Roxburgh, Introducing the Missional Church

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Alan J. Roxburgh and M. Scott Boren, Introducing the Missional Church: What It Is, Why It Matters, How to Become One. Baker Books, 2009.

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LifeandLeadership.com Summary

Alan Roxburgh is one of most significant leaders in the missional conversation through his books, consultation models, and Allelon. This book functions quite well as a supplement to an earlier volume co-authored by Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader (2006). See the Ministry Resource Guide on Missional Strategies by Roxburgh to understand the contribution of each volume.

The term “Missional Church” is used by virtually all current literature on church development. Is there such a thing as a “missional movement”? What is the “missional conversation”? This volume is unquestionably the place to start in finding answers to these questions. Not only does it provide a usable map for traveling the missional journey. It also helps those new to the discussion appropriate other literature on the subject more productively.

In the introduction Roxburgh gives a brief summary of the missional movement, chronicling the early influences of Lesslie Newbigin, the Gospel and Our Culture Network, and Roxgurgh’s own organization, Allelon. He relates the purpose of this text to help the important developments of the missional movement, which has been dominated largely by academics, to become accessible and usable for the whole church.

The book is divided into three parts which are summarized below. This is much longer than most synopses on LifeandLeadership.com, mainly because of the seminal value of this text for understanding the plethora of other resources on the subject.

Part One – The Missional River

Here one finds definitions and descriptions of missional, especially as distinguished from other approaches to church development.

We begin with chapter one, “Not All Who Wander Are Lost.” In a way similar to Robert Webber’s The Younger Evangelicals, he contrasts missional to the “attractional” or church growth-oriented approach typified by the statement, “if you build it, they will come.” This philosophy moves churches to provide the best set of spiritual goods and services they can in order to attract outsiders to their offerings. The missional realization is that now, no matter how “good” we build it, people are not coming. The alternative is certainly not to repel people in the interest of being missional, or to think in either/or terms regarding the attractional approach. Instead of trying to make the church better, get more people to come, or turn around a dying church, the best alternative is for a congregation to attune itself to God’s mission. As one expresses it, “It is not the church of God that has a mission. It’s the God of mission that has a church.” Rather than getting more people interested in what we are doing, we circulate among our neighborhoods to discern what God, in his overall mission to redeem creation, is doing in our local contexts. We then align ourselves with and become participants in God’s redemptive work. We go to our communities as God’s hands and feet rather than expecting them to come to us.

In pursuing this, it is important not to overreact. Some do this by adopting a contrarian stance against attractional by becoming “anti-building, anti-clergy, anti-denomination, anti-megachurch, anti-tradition, or anti-structure.” (21) Neither should we construct grandiose images of what an ideal missional congregation should look like. For example, it is unhelpful to try to return to pristine New Testament patterns of a completely deinstitutionalized “organic” church, as all gatherings of people tend to institutionalize at some level. Also, while it is understandable for people to want a “model” of a church that has refined all aspects of what it means to be missional, this strikes against the Holy Spirit’s unique work in transforming churches in each environment.

Here the authors uplift an important missional principle: “The missional way of life…calls us away from answers with formulas and blueprints. It is an invitation to move out of our comfort zones.” (23) Examples of formula-seeking abound, such as those who look at in Acts where believers met in the temple and houses and assuming THE biblical model is to balance large and small groups (forgetting this is simply endemic to all human groups). Or there are those who look at Acts and the epistles and argue that large meetings were not the norm. The purely biblical model, they argue, is house churches, and large gatherings (and God forbid, buildings!), are pagan.

This leads to three important correctives:

There is no model that is the way to do church – not cell church, mega church, seeker church, purpose-driven church, house church, externally focused church, multi site church, equipping church, emerging church, simple church, or any other model, existing or future. Each has value, but none is universal
The Bible does not reveal a missional secret or formula that provides twenty-first century Christians with a magic pill for entering missional life.
There is no point in the history of the church that provides us with just the right pattern and formula for creating missional churches – not Celtic, Chinese, etc. Each of these were important and effective for their time and place, and can be learned from, but are not absolute templates. (24)

In contrast to these three tendencies, the authors suggest:

“Those on the missional journey are wanderers, and we need to develop skills for reading the winds of the Spirit, testing the waters of the culture, and running with the currents of God’s call so that we are not lost on the journey. To some it might look like we are lost when we cannot point to a model that can be easily applied anywhere. Instead we are participants on a journey in which we have to learn from one another as we move toward becoming God’s missional people.” (25)

Chapter 2 is “Just Give Me a Definition, Why Missional Church is so Hard to Define.” Here the authors prefer the term “missional imagination,” a transformed way of seeing the world, over the word “definition”. There are several reasons why definitions are difficult. First, the two words, mission and church, are defined differently.

