What is a Missional Community?
By admin July 13, 2006
I am struck by one church’s definition of a “missional community.” As you can see from its definition below, this urban congregation is seeking to replicate the love of Christ for the poor and outcast in their community. For these believers, being “missional” means identifying with those people the members of the congregation are not likely to naturally relate to. Being “missional,” for them, means an incarnational ministry–kind of. They have chosen to use “missional” to target the downtrodden. Perhaps this congregation is responding to what they see as a particular weakness in the Church: reaching out to the needy. Here’s their definition:
What is a Missional Community?
Simply stated, its a group of people who journey together to graciously serve people in our city with the whole gospel to the whole person. As we look outside ourselves, unite in humble need-meeting and genuine love for others a deep and rich community develops. We love the broken, the poor, the addict, the outcast, the lonely, the homeless, the displaced, because Jesus does. His compassion compels us, his grace unites us; that is missional community.
A few years ago, I recall a para-church ministry in Washington, DC that targeted people-of-power: politicians, ambassadors, CEOs, etc. The leaders of this group, also, saw a particular weakness in the Church: reaching out to the elite, and they sought to meet that need. I see a similarity between this group and the “missional” church above: different object, same goal–filling a void the Church seems to have missed by targeting a particular group.
As for Third Avenue, our inroads into the community require that we 1) know the community (Bruce has a nice description here); 2) be in the community (this is hard to do in Old Louisville, but it is a vital long term goal); 3) reflect the community (Lord willing, our congregation will look increasingly like the community we are in); and 4) transform the community (our primary goal has to be transforming ourselves, but to the extent we are the community, plus to the extent what we say is true, then we should expect the ideas and lives of non-Christians around us to change). If this isn’t transformation, what is?