| Standing at the CrossRoads Click here to return to the Church Innovations web site. One church started as a Sunday School for children led by a judge in a saloon on the western frontier. Another started as an outreach to freed slaves in an urban center on the eastern seaboard. Another started with the commitment to share, “the faith of our ancestors in the language of our children.” All of these churches are more than a hundred years old- born in what would be the midst of Christendom. Yet all of them illustrate: the formation of Christian community around the mission of God in and for the world. This is what we understand as the heart of missional church. Many congregations learn about missional church and hear it offering a new way of growing or preserving its life. No matter how many times we say it is about the Church connecting with what God is doing in the world, people still hear it is about connecting people with what God is doing in the church. Until people have this shift in thinking, all their efforts to be missional are frustrated because they are still aimed at attracting people to the church. So how do we help them learn that their church’s future is found where the community’s life intersects the church’s life and the mission of God? Standing at the CrossRoads is a 6 month journey for a cluster of local churches and their governing boards to explore this question. It combines two day-long face to face gatherings, with monthly Bible Studies and online meetings. During this journey the teams are led through a series of reflections on Scripture, their own church history and the life of their surrounding community. We find that whenever the church has been vital and flourished there has been a connection between the church and the community. This may have been an influx of immigrants who are looking for a way to become rooted in this new land or a response to the poverty and unemployment of the great depression. We reflect on that church’s history using the metaphor of the Meeting House: where the community at large and the community of faith meet to discern the mission of God. The Meeting House is not necessarily the church building but the place where Church and community meet with the mission of God in that place. It is formed by people who create that space to listen to one another and God, exploring what it might look like if the kingdom of God was actually ‘come near’. Standing at the CrossRoads will be publicly launched this Fall with a cluster in the Synod of the Trinity- PC(USA) who is a special partner in the development of this process. We will be making it available for other judicatories with the hope that it will help local churches determine whether the missional journey is the direction they are headed. More information will be available on the Church Innovations website later this summer so you can decide whether Standing at the CrossRoads might be a direction for your church or judicatory. Bob Armstrong is director of Partnership for Missional Church in North America. |
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