Yet there are eight trends in the missional conversation that illustrate what is NOT meant by the term “missional church”.

It is not a label to describe churches that emphasize cross-cultural missions.
It is not a label used to describe churches that are using outreach programs that are externally focused.
It is not another label for church growth and effectiveness.
It is not a label for churches that are effective in evangelism.
It is not a label to describe churches that have developed a clear mission statement with a vision and a purpose for their existence.
It is not a way of turning around ineffective or outdated forms so they can display relevance in the wider culture.
It is not a label that points to a primitive or ancient way of being the church.
It is not a label describing new formats of church that reach people who have not interest in traditional church structures.

While all of these may be legitimate calls when properly understood, they do not individually or collectively capture the essence of the missional church.

The authors then illustrate how definitions can be misleading, especially with reference to the kingdom. When one considers the many metaphors, similes, images, pictures, stories, and parables about the kingdom in Gospels, it would be impossible to read them and devise a clear definition. “How do you write a definition of the kingdom when Jesus tells us it’s about mustard seeds and vineyards and cheating servants?” (35) Such is the case with defining missional.

The authors provide the image of a missional river that represents the flow of God’s work as it occurs in the world. To be part of the kingdom is to enter the flow of this river with its twists and turns by aligning ourselves with three powerful currents of mystery, memory, and mission.

Mystery – Why did God choose us? This is always “an irreducible mystery, a surpassing wonder.” Thus, “to participate in the missional journey is to embrace this mystery and alow this reality to overwhelm and supersede the pressing matters of being a successful church or growing church, which seem to dominate our imaginations.” (42)
Memory – Biblically, memory is the “reliving and reenacting of past events in the present because these events continue to have power and are the primary shapers of life.” Passover and the Lord’s Supper are examples. Yet, a modernistic participation in these events “limits the Lord’s Supper to a memorial – a modern remembering of a past event.” Yet, biblically, “memory forms us into the people of God who live an alternative story whose power shapes the present. As such, this community formed in the mystery of God’s choosing is being shaped as a parallel culture because it is grasped by a present, lived memory of the story.” (44)
Mission – This is an important dimension of the authors’ message:

“Mission is the outgrowth of mystery and memory. …Mission is not an action or program but an essence the pervades all the church is. God calls the church to be the demonstration of what all creation is to be. Likewise, the church is the new Israel (Luke 12:32; 1 Peter 2:9-10), called for the sake of the world. Mission is not something the church does as an activity; it is what the church is through the mystery of its formation and memory of its calling. The church is God’s missionary people. There is no participation in Christ without participation in God’s mission in the world. The church in North America to a large extent has lost his memory to the point that mission is but a single element in multifaceted, programmatic congregations serving the needs of its members. The gospel is not a religious message that meets the needs of self-actualizing individuals. But the North American church is being invited by the boundary-breaking Spirit to discover once again its nature as God’s missionary people. This will mean going against the stream of most church life at this moment in time.” (45)

For these reasons,

“missional church cannot be codified in a simple definition. It is more than a new word for evangelism, church planting, or meeting someone in a coffee shop for conversation. It is not about restricting or a new program. Missonal church is about an alternative imagination for being the church. It is about this transformation toward a church that is shaped by mystery, memory, and mission.” (45)

Having laid these foundations, chapter three asks, “Does Missional Fit? Can My Church Be Missional?” The answer is that the journey along the missional river is expressed in many different forms, traditions, structures, and sizes. They give examples of emergent churches, traditional churches, rural congregations, megachurches, and denominations. These reveal that

“the missional conversation has entered almost every stream of the church. The Spirit of God is moving in the church in creative, generative ways that call the people of God to engage their neighborhoods and display God’s kingdom in everyday life.” (52)

One universal characteristic of missional churches, however, is that they regard themselves as being sent as

“a sign to the world of who God is. The missional nature cannot be subdivided into internal activities for insiders and external activities for outsiders. All the church does and is should live out God’s life in the midst of the world; missional people should practice God’s life before a watching world. This includes worship, preaching, communion, loving one another, social justice, caring for the poor, and sharing Jesus’s gospel. Being missional is about all of it, not part. This is the missional imagination. All of God’s people are on mission to engage their surrounding neighborhoods, not just a few who are sent outside the church to do something called missions.” (54)

Yet there are some important distinctions, such as that between missional and emergent. The authors designate emergent as more immersed into the postmodern ethos than is assumed by the missional movement. A few pages later, the authors show how both modernity and postmodernity can and often to block the flow of missional life, and that missional should not be tied exclusively to either. They provide some very helpful charts showing the effect of each cultural ethos on missional effectiveness.

