The Ministry of the Missional Church: A Community Led by the Spirit

  The Ministry of the

Missional Church

The Ministry of the

Missional Church

A Community Led by the Spirit

Craig Van Gelder

© 2007 by Craig Van Gelder

Published by Baker Books

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.bakerbooks.com

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Van Gelder, Craig.

The ministry of the missional church : a community led by the spirit / Craig Van Gelder.

   p.    cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 10: 0-8010-9139-X (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-8010-9139-1 (pbk.)

1. Mission of the church. 2. Church work. 3. Community—Religious aspects— Christianity. 4. Holy Spirit. I. Title.

BV601.8.V28   2007

266—dc22

2007015763

Scripture is taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Permission was granted for use and adaptation of the following sources:

Craig Van Gelder, From Corporate Church to Missional Church: The Challenge Facing Congregations Today, Review and Expositor 101, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 425–50.

Craig Van Gelder, The Hermeneutics of Leading in Mission, Journal of Religious Leadership 3, nos. 1–2 (2004): 139–72.

To all of my students over the years who have continued to

challenge and inspire me as we sought together to

better understand how to love and serve God

Contents

List of Figures

Foreword by Alan J. Roxburgh

1. Spirit-Led Ministry

2. Spirit-Led Ministry in the Bible

3. Spirit-Led Ministry in Context

4. Spirit-Led Ministry in the U.S. Context and in the Missional Church

5. Spirit-Led Discernment and Decision Making

6. Spirit-Led Leadership and Organization

7. Spirit-Led Growth and Development

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Figures

1. A Theological Theory of Action

2. The Five Phases of the Discernment Process

3. An Open Systems Perspective

4. A Congregation from an Open Systems Perspective

4.1 Community/Environment

4.2 Congregation/Boundaries

4.3 Feedback and Results

4.4 Purpose (Mission), Core Missional Practices, and Vision

4.5 Leadership and Infrastructure

4.6 Holy Spirit Guiding Transformation

5. A Congregation from an Open Systems Perspective with Transformation

6. Types of Decision-Making Coalitions

7. Types of Planned Change

8. The Cycle of the Process of Change

9. Persons’ Responses to Change

Foreword

The Spirit of the Lord fills the whole world

The Spirit of the Lord moves over the deep

The Spirit of the Lord warms our hearts

The Spirit of the Lord fills all things.

          Matthew Kelly, The Rhythm of Life

This is the invocation for each Wednesday morning in my daily office—it calls us to confess again the source of our lives and the ways God shapes and empowers the church. Scripture tells of God filling us with a new Spirit. In John 20, Jesus appears before his frightened disciples in a locked room, breathes on them the Spirit of God, and creation is reconstituted as the church is born with an identity and mandate to be the sign, witness, and foretaste of where God is moving within all creation. It is in the power of the Spirit that the church receives this mandate, and it is only through the indwelling of the Spirit that the church engages in the ministry of the kingdom. The power of this book is how it is rooted in this recognition and framed by this conviction.

Craig Van Gelder first came onto the screen of my life almost twenty years ago! I was in my second pastorate in Toronto, Canada. It was becoming clear to me as a Canadian that my generation was then far from being called Christian and that most church growth was about the circulation of the saints. It was a time of intense reading and study for me as I searched for ways to frame questions about the place of the church in our culture. I found few in my own context who understood or appreciated the existential nature of my questions about the meaning of Christian life in this strange new world. I was attending a conference one cold May weekend in Chicago that was sponsored by the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education (SCUPE). A workshop had a beguiling title about the new missionary situation of the church in North America. I sat in the back of the room listening to Craig talk with deep passion about this theme and was enthralled. I was on a long journey in which my current maps of the territory were becoming more and more useless. I felt lost and alone in a place that didn’t make sense anymore. Listening to Craig I knew that, at last, here was someone who understood and could articulate why the maps had failed. He was pointing to ways for us to imagine a different way of being for the church in North America.

