Christians can have meaningful interaction. Examples include cafés, coffee houses and even pubs.

Shared projects are cooperation between Christians and an existing community activity where Christians and not-yet-Christians can develop relationships. Instead of starting their own ministries, these congregations are participating with community organizations to provide services to the community.

Commercial enterprises are effective ways to do ministry. Many communities are not interested in a new church, but they might be interested in a new business that invests in their community. This business then becomes the vehicle for ministry.

Indigenous faith communities are small congregations that grow out of the other ministries. Many would call these communities house churches. They are made up of the converts and inquirers produced by these ministries.

The years ahead will be exciting for those who pay attention to what God is doing in their community and who are willing to step outside the traditional ways of “doing church.”

Pastor Rod

“Helping you become the person God created you to be”