daveingland.com   about church relevance, culture, life, community, & transformational faith

Let me start with a question: Can the seeker-sensitive, mega-church model really be missional? I’m one of those that thinks it can. Missional really is a matter of the heart that is realized through application. Serving others becomes relevant because it is in the very nature of who we are as missionaries. Can such an environment exist in a mega-church? I think it can.

The biggest problem facing the missional mega-church is one of how it can be organic and easily mobilized when it operates with 2-5 services per day and affects 2,000-50,000+ in attendance on any given weekend. Menlo Park Presbyterian Church actually closed its door one Sunday in April last year to be the love of Christ to the surrounding community. With about 2,600 of its 5,000 members committing to serve others as reported in the Oakland Tribune:

For only the second time in its 134 years, a church in Menlo Park today canceled Sunday morning service and shut its doors.

It’s no crisis — it’s only because the majority of its 5,000 members instead spent the weekend renovating homes, refurbishing schools, assisting the homeless or building thousands of support kits for AIDS caregivers in Africa, among scores of charitable activities throughout the Peninsula.

As Pastor David Meysembourg stated in a comment to one of the previous posts here on the blog about the missional church, “So for those who are already doing church, the real work lies in becoming missional without losing the flock. The difficulty comes in transitioning from a more traditional church (which is many of the things missional is not) to a missional church. Education and training, modeling missional values, discussion, reading, all are an important part of this process. One of the first things we’ve done is to define ‘church’.”

Ask 100 pastors to define what the church is and you may find 100 different responses. Sure, the underlying theme and overall context may be similar, but just as God calls individuals to lead/preach/teach he also inspires them with visions that complement their giftedness and passions. Another point made by Pastor Meysembourg that we as pastors must be united on though: Church is “Not a building, not program, not an event, but people living God’s plan for their lives.”

What is God’s plan for our lives? Simply stated in the eloquent words of Christ himself in Matthew 22:37-39:

37″‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

If we gather together as the body of Christ and love God completely and love others with the love of Jesus aren’t we being missional? Must there be a 100% buy-in from all that gather in a Sunday service in order for the church to be considered missional? If we look at missional as some formula of how we can “do” church, then the answer would be no. However, if we look at being missional as a matter of the heart and an application of our love for our fellow humans and realize that not everyone may be willing to walk in the same shoes at the same time, then any body of Christ that exemplifies the Greatest Commandment is in-fact going to be missional.

As Alan Hirsch states on page 182 of his book The Forgotten Ways,

“One of the reflections arising out of my fifteen years’ experience at SMRC is that as we grew and began to operate in the classic church growth mode it became increasingly harder to find God in the midst of the progressively more machinelike apparatus required to ‘run a church.’ With numerical growth, it seemed that we were increasingly being drawn away from the natural rhythms of life, from direct ministry, and that our roles seemed to become more managerial than ever before.”

With Mr. Hirsch’s statement being a generalization of what is thought to occur in the mega-church model of ministry, there are definitely large, looming issues inherent in this model that could or would prevent a missional dna from developing as the environment can lend itself to becoming consumeristic and inwardly focused. However, with a missional vision for a mega-church committed to the Greatest Commandment, all things are possible with God.

I follow a lot of what is going on in the church today, particularly here in America. One thing I am getting tired of is church leadership slandering other church leaders. At the center of a lot of this is political. Take a look at the forum Rick Warren hosted last weekend at Saddleback Church here. One of the things I admire about Pastor Gregory Boyd of Woodland Hills Church in Minnesota is that he gets it and isn’t afraid to talk about it.

As Christians we should be focused on the work of the kingdom of God and not about promoting political candidates or political agenda. Is it our job to polarize Christians through our political positions or are we to show the world that it is through love that others will know we are Christ followers as in John 13:34-35.

In his blog, Boyd comments:

“In my view, followers of Jesus are to be concerned with everything Jesus was concerned with – and Jesus was obviously concerned with more than people having a relationship with himself.”

What are some of those things? Well, for one Pastor Boyd speaks about racism:

Jesus revolted against racism by the countercultural way he treated and spoke about non-Jews , so his followers are to revolt against all forms of racism.”

