Summary of Missional Church Touchstones

Characteristics of The Missional Church Revolution:

Go to them not expect them to Come to us

Church is not ultimately to attract those who are of like minds to form a spiritual community to celebrate their values, but church is ultimately about the healing of the community beyond itself. Church is not to be a safe home until all homes are safe. Church is not to be growing and thriving in a community that is suffering and declining. Don’t be the best church in your community, but be the best church for your community.

We no longer compartmentalize; we live in a blurry world; boundaries of sacred and secular overlap; spiritual and material, personal and political or social are not kept separate; no one can go it alone in such a world; the church and non faith based nonprofits and business and government and philanthropic groups all need to play a part in the Mission, but they won’t inhabit different realms but will be partnering. Can’t say this problem is only for government or this role is only for the church.

Church is not about meeting personal needs, but about helping people get over themselves, beyond themselves; not with the aim of creating lives of comfort and convenience and community, but of conscience and commitment for others. Church is about cultivating lives and communities that grow and go inward and outward.

Church heals the world not by saving individuals, not by focusing ultimately on individuals and their personal beliefs and attitudes, but by connecting and growing and setting loose in the world persons as communities of missional disciples, persons who have increased their own capacity for generosity and service, especially serving those most vulnerable. We grow through service, through discipleship/study/faith formation, through community, and through worship.

The church does not have a mission; The mission has a church.

The church is not a church, but an expression of The Church.

Don’t focus on changing the church; focus on changing the world and the church will change.

Don’t expect mission to flow out of worship, but worship will be a response to mission.

Grow smaller to do bigger things

Ask the question: if your church ceased to exist, who would notice and who would be affected?

Programs and events don’t transform lives as much as relationships do.

No longer structure church around believing first then behaving or acting and finally getting to belong; but belong first, practice behaviors, and outcome of beliefs.

It is okay if the church dies, if the mission is accomplished

Church not a what but a who.

Church not about showing up at a specific time and a specific place in order to get a message; especially the younger someone is the more the content has to go to them when they want it and can receive it.

The church does not go out to convert the world, but to be converted by the world as God is already there ahead of the church transforming the world. Wake up each morning and ask: where can I go meet God in the neighborhood today?

Shift from church of Three A’s---Affluence, Appearance, Achievement; to church of Three R’s---Relocation, Redistribution, Reconciliation

Going Missional or External: 1. Partner with other churches, and with groups outside yourself; 2. Eat together more often with other groups and in the spaces of others and the public spaces; hold potlucks in parks and places where the hungry go; 3. Look for ways to relocate worship or start a new worship in a new location, especially in a poor neighborhood; 4. Turn your space over to others; 5. Send teams of 5-7 people away from your routine gatherings to go be the church in designated relocated spaces around you, reporting back to you, being your partners your scouts; 6. see smallness with a big vision and sense of abundance and opportunity to move from being vulnerable under old paradigm to being vanguard of new paradigm; 7. divide up your church and do a re-start as networked geographical mission communities.

Our Faith Formation Vision: Our Ask or Community Rule as we move toward becoming an urban progressive missional new monastic community:

Daily prayer and/or meditation; weekly at least worship; monthly spiritual check-in; annual retreat; lifetime pilgrimage; daily acts of random justice kindness beauty…Work toward vision of reverse and relational tithe: live on ten percent of income, save ten percent, give 80 percent away to community…Live in proximity to one another. Eat together at least three times a week.