Over these twenty years I’ve come to know Craig as a friend and scholar. I have learned so much from the perspective he brings to the missional conversation. He has an amazing mixture of skills that uniquely equip him to engage the subject of this book. First and foremost, Craig has a passion for the gospel. This is his focus. He’s driven to understand the question of what God is doing in the world, and it is not just a polite theological idea. Craig, as you will discover in this book, can bring such a breadth of disciplines and skills to a conversation that you will be amazed at his ability to synthesize complex subjects covering a multiplicity of disciplines. But all this learning is always being used at the service of this one thing—addressing the question of what God is doing in the world. His work is theological and framed by the God question. Hence, this book is an argument for the critical need to understand what the Spirit of God is up to in the world and, therefore, the ways in which the Spirit is seeking to shape the ministry of the church.

A second focus in Craig’s writing is the missional church. He is always attending to the meaning and interpretation of a missional theology applied to and engaged with ecclesiology (the questions of what it means to be the church). Craig is immersed in the literature of missional theology and missional church. His lifework is the framing of a domestic missiology for North America. I know of no one who has so consistently followed this commitment in seeking to articulate a thoroughly missional reading of the church. In this book you will find the distillation of this theology and its application for the ministry of the church. This follows from his earlier book The Essence of the Church: A Community Created by the Spirit, in which he locates the issues that must be addressed by the church in North America in order to form a missional way of life shaped by the intentions of God.

A third focus of Craig’s attention and passion is the local church and the systems that comprise local churches. He brings his learning and skill to the question of what God is doing in and among the people of local churches and the denominational systems that serve them. This book about the ministry of the missional church is for communities of God’s people in local contexts that represent a variety of traditions and histories. For those wanting to discover how their traditions and histories have both shaped their story and can become forces in framing missional life, this book offers a comprehensive mapping of how denominations took shape in North America as well as how these traditions can provide important pointers forward.

A fourth focus of Craig’s work that is manifest in this book is organizational systems. I know of no other individual in the church world who understands organizational theory and organizational change as does Craig. He has been a consultant to church organizations (local churches, denominational systems, and schools) for many years. He knows the theories and is familiar with all the literature—he owns this field inside the church world. There is no better person than Craig for developing processes for change and innovation from the perspective of the organizational systems of churches and the systems that serve them. As you read through this book you will be introduced to multiple frameworks of organizational life, and you will be provided concrete, practical ways of thinking through how to apply missional innovation in your context. But you will not find this material in the first few chapters. Craig loves the church too much to simply write a book that offers only a set of organizational or management techniques. He knows that the adaptive innovations which are required in our time are about theology, about an imagination for what God is up to in the world, and about what the Spirit is doing in and through the church.

All these foci are woven together in this book. It needs to be read developmentally. Chapter builds upon chapter as Craig creates a map. It begins with an argument for the formation of Spirit-shaped, missional ministry and roots that argument in a biblical framing of God’s purposes in the world. These early chapters invite you into a journey of discovery about what the Spirit of God is up to in and through the church in the world. It is from this starting point that you are led into concrete and practical ways to cultivate missional churches. This is an important book: its chapters give you the frameworks and tools to help form missional ministry within multiple contexts. It’s easy to write books that offer quick solutions for making the church work. Craig Van Gelder provides an alternative approach by helping you first to frame your world as a leader and then to develop a map for engaging in ministry, a ministry that begins with the important questions about God and moves to concrete proposals regarding the leading of the Spirit.

