| A Letter From the President Click here to return to the Church Innovations web site. Missional church language has become a fad. Darrell Guder made it official at the jointly sponsored by Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and Church Innovations Annual Think Tank in April. What was starting to take shape five to seven years ago in many circles has become almost ubiquitous in the American church scene. Whether it is the self-described, cutting-edge organizations of the mega-church consulting operations and leadership networks, or the church-wide operatives of the nation state Old Line Protestant Denominations, the language of missional church has become what proves you are state of the art. Darrell, with the wisdom of many years watching church fads in the area of ministry, evangelism, and mission wondered, “Perhaps it is time to abandon the missional language for the sake of the missional vision.” I have often wondered the same thing over these last five to seven years as with wonderment I have observed the same faddish patterns taking shape. I share his legitimate fear that the term popularized by the book that he edited for the Gospel and Our Culture Network writing team, Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending the Church in North America (Eerdmans 1998) has been co-opted by many, way too many, who seem truly clueless to what that book means by missional church. While I do not spend my time searching the web for uses of the term, I have doctoral students who do, and their findings only confirm many of my worst fears about this faddish pattern. I must admit a certain ironic delight, however, that after decades of having the themes of the GOCN movement portrayed as some rightwing agenda, or missiologists’ irrelevant theories and analyses, or simply another word for mission, missions, or being in mission, it is being adopted by the very systems of church practice and leadership that made those false portrayals their stock in trade. I delight in some of the very same people now using the term to get promotion in those very systems that the GOCN analysis puts at greatest risk. I even believe some of them when they say that they have come to see the truth of the GOCN analysis and are willing to enter the missional journey. I say deliberately “ironic delight” precisely because in our contemporary time the experience of the “ironic” is often a clue to the presence of God. (I borrow this insight regarding the ironic from my teacher Wayne C. Booth, the philosopher, literary critic, and teacher extraordinaire. Read anything he wrote and you will never be the same.) Might God be inviting those of us gathered into the GOCN conversation from so many different places and from quite different intellectual and vocational journeys to endure this new challenge to its insights by NOT giving up the term missional church? Might God be inviting us to sustain the wider faddish church culture with a very uncomfortable conversation that begins, “on the contrary”? Might a lively give and take on what it means to be missional, even with the faddish purveyors of the term, widen the insights of the movement and deepen our own understanding of the missional journey? Might what began as a conversation among Reformed and Mennonites with merely a dash of some other Christian traditions in Christendom now be called into a much wider stream of conversation that risks riding the faddish wave until it plays out and becomes a deeper and wider transformation of church practices? Some days these questions seem almost self answering. “Of course,” we say at Church Innovations, “we must continue the conversation into which we have been invited. Of course, we must like the disciples in Luke 10 accept this new peace extended by these once doubting, even nay saying, sisters and brothers. We have no choice.” Other days we find ourselves so disgusted at the trite and even dangerous co-opting of this language that we simply say, “Time to move to new language and fast.” Many days, including as I write this little note, I am caught in the ambiguity and hiddenness of God’s leading. I yearn for more clarity and find myself waiting upon the Spirit. For sure, we have come to realize the language is no longer in our hands, as if it ever was. For sure, the ambiguity of the Spirit of the Crucified, Risen, and Ascended One powerfully reminds us it all depends upon the Spirit’s power. A sent church always depends upon the leading of the Spirit. So today, at least, I will continue to ride the wave of missional church, be surprised by the fellow body surfers, and wonder how it all will play out, how the wave will break, and what the next wave will look like. Peace, Pat Keifert |
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