Boundary Crossing and Missional Transformation
By Scott Hagley

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When the Apostle Peter received Gentile hospitality at the house of Cornelius in Acts 10, he was astonished to discover the gift of the Holy Spirit poured out. “Can anyone keep these people from being baptized with water?” Peter asked. In Luke’s narrative, this question is simply rhetorical in that mission means participating in the creative boundary-crossing capacity of the Holy Spirit.

At the Sustaining Missional Leadership Conference, several church and denominational leaders told a similar story, recounting the development of new relationships on the inter-denominational, denominational, and judicatory levels. As these communities continue to cultivate a missional imagination, they are each discovering the leading of the Spirit for fruitful integration across old boundaries.

In Edmonton, Alberta, Church Innovations’ consultant Gregory Brandenbarg and pastor Howard Lawrence of the Neighbourhood Church share their own 12-year journey to discover what it means to “live into our community of Northeast Edmonton as a church.” After about six years of missional experiments, mission still functioned as just another church program. Encouraged by Randy Frazee’s The Connecting Church, the Neighbourhood Church created geographic home groups. An imagination began to develop for the work of God in particular neighborhoods among Christians from several churches. “Soon the groups became larger than the church,” Lawrence says. “We discovered that we didn’t have control.” The Neighbourhood Church responded to this leading of the Spirit by seeking cooperative relationships with other churches in these home groups. To date, nine other churches from a variety of denominations are engaged in a cooperative mission to Northeast Edmonton through these geographic home groups.

The Rev. Suzanne Darcy Dillahunt, the assistant to the bishop in the Southern Ohio Synod of the ELCA, similarly sees the process of missional transformation as leading toward increased cooperation and collegiality among isolated ELCA congregations. Spurred on by three Partnership for Missional Church (PMC) clusters begun eight years ago (when it was Partnership for Congregational Renewal), the synod connects large, medium, and smaller churches together for the purposes of mentoring for mission and missional change. Previously, the density of ELCA churches in the synod provoked feelings of competition. “Working cooperatively does not happen naturally,” she says, but the process of seeking God’s mission together has resulted in increased cooperation. “We are seeing that they [churches in the synod] really believe when asked the question ‘What is God doing?’ that God is present,” she says.

Joanne Dietzel, the Lancaster Mennonite Conference coordinator and Paul Luthman, the executive presbyter for the Flint River Presbytery, PCUSA, both tell stories of judicatory transition in light of missional reflection. In both offices, roles and responsibilities are being integrated with the concern for missional congregations. In the Lancaster Mennonite Conference office, this means, “We feel we must lead the way not by telling congregations what to do but by example in our gatherings, how we organize ourselves, in how we work together as a staff, in our job descriptions, even those things like credentialing,” Dietzel says. “How do we redefine it from a missional perspective?”

Scott Hagley is a PhD candidate in the Congregational Mission and Leadership program at Luther Seminary.