Engaging Your Missional
Field with The 3R’s of Missional
Ministry: Relocation, Redistribution, Reconciliation
1.
Location: Go As Local As Possible.
Pick your Parish. Who you gonna serve? Narrow Your Scope to Make the Most
Difference with your Resources. A block? A neighborhood? A Demographic Group? Begin with concerns about changing the
community around you, not with concerns about changing the church.
2.
Relate With Remainers, Returners,
Relocators. Connect these groups. Embed
Yourself. Find the “peaceful presences” to partner with. Various ways to relocate: physically with your
residence, moving your church, or regrouping your church, or just with classes,
your board meets outside its own building; your social events, even your
worship; think of all the ways you can take what happens inside your building
and do it with others in your community.
3.
Choose the Abandoned Places of Empire
for your mission field: the first of the 12 Steps of New Monasticism. See
handout for all 12.
4.
People lead to partnerships and to
the particular projects you choose as long as they fit within your overarching
Mission Vision Values. (For us, the mission is a given: Luke 4, Matthew 25, and
the values from 8 Points TCPC, 7 Principles UUA). Is your own truncated sense
of mission and mission statements holding you back from engaging in mission?
Looking and Living Outwards will help you to grow within your community as
well; what are the connection and the gifts of all the people including
especially those on the fringes who can connect you with others?
5.
Listen, Learn, Follow. Know the data,
know the history, know the leaders, but also pay attention to the margins and
the fringe folk, those new in the community you are serving, just as you should
within your own; do windshield tours and walking, talking, community forums.
6.
Experiment and Fail your way to
Success. Don’t wait to serve. Be wary of planning; instead prepare. Be wary of
Big Hairy Audacious Goals. Be wary of your dream of community interfering in
growing community. Don’t fall in love with your vision statement.
7.
Balance the needs of the partners from
outside your area providing service and the needs of the neighbors receiving
it; err on the side of neighbors; create your own non profit and work with non
profits and governments. See handout.
8.
Moving from Come to Us to Go Be With
Them. Know Yourself and Your Context and the Disconnect between them. Figure
out where you fall on the Missional Field Scale. See handout.
9.
Growing Smaller to Make Bigger
Changes in the World; also grow in multiplicity moreso than with addition;
develop growing overlapping missional communities; turn all small groups and
circles within the church into missional communities with a service component.
10.
Permission Giving culture; turn over to
others. Simplify how things get done.
11.
Going Missional is more than another
outreach program added on; it is core; affects budget, building, board,
programs. 3 Sets of missional practices (Alan Roxburgh and Scott Duren,
Introducing the Missional Church): 1. Cultivating Sacred Presence, ie worship,
prayer, spiritual disciplines; 2. Demonstrating Love, through life together
(cannot be done by a conglomeration of individualists who see each other only
at formal meetings); 3. Engaging the neighborhood.
12.
Meeting needs is not the starting point for
incarnational mission. “When missionaries start with the need, hoping they will
one day get to know poor people personally, they are likely to be found 10
years later, still addressing the need,” John Hayes, of InnerChange, which
brings us back to relocating physically, getting to know people as friends, as
givers not just as receivers,
Adapted from Right Here, Right Now:
Everyday Mission for Everyday People by Alan Hirsch and Lance Ford
How we perceive the relationship of
our church in our contexts. Demonstrating the difficulties in remaining and
growing as an attractional only church.
How far is a person or group from a
meaningful engagement with your church’s core message and practices?
m0---------------m1-----------------m2-----------------m3-----------------m4
Each numeral with the prefix m
indicates one significant cultural barrier to the meaningful communication of
your core message and practices. What makes it difficult for “them” to “come to
us”:
Examples of cultural barriers:
language, race, nationality, religion, worldview, economical class, educational
attainment, age, occupations, family size, political leanings, etc.
m0-1: Those with some concept of
Unitarian Universalism who speak the same language, have similar interests,
probably the same nationality and are from a similar class grouping as you or
your church. Most of your friends would probably fit into this bracket.
M1-2: Here we go to the average
non-UU in our context: a person who has little real awareness or interest in
UUism but is suspicious about the church (they have heard bad things). They may
be open to spirituality, socially aware, but have been offended previously by
church, some call them “bad fruit” and are hard to reach.
m2-3: People in this group probably
have no idea about UUism. Or they might be part of some ethnic group with
different religious impulses. This category also likely describes people
actively antagonistic toward UUism as they understand it, e.g. Christian
fundamentalists.
m3-4: This group might be inhabited
by ethnic and religious groups with a bad history with historical Western
religious communities, such as have Muslims and possibly Jews. The fact that
they are in the West in greater numbers now ameliorates some of this distance
but they are highly resistant to the culture of “church” by whatever name; some
immigrant and refugee communities fit in here too.
………..
Our church has a distinct culture and
so do the people we are trying to reach. All mission in Western contexts now
must be considered cross-cultural enterprises.
The attractional model of church
requires the other to do all the work in crossing the cultural divide. They
have to be the missionaries.
Compounding this is the dynamic of
how people who join churches, often within three to five years, have no
meaningful relationships with anyone outside the church. So if we do bring them
in and socialize them to our group we cut them off from their host community
where they could help us continue to connect.
--------
If you are looking for measures of
missional engagement, see how your community is doing according to the 12 Marks
of New Monastic Communities, adapted: 1. Relocate to the abandoned places of
Empire. 2. Share economic resources with one another and with others. 3.
Hospitality to the stranger. 4. Lament for racial divisions within the church
and our communities, combined with an active pursuit of a just reconciliation.
