missio Dei Group

I recently met a new friend Dan Steigerwald who with his wife Ann and their two daughters moved to Portland a year ago from the Netherlands. His heart is to network and develop partnerships that will send healthy Christ-centered leaders and teams who will start missional initiatives and churches in the urban centers of the Pacific Northwest.

To start he has invited several individuals from the Portland/Vancouver area who have a similar passion to join a Missio Group. Linda and I have been invited to join Missio. As Dan describes it, Missio will be a face to face learning community that gathers regularly to stimulate each participant’s natural missional engagement with their neighborhood, workplace(s) and social network. The format envisaged is a weekly small group experience over three or four months involving conversations about how we might join Jesus in the missio Dei (mission of God) within our contexts. This includes discussions about how to apprentice disciples in their “missional formation.” Attention is also given to thoughtful interaction over how we might help seed a misional DNA within existing and new churches. It is hoped that Missio might become a proto-type for a group learning experience that is reproducible within local churches and other expressions of Christ-centered community around Portland.

The following are some of the questions we will be discussing.

What does it mean to be “missional” and why it matters?
How might we “live prophetically” in our context?
What does it take to make friends with those who’ve yet to know Christ?
What does incarnational living look like in practice?
What does evangelism look like and what is the message we speak/live?
Why Christianize everything when there’s already great waves to catch?
What is “time-banking” and how does it foster community?
How does spiritual formation relate to missional church?
What does it look like to be creatively missional?
How do we form and link local communities for maximum missional impact?
What have we learned and how can we pass it on?

To say I'm excited is somewhat of an understatement. These are questions that not only need to be asked, but also wrestled with, and than applied for the sake of the missio Dei.

Jesus Missional?

The Word became flesh and blood,
and moved into the neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes,
the one-of-a-kind glory,
like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out,
true from start to finish.
John 1:14 (THE MESSAGE)

Missional Definition

In all my missional reading, I have yet to come to terms with the definition of the word. In perusing the friend of Missional website, I think the following is short answer is extremely helpful for those of us still struggling a bit with the what it means to be missional.

What is Missional - A Short Answer

"Jesus told us to go into all the world and be his ambassadors, but many churches today have inadvertently changed the "go and be" command to a "come and see" appeal. We have grown attached to buildings, programs, staff and a wide variety of goods and services designed to attract and entertain people.

"Missional is a helpful term used to describe what happens when you and I replace the "come to us" invitations with a "go to them" life. A life where "the way of Jesus" informs and radically transforms our existence to one wholly focused on sacrificially living for him and others and where we adopt a missionary stance in relation to our culture. It speaks of the very nature of the Jesus follower."

---Rick Meigs

Missiology precedes Ecclesiology

I was asked by Len Hjalmarsen to write a response to the question; "Do you think missiology precedes ecclesiology, or is it the other way around?

Here is my response.

Len,

Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch in The Shaping of Things to Come established for me some real clarity regarding this issue. With their help I came to understand that missiology precedes ecclesiology and our Christology informs our missiology (p.209). I believe John 1:14 and Philippines 2:5-8 affirm this reality.

The supremacy of Christ demands that He is the center of all that the Church is and does -- the shaping influence. For me John 1:14 in THE MESSAGE describes for the Church its correct missiological paradigm:

The Word became flesh and blood,
and moved into the neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes,
the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out, true from start to finish.

Philippians 2:5-8 describes how Christ fulfilled his mission by becoming "flesh and blood and moving into our human neighborhood" -- on an incarnational mission so to speak. He did this as He "emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men." (Phil.2:7 NASU) Christ's ecclesiological nature (form) was that of being a human being; inhabiting human form and likeness. Like Christ the church should take what ever form/structure necessary to facilitate the missio Dei (the mission of God); its missiological responsibility.

As further stated in John 1:14 the form (ecclesiology) must reflect Christ's glory in a way that is culturally observable in whatever neighborhood it finds itself. This glory in unlike any other glory -- "one-of-a-kind," as described in the remainder of the verse.

Every time the church manifests another order other than Christology, missiology, ecclesiology, it looses its missional edge and focus; becoming distracted by the forms and structures. Christ determines our mission, and our mission must shape our ecclesiology.