(This post also appears in the Total Church Discussion)
I know I’m in danger of sounding like a grumpy old man, but here goes anyway.
It seems there’s a growing local trend to critique what’s being called ‘attractional church’ in favour of so-called ‘missional communities,’ partly in response to the recent visit to Australia by Total Church author Steve Timmis from The Crowded House movement in the UK. I haven’t read Total Church, and I haven’t met or heard Steve, but I’ve certainly been watching the tidal wave that’s followed in his wake. So I’ll just comment on what I’ve observed, and those who have read and heard first hand can tell me where and how I’ve got it wrong.
Can i preface all this by saying I’m certainly not ‘anti missional’. In fact, I’m peeved at how the name tags have been allocated. Being missional is a good thing. And I’m not going to argue for ‘attractional churches’ with better basketball courts and more glitzy events to draw people in. (But surely that’s not our problem here in Australia anyway. Very few evangelical churches are attractive or attractional at all. In fact, I think it’s well worth doing our public meetings as winsomely as we can, to make them less ‘repulsional.’)
Even so, it’s kind of unfair that to be considered missional these days you need to deconstruct and devalue the habits and process and values of the “Sunday Church movement” that’s been struggling along for quite a while now. Tag it ‘attractional’, tag it ‘failed’, and let’s move on.
Everyone I know who leads a church in the current wave of the evangelical church movement (I’m most familiar with the last 20 years or so) has been working hard to create real, caring communities that extend far beyond the structured Sunday Service – genuinely loving church families that missionally cross-connect in myriad ways. At the same time, there’s been an effort to renovate structures – Sunday church meetings, denominational emphases, ministry training structures like METRO, evangelical conferences to name but a few. Has this process failed so miserably that it needs to be radically re-visioned? I’m not so sure. I would argue that it’s too soon to deconstruct the hard won gains of the last half generation, when vibrant, Christ-centred Bible Teaching Churches have sprung up all around the NSW North Coast and Queensland – to name just the areas I’ve witnessed first hand. I saw what was, and I see what is… and the change is amazing.
Here’s my fear. The push for ‘missional communities’ starts out by critiquing the status quo for being ineffective in reaching ordinary Australian non-Christians. The ‘missional community’ offers a solution… but first we must dismantle what came before. Maybe not intentionally, but at the very least by leading cohorts of willing hearted missional types in a new journey. Away. Somewhere else. But what dangers lie ahead on the journey?
Forgive me if I sound a bit jaundiced here, but the biggest problem in leading any church is that we’re leading sinners. Leading sinners can be frustrating. Leading sinners can be disappointing. Leading sinners is like trying to herd cats. Most often, the kind of sinners we’re dealing with are people just like us, with willing hearts – but they’re living with the kind of mortgage crunch, time crunch and family crunch that can leave the Kingdom of God coming in at a distant fourth place in their affections. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. We teach about priorities, we exhort… and we see progress from time to time. But they’re the people we deal with, and this side of heaven, it’s not going to be fixed. Guess what? When those same people become involved in ‘missional community’, they’ll find they’re faced with the same pressures. Sometimes, they won’t have time even to be there. That’s disappointing – but it’s not attractional church that’s the problem here. And I fear it’s not missional communities that will fix it.
More than that, the kind of sinners we deal with find it hard to share their lives. They find it kind of awkward to speak with newcomers. They find it difficult to really care for people, especially if those people are ‘high maintenance.’ Sometimes, it takes a whole church to care for a particularly difficult member. In reality, because we’re sinful, and because of other practicalities, I suspect it will be really hard to integrate difficult people into smaller missional communities. They’ll be left behind. In the name of mission.
Obviously, the missional movement is a rallying call for higher commitment, higher involvement, greater sharing and deeper care. But my fear is that the missional community movement will ultimately just be another way of purifying the church like other forms of revivalist piety. Some will be drawn deeper, while many others will be excluded or simply fall off the edge.
More worrying is the disturbing movement away from structured Bible teaching. Sermons replaced with dialogue? Structured Bible Studies replaced with unguided discussion? My fear is, we’ll soon trade what the bible actually says with ‘what the bible says to me.’ If years of structured Bible Study Groups at a church like Southern Cross were unfruitful in creating gospel conversations as Pete says in his blog, I’m not sure that the problem was with the structure. This cure may be worse than the disease.
Unavoidably, the high ideals of discipleship that this new movement offers will be attractive at first. But without an incredible amount of leadership energy, things are bound to devolve to a system that’s comfortable and convenient in the guise of being missional. (While the idea of deeply shared community sounds adventurous and high minded at first, it’s easy enough to become comfortably communal. It’s just another rut.)
And what happens when the time comes when some benefits of the older structures become necessary or desirable? When you’ve devolved and dissolved the presumably attractional church you’ve grown from, and there’s only a shell left behind (albeit with now decaying basketball court) where will you turn when you’re looking for an effective youth ministry for your teenage kids who want to hang out with a bunch of other Christian teens? Where will you turn for training for your next pastor? Not that the missional movement is against this stuff – just a little disinterested in the mechanics that make it happen. Hopefully it will still be there for you when you need it.
What I’m seeing from my vantage point as a grumpy old man is an idealism that is gravitating towards only doing what people are naturally inclined to do, and so avoids the painful business of process. Maybe it’s just laziness, dressed up as a desire for mission? I’m seeing an idealised communalism that devalues structures; I’m seeing a dangerous devaluation of trained leadership and purposeful bible teaching. In short, I’m wondering if the missional community movement is highjacking some of these key values of evangelical Christianity, in the name of being missional. What we need are more and more living churches, with a love and vibrancy and word centredness that explodes into everyday life… a church life that’s big and attractive on Sundays, but even more attractive when you meet the members in daily life and see them hard at work loving one another, and the community around them. Isn’t that the enterprise we’re already working on?
Phil Campbell