Part Two – Three Missional Conversations

Chapter 4 – Having laid the essential foundations of the missional perspective, the next several chapters cover three conversational topics that if maintained, help churches move along the missional river.

Reconsidering Our Context – The West Is Now a Mission Field
Rethinking the Gospel – The Missio Dei (Mission of God)
Reimagining Church – Sign, Witness, and Foretaste of God’s Dream for the World

They suggest ways that the discussions of churches can move away from churched-culture assumptions and toward preoccupation with God’s mission and his dream for the world.

This is similar to the three-way conversation proposed by Lesslie Newbigin that begins with discussions about the interrelationship between the gospel and our context, and then progresses to the church so that we shape congregations that engage their missional environments effectively.

The remaining chapters in Part Two take up each of these conversations individually.

Chapter 5 focuses on the first conversation, Reconsidering Our Context. This underscores that North America is now a mission field. This requires that the church follow Jesus who pitched his tent among us, teaching us to take up dwelling in and become aware of our neighborhoods, i.e. incarnational ministry. “God is only known in the particularity of place and time.” (77) In our place and time, America has shifted from the church having the central place in society to being on the periphery. Many churches have responded to this with irrelevant strategies that operate as if the old church-centered culture were still the reality. These strategies are discussed at length:

Church and Culture as Congruent
Church Renewal as Mission
Church as Presenting the Answers to Culture

Missional strategies, on the other hand, “are shaped through dialogue and engagement with the contexts and neighborhoods in which we live.” (84) Churches may follow a two-step strategy to achieve this:

Entering and listening to one’s context (real presence vs. demographic profiles), analyzing the cultural context, attending to the values and meanings that underlie the surface activities of the neighborhood, and summarizing the themes in the culture that arise from the analysis.
Reengaging the Biblical narratives – Here a congregation uses scripture and the experiences of other local churches to reflect on the themes they encounter from listening to their communities. We “read scripture with the eyes of our neighborhood.” (90)

Out of this, the church is able to develop evangelization strategies that fit the local context.

Chapter 6 focuses on the second conversation, Rethinking the Gospel. The authors contend that “theology is critical to the formation of missional churches.” (91) Churches must engage in theological dialogue centered on the Missio Dei, or “Mission of God.” The location of this conversation is important, as “theology must move out of the academic ivory towers and into the local places where we live, eat, work, and do business. Shaping missional life means seeing ourselves as theologians who are learning to talk about God in our local contexts.” (92) Here the authors rely upon Robert Schreiter’s work, Constructing Local Theologies that identifies three types of theology that are important to this conversation: 1) community, 2) prophetic and poetic, and 3) outsider theology. The model is Jesus who, as Eugene Peterson paraphrases, “became flesh and moved into the neighborhood.” (John 1:14) So we must construct local theologies that express the ways in which God is at work in our local contexts.

The rest of this chapter offers refreshing stories of “ordinary men and women waking up to their neighborhoods and figuring out how to be the kinds of cooks who set the gospel table using local ingredients.” (97) This theological work seeks to answer the central missional question: “What is God up to in this world, and what does it mean in this place and time?” The authors present a beautiful, although brief, picture of how Paul did this in ancient Ephesus.

Chapter 7 discusses the third conversation, “Reimagining the Church – Sign, Witness and Foretaste of God’s Dream for the World.” This means “missional is about embodying God’s dream, even though we do that in an imcomplete manner. It is a dream that has begun but is not yet fully manifest.” (102) The church manifests this dream primarily by becoming “a contrast society…a people shaped by an alternative story, living by a set of distinctively Christian practices.” (103) The rest of the chapter discusses the meaning of each piece of this definition: contrast society, alternative story (the place of Scripture and the sacraments), and contrasting practices (spiritual practices).

Part Three – Countless Missional Journeys

This section addresses how churches may become missional. Not all enter the missional river in the same way, but each story is unique as churches find ways of becoming God’s missionary people in their own neighborhoods and communities. They propose ways of listening to the missional pathways the Spirit is birthing in a church’s place and time.

Chapter 8 discusses the essential philosophy of following the winds of the Spirit, and is summarized well by the concluding paragraph:

“Very practically, a missional church is formed by the Spirit of God at work in the ordinary people of God in a local context. A practical implication is that this imagination changes the focus of leadership. Rather than having plans, programs, strategies, and goals, they ask how they can call forth what the Spirit is doing among the people. When this happens, the potential for discussing the wind of the Spirit is exciting.” (122)

The next several chapters present a practical process through which congregations may discern the movement of God’s Spirit in their contexts.