Boyd states that, “Jesus was a revolutionary on social issues, so his followers are to be revolutionaries on social issues.” However, he concludes with these profound remarks:

Jesus was a radical social activist, so his followers must be the same. It’s just that Jesus never once placed any trust in the government of his day to address social issues. He rather just addressed social issues by how he lived and taught. So too, we who are Jesus’ followers are to place no trust in government to address social issues. We’re simply called to address them by how we live.

Following Jesus’ example, we’re to place our trust in the power of the cross – the power of self-sacrificial love – not the power of the sword. We’re to trust the power of Calvary, not Caesar. And this is why I believe those who spend their time and energy trying to control the political arena “in Jesus’ name” are profoundly missing the point. Our job is to love, serve and sacrifice for sinners – not argue about passing laws against them. For we are to know that, whatever sin we see in others, our sin is much worse (Matthew 7:1-3)”

Obviously there are many that refute what Pastor Boyd speaks about. However, isn’t the scripture clear on this that Jesus called his followers to be examples of their faith? If we live by the sword we die by the sword. If we live by love, we are keeping with the Greatest Commandment and it is through our love that world will know we are Christians.

Here is some video of Greg Boyd speaking on this a bit for the CNN series God’s Warrior’s:

My friend Mark posted a blog on myspace that got quite a few responses so far this morning (You can read it by clicking here.) The post was a commentary on how some Christians can be judgmental and closed-minded. However, a lot of the posts seemed to agree that the world would be a better place if Christians did what Jesus taught instead of using the scripture against people. What is it that they think Jesus taught? They agree that Jesus taught love was above the law and that we should embrace love and not the law. At least that is the way I perceived a lot of the replies to be saying.

I’m sure many people outside of that blog would agree. However, I would have to fundamentally disagree. Matthew 22:37-40 NIV tells us that loving God and loving others as we love ourselves are the two greatest commandments. Verse 40 specifically states that the Law and the Prophets hang on these two things. Therefore we have to keep in mind that Jesus didn’t say love is above the law (God’s commandments), instead he says that if we keep love of God and love of others first and second in our hearts, then we are upholding the two greatest laws of God. Verse 40 confirms this by stating that through keeping these two commandments we will be able to honor all of the commandments.

Did you know that there are over 600 commandments of God in the Bible? Isn’t it amazing that by just upholding two of them, that we cannot fail in keeping the rest? Think about it and if you find a contradiction please reply and let me know.

Love *is* the law and it is God’s love for us that allows us to love others above ourselves.

We finally have made it to the beginning of Proverbs where there are multiple two-line proverbs that speak to different things. From Proverbs 10, verse 12 comes:

Hatred stirs up dissension,
but love covers over all wrongs.

This is something that I deal with almost every day in ministry. Someone does something to wrong another and it is held against them. It doesn’t matter how silly or meaningless the act is, it just takes one thing to set some people off and cause them to hate and be unforgiving for the rest of their lives. In the end, where does that get us? We end up being hateful and hurt as long as we carry the weight of that wrong around on our shoulders!

I used to be one of those people that held grudges, sometimes to the pointing of hating others for what they had done against me. However, through gaining an understanding of how much negative energy I stored up within myself and how easily I could learn to hate others for petty things just got me to thinking I didn’t want to live that way. It took coming to know Jesus and having the Holy Spirit convicting me of the ways of peace, but when it came upon me it was if a huge burden had been lifted from my spirit. Through that experience I came to find out that I had forgiveness in my heart for others and replaced feelings of hate with feelings of love and patience. This has served me well even with situations in my own family where I feel someone took advantage of me or disrespected me or maybe even disliked me for whatever reason. It’s just not worth it! Love covers over all things and even if it’s the other person that wronged me, I can take the responsibility to forgive them and show them I am not hateful in order for them to see that I do in-fact carry love for them in my heart.

Is there someone you stopped talking to or maybe even wished ill-will towards them because of something they did to you? Is it time for you to maybe forgive them of what they did and reach out to them again with your friendship and love? Don’t let the negative spirit of hate ruin your relationships. Experience the joy and peace of learning to forgive and love others, forgetting about the past and looking forward to the future. Isn’t that what friends or family are called to do anyways?