STARTING THE FLOW OF MISSION FROM ANYWHERE

I know what many of you are thinking at this point:  “I understand what you are saying and I wish I could just start over with such a clean apostolic understanding and a missionary flow, but I'm slammed! I lead one of these structured churches right now and our corporate paradigm is pretty non-missional and definitely non-apostolic.  In fact, our structure calcified into a hard lump of coal ten years ago. Is there any way for us to be this stuck and move toward missional ways of church? Can we actually become apostolic and prophetic moving out to win the lost once again?”

The quick answer is yes. To get your people living as apostolic bands engaging culture with the fervor you believe they should is simply a matter of discipleship. It is not just possible; it should be fought for and prayed into at least a percentage of every church. Will you be able to get everyone on mission? Of course not! There will always be people who love the Lord, love the church, and continue to live a faithful life under the old context. For these, we suggest giving them the grace to stay and hope that the apostolic  ways rub off on them. Encourage their support for those who are leading the way forward, but don't get frustrated that not everyone dances in unison to the new beat.

Practically, the answer to "Is it possible to change a church toward an apostolic mission model?" is to simply go backward. In other words, begin the missionary flow from your existing structure. Let's color in the lines.

GOING BACKWARD TO GO FORWARD

Just about every leader wants to "engage culture." We want our churches to live apostolically and missionally; and we want our people to learn that they can live a larger gospel experience than they have been. On many occasions, we have all preached a message or set up programs that we thought would move people out to engage their neighbors. And we all know the typical results. Our people think to themselves, "Oh, there goes the Rev, trying to fire us up again to do friendship evangelism so we can invite them back to church." These types of approaches will probably not sustain an apostolic-missionary context.

There's a bigger issue at play here than just getting people to go and hang out with people outside the church. The core issue is a missionary question: "How can we best engage the culture to which God has called us?" In our present context, we believe the answer closely mirrors the apostolic context of the early church. The community, not the individual, is the primary witness to this "bigger" gospel.

Whether you're starting from scratch and moving down the missional flow or starting from an existing structure and moving up (see diagram), you'll notice that the center of the process is "incarnational community." This central concept ties good apostolic (missionary) engagement to the concept and reality of the church as the apostolic community (a community of ‘sent ones’). This incarnational community essentially is a substructure of church where a small band of "apostolic people" intentionally integrate into the lives of the unchurched.

If you want your existing church to successfully engage the culture, you don't begin by telling your people to engage and then bring them to church. You must start by creating a new environment for them that provides a better witness to the culture and is the best way to see the kingdom lived out in concrete ways. The incarnational community that forms can then go out together and will eventually form the bridge between your cultural engagement with the world and the corporate structure of the church.

While a pure, start-from-scratch mission typically begins with engagement, then forms into community, and eventually morphs into congregational structures, an existing church must first gather bands of apostolic / missional people out of the larger body, bring them together, and then begin the process of engagement. All you need is a handful of people who want to pilot an incarnational community. You don't have to hit an iceberg and capsize the whole ship; you just have to send out a few people by cover of night to begin the new voyage.

Will one little schooner change the direction of the ship? Not by itself. But eventually the stories of the missional communities will filter up into the general church population and begin perking curiosity and stirring up more buy-in for the next wave of would-be missionaries and apostolic-missionary communities.