Missional Thinking
Churches that want to break the code must move beyond personal preferences into missional thinking.
~Breaking the Missional Code, David Putman and Ed Stetzer
In the church world, there are a lot of ideas out there that aren’t fully understood. One that has seen a rise in use in the last decade or so is “missional thinking”.
When people hear that phrase, most likely, their mind immediately goes to things like mission trips, and similar work within the community. But that’s not missional thinking. Certainly, it can be a result of missional thinking, but in itself, it’s not missional thinking. There’s a difference between “missions” and “missional thinking”. Here’s what I mean.
A food pantry, a community meal, intentional work with the homeless population, house repairs for the elderly — these are all great things that a local church can be doing. Typically, they are overseen by a “missions committee”.
Missional thinking, on the other hand, focuses on the mission of the church, and gears the work of the church to support and fulfill that mission. Each church approaches this idea of mission differently. The way I’m using “mission” here is something you will see in relation to conversations around vision, mission and values.
Churches will go through various processes to determine their “mission statement,” which is great, as long as it is more than something that gets written down and stuck in a file folder. A mission statement should be a guiding statement for decisions in the local church at any level.
For example, in the United Methodist Church, we talk about how our mission is “to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world”. This is in our guiding denominational book, our Book of Discipline. Ideally, every local United Methodist church will adopt this as it’s mission as well. It would certainly save a lot of time and meetings if they did. However, not everyone does. Certainly, that’s their prerogative, but it seems like they are doing a lot of extra work that doesn’t necessarily need to be done.
In any case, once the mission statement is set forth for the local church, everything should be guided by that mission statement. That’ s missional thinking. It’s higher-level thinking that focuses on the overarching goal of the church.
The problem we have in a lot of churches is that they tend to be guided by personal preferences. We have long cultivated a very Americanized, consumeristic view of church so that it becomes more about what the majority of the people prefer, as opposed to the mission of the church as a whole. This is typically seen as a way to retain current members or to reach new ones. But it’s not necessarily missional thinking.
I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with people who think that the church should only have “contemporary” music if it wants to reach younger people. It’s about preference.
I can’t tell you have many conversations I’ve had with people who think that the church should only use “old hymns” or “traditional” worship if it wants to retain the long-time members. It’s about preference.
Missional thinking calls us beyond such narrow-minded ideas. It calls us to think about what we need to do in order to truly make disciples. I’ve said before that I care less about how worship goes as opposed to where it is going. Worship should be a cohesive collection that moves in a particular direction, calling people to a life of discipleship and drawing them deeper into it.
What do you think? What would the church — local, global, etc. — look like if we moved beyond our personal preferences regarding style and activities, and shifted to this type of missional thinking?
