RE: missional
By Keith Goad July 13, 2006
I intentionally chose an article to springboard from because so many people are using missional and no one seems to be using it the same way. I do recommend the McKnight article on the emergent church for those interested. What I wrote earlier and will write about now is the “missional” theology of the emergent church. There is a positive use of the term missional that many are using and we can adopt at Third. The problem with many terms is how everyone latches on to them and redefines them. Example: Evangelical, wow, what a wide variety of folk that claim this one? I did not want to bring up Niebuhr earlier and sound like a nerd, but since Greg did…I was thinking in those categories when I read emergents are pro-culture. What does this mean?
According to the article I am working from, pro-culture means looking for what God is doing in the culture and participating in it. In my perspective and understanding of how McKnight describes culture and Christ, they are place side-by-side because God is acitve in both equivically and so God’s people are active in both equivically. Is this how the Scriptures really describe God’s activities and how Christians are to act? In our John 17 study it is clear that a great divide is cast between “the world” and the disciples/church. Christ does not pray for the world, but only for those the Father had given him. The work of the Kingdom (salvific grace) has precedence over the creating, sustaining work of the world (common grace). Believers are in the world, but not of it. They are to go into the world and transform it. They are not old creations just seeking to act a new way. Believers are transformed, receive a new nature and status as children of God, and proclaim the kingdom.
We at Third should be missional in the sense that we are going to order ourselves around the command to go make disciples. We must recognize that we have a culture to reach and seek to interact with the people of that culture as much as possible. We do this while not becoming or thinking like them, as if they will complete us in some way. Instead we hold to the Scriptures and seek to proclaim God’s truth so that those who are lost and dead in their sins will be converted and begin to think like us. This does not sound generous to many. But we cannot get around the fact that the world we proclaim Christ in hates the God whom we proclaim. So, we go to coffee with them, go to lunch with them, play basketball with them, study with them, you get the point…all to proclaim the one they will either receive by faith or hate by rebellion.
Therefore, let the members of Third Avenue begin making Old Louisville their “homeland” as much as a missionfield. Get to know the people, language, art, interests, gathering areas (pretty much their culture). You do this not because God has graciously provided that culture for you to become a better person, but in order to be an agent of grace in the fallen culture. We befriend our neighbors in the hope that they will be converted and declared “friends of God.”