New Markers of Missional Faithfulness

A little while back I listened to this Allelon Netcast, in which Al Roxburgh interviews Pernell Goodyear, pastor of an emerging Christian community called The Freeway in Hamilton, Ontario. Since then I've been checking in on his blog. Today I ran across this post entitled, Missional Church? Be Prepared to Lose -

We decided we could likely not continue to measure "success" as we always had - by attracting numbers: money, people, programs, projects, mission trips, souls saved, etc. We needed new markers, as it were, to know if we were becoming more Jesus-y.

I was immediately intrigued. He goes on...

In other words, rather than counting the number of people who come in to consume church programs, etc. we would celebrate people who left to follow to Jesus outside of the church walls. This shift meant several changes in the way we had always done things and the "results" we had always seen (some of which we would never have been able to anticipate ahead of time).

Our impulse to count things and measure our success by our numerical growth in any of these categories belies our addiction to modernity and its relentless commodification of everything. In modernity, if a thing can't be counted, it doesn't exist. We are so entrenched in this mindset that it's hard to imagine evaluating a congregation in another way. Clearly, the Bible is concerned with numbers and even names the numbers of people who were added to their communities of faith, but I seriously doubt they had the same hangups about numbers that we do, concerned as we are about market share, winning and loosing, and staking our identity on the 'unqualified good' of limitless growth.

Please read the whole post and look at what they have come up with as new markers of faithfulness. My heart is stirred by these things. However, I have a few questions....

First, a clarification: Pernell is starting a new missional community, essentially from scratch. We, in Hollywood, are living into a story that goes back to the early years of the 20th century. We are both in urban contexts that demand new innovations, but our starting point is different.

Therefore, I find myself wondering these days about the bad rap that public, corporate worship services are getting. I agree that one of the new markers of faithfulness should be how many people we send out vs. how many people's butts are in the seats on Saturday/Sunday morning. But I do think that worship is missionally formative if the leaders of worship are attentive to what they are doing. I'm not saying that we're perfectly dialed in about this, but we are increasingly attentive to the question, "In a missional church, what is worship for?"

Second, in my context, religious consumers are just a reality. I can rant all day about how I don't want to cater to consumers of religious goods and services, but these consumers have been trained by me (and others like me) for decades. To just cut them off and tell them they're wrong to expect those things from church says more about church leaders, I think, than the consumers themselves. In reality, what I have found is that some consumers have gradually become missional disciples in part by participating in corporate worship gatherings.

I absolutely love what Pernell has to say in his post, and I would only offer this corrective for ME and MY GROUP. As I said before, I think our situation is different than his because we are an established church. A new imagination about what it means to be church must be diffused through the congregation like yeast. Meanwhile, we do our best to make our worship services places where people's imagination is stirred up about what it means to be the church in Hollywood today. I think this means moving toward more participative, liturgical (work of the people) movements, which minimizes the attractional and performative aspects of what we are currently doing.

Finally, Pernell points to something that we, in Hollywood, have called "the poured out church." It means that the church is there to be spent on behalf of the kingdom of God, not to accumulate stuff on the way to the kingdom.

Comments

[Pernell]

Ryan - Good observations. A few things:

1) I agree with you about corporate worship. 100%... I just don't think one or two paid people should spend the better part of a week planning them and allow it to be the main focus of the churches life and its main identity.

2) Religious consumers needn't be a reality. We can help change that.

3) The contrasting age/background of our two communities is likely less significant than simply the difference between American and Canadian culture.

Great thoughts. Thanks for digging in.

Peace.

[Ryan Bell]

And thank you for stopping by. I appreciate your thoughts and I join you in working to change the consumerism that so characterizes our culture, both Canadian and US American. Peace, brother!

[michael bells]

I came here via Pernell's blog... I think I might spend some time exploring what you have written... looks interesting.

I think your comments re worship & religious consumerism are linked. We have created an environment of expectation that worship is something done for us. Rarely, & I honestly mean that, have I been in a larger public church gathering where people really worship. We may have sung, some many have prayed, others may have done some religious things... but we don't worship together.

As I commented on Pernell's blog, I'm not sure that transformation can take place apart from a people being desperate to do things differently.

[Ryan Bell]

Hey Michael, thanks for stopping by. I appreciate your comments and I agree. People have to feel a need to change in order to change. I have watched people from really successful evangelical churches who are listening to someone like Alan Roxburgh and saying to themselves, "Why would I want to do that? Everything is going so well!" One other possiblity besides desperation might be captivation; people become so captivated by a new/old vision of being church. In our case, we are desperate, but I'm also trying to captivate people with a vision of God's kingdom and life in that kingdom.

What I am attempting to deal with in my post above is the reality of a situation in a long established church in (arguably) the entertainment capital of the world. Reality: we have a lot of religious consumers who are, frankly, not interested in connecting the dots of their life so that they live an integrated life of worship, work, play, relationships, service, community life, etc. They want their shot of God on Saturday morning (in our case). The question then becomes, "how do we take these beautiful people, created as ikons of God, and help them start to make the move to missional life." That is not easy. It's not enough to simply say, people shouldn't be religious consumers. I agree, but when we go to work in the morning, we all have the hard task of actioning that belief and "being the change we want to see" to borrow a phrase. I'm hoping to share a story of how this is starting to happen in a future post.

I think that one of the ways we start making that shift is exactly what Pernell is saying in his post: we start evaluating things differently. We redefine what we're doing and then measure it by different metrics.

[Kirsten]

ryan - i really appreciate your writing and will continue to read your blogs more frequently. i smiled when you talked about our situation being desparate. i'd add to that that we are in a position that much of church literature doesn't support. creating a "new" community in an "existing" one just "isn't done" or encourage. you don't find successful examples. i know my statement sounds simplistic, but it's so true that we are really attempting something here in hollywood that has and will continue to test our faith. but i'm excited about behing a part of the ride. and i love the visual created by your statement: "A new imagination about what it means to be church must be diffused through the congregation like yeast." powerful!

[Ryan Bell]

Kirsten, I agree completely. We really are doing something that isn't tried very often. It's definitely not encouraged in our corner of the religious world. Thanks for being a part of the conversation. I really am doing this primarily for you and other church members who are on this journey with us.