Chapter 9 summarizes the process. It begins with a church assessing its current situation. The authors offer a diagram of four ways in which a church may understand itself: reactive, developmental, transitional, or transformational. They emphasize that “no church is purely one of these four; it is always an amalgam of each.” (125) The goal is becoming a transformational people in which the people realize that

“like missionaries in another culture, if they are to be a witness to what God is doing in the world, they need to focus continually on engaging their changing contexts and the people of their communities. They know they will be continually adapting to the communities and people where they live. It is not about being trendy or catering to the culture but about being missionaries in their neighborhoods, shaping the gospel in forms and language of the local people, and remaking church structures and social systems around the context rather than abstract notions of church drawn from a previous point in history.” (131)

Each of the remaining chapters discusses how to help congregations progress along the journey from a developmental through transitional to transformational church.

Chapter 10 introduces the Missional Change Model (MCM). It is not a linear, lock-step process, but has proven to empower change that emerges from the people themselves . It gives people a way to practice change in a way that catches the winds of the Spirit. It consists of five elements that “represent the stages a local church moves through to enter upon the missional journey.” (135):

Awareness
Understanding
Evaluate
Experiment
Commitment

Again, while these may look like a linear strategic planning process, the stages should be seen as more of “a set of spirals continually turning back on and interacting with one another rather than a straight-line process in which one moves from A to B to C and so on.” (135)

An important piece of this is the role of the leader. Missional discernment is not a top-down process, but a bottom-up process. Here leaders operate differently:

“The leader (whether pastor, clergy, or board) needs to develop skills in creating environments in which the people themselves do the work of discerning and discovering the imagination that the Spirit is giving them for mission. The leader creates space and experiences for others to imagine what the Spirit is calling forth. It is a move away from the people being passive to the people being at the center of the processes of discernment.” (139)

This is very similar to the field of Appreciative Inquiry (AI). In fact, the authors cite Peter Block’s Community: The Structure of Belonging, which is a standard AI text. (see summary)

The remainder of chapter 10 explains each of the five elements of the Missional Change Model. This is followed by chapters devoted to each element individually.

Chapter 11 discusses Awareness, how leaders may give voice to what is happening among the people through pastoral care, appreciative inquiry, giving language to people’s experiences, and forming listening teams. It also describes a typical timeline and developmental tasks for each of the remaining stages that build upon Awareness.

Chapter 12 explains the Understanding stage in which the congregation views a report of the listening done in the Awareness stage and is invited into “a series of conversations concerning what the Spirit might be saying about some potential missional experiments in the neighborhoods and communities of the people.” (159)

Chapter 13 describes the Evaluation stage where the church embarks on a four-month process of dialogue groups to consider their readiness to be on a mission and consider some potential ways of doing that. Rules of dialogue are important here. At this point, the authors insert chapter 14 on the role of the board in this process. It is appropriately subtitled, “How do Innovators and Traditionalists Work Together?” This contains excellent suggestions on preparing church leaders to oversee the journey.

Chapter 15 resumes with the Missional Change Model, looking closely at the fourth stage, Experiment. Here they discuss how leaders may show respect to the anxiety that comes with risking new ventures by crafting them not as “big programs or major changes,” but as experiments or “small ways of addressing the question of forming mission-shaped life in the neighborhoods where they live.” (184) The concluding chapter describes stage five, Commitment, what happens when a church has traveled through the four stages of missional change and gain clarity on the new paths they wish to commit to long-term.

From the Publisher

Many pastors and church leaders have heard the term “missional” but have only a vague idea of what it means, let alone why it might be important to them. But what does it actually mean? What does a missional church look like and how does it function? Two leading voices in the missional movement here provide an accessible introduction, showing readers how the movement developed, why it’s important, and how churches can become more missional. Introducing the Missional Church demonstrates that ours is a post-Christian culture, making it necessary for church leaders to think like missionaries right here at home. Focusing on a process that allows a church to discern its unique way of being missional, it guides readers on a journey that will lead them to implement a new set of missional practices in their churches. The authors demonstrate that living missionally is about discerning and joining God’s work in the world in order to be a witness to God’s kingdom on earth.

About the Author

Alan J. Roxburgh is a teacher, trainer and consultant who works with Allelon and internationally framing resources for the missional church. He coordinates an international project involving leaders from twelve nations who are examining leadership formation in a globalized world. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including The Missional Church, The Missional Leader and Leadership, Liminality and the Missionary Congregation, and Reaching a New Generation. He and his wife Jane live in Vancouver, Canada, and have three grown children. He can be reached at his website, alanroxburgh.net.

M. Scott Boren is one of the pastors at Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is a trainer, consultant and the author of The Relational Way and How Do We Get There From Here? He works with Allelon in developing training materials on the missional church. He shares life with his wife Shawna and their four children. He can be reached at www.scottboren.com.

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