“Churches are very risk-averse. They are not places that you normally associate with adventure, or risk, or creativity…a little bit of danger is good for us.”
One of my favorite stories of radical missional church incarnation is from Michael Frost’s book Exiles, about the young adult who had attention deficit disorder and had always found it difficult to sit still in the pews with his family during worship, and so when he became an adult it dawned on him that he really didn’t have to go to worship anymore as he had in the past in the congregational setting, so he went with friends to the lake on Sundays. But he felt a little guilty and he wanted to be spiritually nourished so while he was partying at the lake he asked his friends, most who had not had his church background, if he could take a moment to pray and he asked them if they had anything he could include in his own prayers, and he went on partying. The next Sunday he brought his Bible and took a few minutes to do the same, adding in a brief reading, and then he went on partying. Not taking more than a few minutes at first. But then he and his friends started adding more prayers, and they started doing small acts of service at the lake, cleaning up, towing boats, and then they sat at picnic tables and had bread and juice for communion alongside the burgers and the beer, and wove spiritual issues into their conversations. Still, it was a party; still, his family pestered him to “come back to church.” Imagine such an organic expression of church being seeded intentionally?
from “ReShaping the World: Church in Likeness to a Different God” by Rev. Ron Robinson
“Instead of trying to knock each other down, we (should see) it as an opportunity to cheer each other on.”
by the Rev. Ron Robinson
The prevailing church model today does much good in the world, and will continue to do so. But what I want to leave you with today is that no matter how good the congregation and its people are, and no matter how much it grows in number as well as in vitality, that fewer and fewer percentages of people in the world around the congregation are likely to be attracted to it—though still hungry for spiritual depth and connection and service. The pool, or mission field, of people who seek to be nourished by a congregation, any congregation, will shrink, and the competition by congregations for them will be fierce, cutting across denominational and religious lines as we are already seeing, with the already haves having the upper hand in landing the potential new members.
…
I believe the mission of the church is at heart about serving, saving, the most vulnerable of our neighbors; and if your neighbors aren’t vulnerable (though I bet they are in many ways; as my wife Bonnie says, the people in the wealthy suburbs have power but don’t know they have needs; the people in our area know they have needs but not that they have power; it is harder work in many ways to get the powerful to know they are in need) and you can’t figure out a way to give yourself away to them then you should move to a different neighborhood. I believe the church should not be growing more vital and healthy when the world around it is dying. I don’t believe the mission of the church is to attract more people to think like us, and lord knows its not the mission of the church to make more people who call themselves Unitarian Universalists, or call themselves Christian either, for example; if that happens as a byproduct of fulfilling our mission, then well and good; but it isn’t why we exist and the more we make it our focus, the more we worry about church even, as an institution and organization, the more we lose sight of our calling to love and shape the world bent out of shape, and the more we will just end up paralyzing the church anyway with anxiety.
(excerpted)
Our most basic life process is one of receiving and giving. Taking in, and putting out.
Breathing.
We take in oxygen. We put out carbon dioxide.
You can’t do just one. Try it. Either only inhale, or only exhale, but not the other. I’ll wait.
As a member of a religious community, we too must both take in and give out. Which came first, a friend recently asked, the chicken or the egg?
First? I don’t know. I imagine it depends on the person. But who can remember back that far? Because if you’re doing church right, this isn’t linear, it’s circular. Round and round, giving, receiving. And we find that many times, when we give, we feel we are the ones receiving the greater gift.
Those in the missional church often talk about being gathered and sent. Sometimes, they reverse that – sent and gathered.
We are gathered to strengthen our souls, we are sent out to strengthen the world. That works, reversed, too. And one flows into the other.
Both parts are necessary. We can’t only inhale. We can’t only exhale.
Unitarian Universalism is a deeply missional faith. In Orthodoxy: Its Truths and Errors, Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke wrote:
“We think it possible to have a Church, and even a denomination, organized, not on a creed, but on a purpose of working together. Suppose that the condition of membership was the desire and intention of getting good and doing good. The members of a church are not those who unite in order to partake the Lord’s Supper, but to do the Lord’s work. The Lord’s Supper is their refreshment after working. They come together sometimes to remember his love, and to get strength from him. Let them sit together, express their desires, confess their faults, say what they have been trying to do, where they have failed, where succeeded, and so encourage each other to run with diligence the race set before them.” (419)
Being missional is not just about our ecclesiology. It’s about theology. As Alan Hirsch says, it’s about the very nature of God. God is a sending God.
You don’t have to be a theist for that to work. Sub in your term of choice for that which compels us to do for others. What is larger than ourselves.
Our churches may no longer take the Lord’s Supper in a ritual of bread and wine, but who can deny that we gather together for communion? We receive inspiration, relationship, love. We are strengthened. Our souls are strengthened.
Why? Is it just to have strong souls? I don’t believe so, and I don’t believe that our souls can fully be strengthened just by being happy recipients. It is through exercise that both souls and muscles become stronger. We go out and use these souls; they become more flexible, stronger. We come back together as a church for worship, and we use those strong souls in ministering to each other. So it is not always clear, when we are inhaling, when we are exhaling. Out in the neighborhood, we share juice and bread – is this worship? Inside the church building, we sit with each other during grief – is this service?
We breathe out. We breathe in. Both necessary to be alive.
— Joanna Fontaine Crawford
Liberal theology does not come from liberals thinking about religion, it emerges out of the disciplined process of how we tell these stories and engage those images. This means dealing with not just the stories, images and ideas that we like, but engaging the ones we don’t as well.
One of James Luther Adam’s (20th century liberal theologian) guiding principals for a free faith is a belief in continuing historical revelation. That means approaching the revelation of truth and meaning with both an openness to the future, which most liberals do well, and it also means a continuity with the past. This is what Adams referred to as a sense of length. In my former church we used to say it this way – in our faith the Bible is the beginning but not the end.
The missional church cannot generate its energy from the sighs of relief exhaled by its members who are welcomed into it as a place of refuge from “icky ole religion.” Nor can it be a place where people slide “safe” into home base and stay there for the rest of their church life, with grass stains on their pants and a sense of elation for having made the run. The church’s responsibility is to help such individuals get up off the dirt, brush themselves off, have any injuries tended to, and sent back out on the field, and then eventually out of the ballpark altogether.
The core elements of the modern missional theology movement strongly align with the theological house of Unitarian Universalism that Rebecca Ann Parker explained at Collegium 2003. These elements propel us toward new understandings about how we should work in, and engage with, the world. They urge us toward the life of a modern missionary, in which we both work with the culture, yet still understand ourselves as radical prophets in a land that often reflects values vastly different from our own.
Written two years ago. Over-reliance on quotes. But I said I’d post it, so here it is. — Joanna