5. Connection with other churches. 6. Intentional formation of spiritual life
borrowing from the lines of the old monastic formation rules. 7. Nurturing
common life among members in an intentional community. 8. Support for singles,
celibacy, alongside families and couples. 9. Geographic proximity to community
members who share a common rule for life. 10. Care for the plot of God’s Earth
Given to us along with support of our local economies. 11. Peacemaking in the
midst of violence and conflict resolution. 12. Commitment to a disciplined
contemplative life.
Rules For Radicals in
Mission
From Alan Roxburgh’s Missional:
Joining God in the Neighborhood, with acknowledgment to Saul Alinsky
1.
Go Local. Truly Live in your
neighborhood. Also instead of creating church programs to invite people to,
lets make the neighborhood the focus of our creativity and commitment and turn
the local church into the center of formation for the equipping, sending, and
resourcing of people in the local.
2.
Leave Your Baggage At Home. Relate
with people as people not as objects for your purposes. The local church learns
to become like strangers who receive the hospitality of the people in the
community.
3.
Don’t Move From House to House. Bloom
where you are planted. Follow the call to stability and place in the 21st
century. A truly counter cultural move.
4.
Eat what is set before you. Be ready
to meet the other person in the ways that are comfortable for them.
5.
Become Poets of the Ordinary. Listen
and tell the stories of the people.
6.
Move the Static into the
Unpredictable. How are the local church’s arteries becoming hardened. Creating
non-anxious presences so anxiety can be surfaced and change faced. Appreciative
inquiry with others.
7.
Listen people into speech. Creating
space in the community, and in the local church, for this to happen.
8.
Experiment Around the Edges. Don’t
rush to fix an identified problem with a program; open up and try small things
like asking and talking with others, doing something small. Help people do
their own work of discovery.
9.
Cultivate experiments, not BEHAGS,
big hairy audacious goals; what to resist to allow number eight to happen.
BEHAGS tend to perpetuate feelings of being in control, instead of entering
into vulnerability, and trust.
10.
Repeat Rules one through nine over
and over again. Change comes through practice.
Map The Neighborhood:
Assets Resources Hazards, Listen to stories, where do peoples gather, including
virtually, from bus stops to coffee shops, workplaces, et al.
What issues are
important to various groups? Who speaks for the community? What are they
saying? Who doesn’t have a voice?Why? Who are the historians and poets of the
community? What are they saying? Who has power, and who doesn’t and why? What
topics concerning the neighborhood keep coming up?
….when did you first
move in? what brought you here? What are your best memories of the
neighborhood? What do you like best about the area? Tell me about your family.
Does your extended family live here too? What would you love to see happen in
this community?
Missional Communities
Resources: A Sample List
Books: The Almost Church Revitalized
by Michael Durall;
Missional Renaissance and also
Missional Communities by Reggie McNeal;
The Shaping of Things To Come by
Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch;
Introducing the Missional Church, and
also Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood, by Alan Roxburgh
Right Here, Right Now by Alan Hirsch
and Lance Ford
The Abundant Community by John
McNight and Peter Block, see also McKnights Turning Communities Inside Out
The Faith of Leap, by Hirsch and
Michael Frost
Exiles by Michael Frost;
The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch,
Christianity Rediscovered by Vincent
Donovan (most of the books on this list are very contemporary; Donovan’s
pivotal book is from the 70s);
Welcoming Justice by John Perkins,
Let Justice Roll Down by John
Perkins,
Follow Me To Freedom by John Perkins
and Shane Claiborne,
The Irresistible Revolution by Shane
Claiborne,
Houses That Change The World,
Wolfgang Simson,
Change The World by Michael Slaughter
Emerging Church by Ryan Bolger and
Eddie Gibbs,
The Organic Church and Search and
Rescue, both by Neil Cole,
Life of the Beloved by Henri Nouwen,
The New Conspirators by Tom Sine,
The New Friars, and also Living
Mission by Scott Bessenecker,
The Tangible Kingdom and Gathered and
Sent by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay;
The New Monasticism and School(s) for Conversion,
both by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove,
Economy of Love, by Claiborne and
others
Church Morph by Eddie Gibbs,
Reimagine The World by Bernard
Brandon Scott,
Revolution by George Barna,
Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola,
UnChristian by David Kinnamon;
The Secret Message of Jesus,
especially appendix, by Brian McLaren,
Under The Radar by Bill Easum,
An Altar in the World by Barbara
Brown Taylor,
Planting Missional Churches by Ed
Stetzer,
Inside The Organic Church by Bob
Whitesel.
Lyle Schaller’s books especially The
New Contexts For Ministry, and What We Have Learned, and From Geography to
Affinity,
Postmodern Pilgrims by Leonard Sweet
and his other books, and the other books by Bill Easum and Tom Bandy, and The
House Church Manual by William Tenny-Brittain
The Small Church At Large by Robin
Trebilcock.
A few Films: Entertaining Angels: The
Dorothy Day story; Romero; The Least of These; Briars in the Cotton Patch:
Koinonia; Places in the Heart, The Spitfire Grill, Chocolat, Babette’s Feast,
Man on Wire, The Blind Side, The Mission, The Shawshank Redemption, October Sky, The Blues Brothers, Of
Gods and Men. See also videos Economy of Love by Shane Claiborne, and Justice For
The Poor from Sojourners, with Jim Wallis.
www.msainfo.org, http://www.shenango.org/PDF//Missional%20Church%20bibliography%20_2_.pdf,
Http://www.nationalministries.org/missional_church/docs/MCT_Six_Characteristics_Missional_Church.pdf
For a list
of diverse missional communities: http://missionalprogressives.blogspot.com/2011/09/links-to-diverse-missional-communities.html
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