Alan J. Roxburgh

Director, Allelon Center for Missional Leadership,

Allelon Missional Leadership Network

CHAPTER 1

Spirit-Led Ministry

Alicia was sitting at her word processor, typing a paper for her mission theology class, attempting to bring the ideas that she was working with into a coherent presentation. Then, there it was again, that pesky red underline that appears in Microsoft Word every time a word is typed that is supposedly misspelled. She thought to herself, Why did the professor keep using the word missional in lecturing about mission theology and the church if, in fact, it isn’t really even a word?1

A Changing Conversation about the Church

The conversation about the church today is changing. This conversation is introducing a way of thinking about the church that is quite different from several current trends. One such trend is the seemingly endless obsession with trying to discover strategies to help congregations become more effective or successful. These strategies are usually defined in relation to clarifying and carrying out the purpose of the church—the purpose-driven church.2 The necessity of utilizing such strategies is normally justified in terms of the changing context in which the church now finds itself.3 The church must change and adapt cultural patterns in order to be relevant. Another current trend utilizes the logic of this argument about needing to change in light of a changing context, but offers a different answer as to the solution. This is the emergent church discussion where the focus shifts to trying to recapture the ethos and practices of the church of the early centuries and bring these to bear within the emerging postmodern condition.4

In contrast to these approaches, a quite different discussion regarding the church also surfaced during the past decade, one that seeks to probe more deeply key questions about the church. It is a discussion that is not being driven primarily by changes taking place in our cultural context, although these are attended to as being important. And it is a discussion that seeks to go beyond just focusing on purpose, strategies, or recovering early church practices. This different conversation is being shaped by a biblical and theological imagination for understanding the very nature of the church. The key premise is that understanding the nature of the church is foundational for being able to clarify the purpose of the church, and for developing any strategies related to that purpose. And understanding the nature of the church is also seen as being foundational for discerning how to address changing cultural contexts. This represents a change of kind in the conversation about the church, and is a change of kind being developed around the concept of the missional church.

The missional church conversation is being popularized largely by the fast-becoming seminal work published in 1998, entitled Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America.5 This volume is the product of six missiologists who spent two years in intensive discussions attempting to develop a shared argument about the very nature of the church. They sought to explore how the discipline of missiology (understanding God’s mission in the world) is interrelated with ecclesiology (the study, ology, of the church, ecclesia). The result was the construction of a missional ecclesiology, or in short hand, the concept of the missional church.

This conception of the church is now catching hold among church leaders and congregations across a wide range of denominations. The missional church discussion is capturing a basic impulse within many churches in the United States (U.S.) that there is something about the church that makes it inherently missionary. But it is clear that confusion still exists over what the term missional really means. Some appear to want to use it to reclaim, yet one more time, the priority of missions in regard to the church’s various activities. Unfortunately, this misunderstanding continues the effort to define a congregation primarily around what it does. The concept of a church being missional moves in a fundamentally different direction. It seeks to focus the conversation about what the church is—that it is a community created by the Spirit and that it has a unique nature, or essence, which gives it a unique identity. In light of the church’s nature, the missional conversation then explores what the church does. Purpose and strategy are not unimportant in the missional conversation, but they are understood to be derivative dimensions of understanding the nature, or essence, of the church. Likewise, changing cultural contexts are not unimportant, but they are understood to be conditions that the church interacts with in light of its nature or essence.

There is a growing literature about the conception of the missional church that is now becoming available.6 But there is still a need to make more explicit the connections between the church’s nature in relation to its purpose and strategies for ministry and also to explore how it engages changing contexts. It is not uncommon for persons to ask, So, what does a missional church actually look like? This is a fair question, and to date there has been little research and writing in this area with the exception of the 2004 Gospel and Our Culture series publication Treasure in Clay Jars.7 There is a need to develop a more focused understanding of what Spirit-led ministry looks like in a missional church.

Understanding Spirit-Led Ministry

This volume makes the connection between the church’s nature and its purpose in relation to changing contexts more explicit by focusing on the ministry of the church as being Spirit-led. It builds on my earlier book, The Essence of the Church: A Community Created by the Spirit, which was published by Baker Books in 2000. That book focused on the nature, or essence, of the church as being inherently missional. In simplest terms, the argument in that volume was developed as follows:

The church is.

The church does what it is.

The church organizes what it does.

The interrelationship of all three aspects is important to understand. The church is. The church’s nature provides the framework and foundation for understanding the essential character of the church. The church does what it is. The nature of the church establishes the foundation for understanding the purpose of the church and its ministry and determines their direction and scope. The church organizes what it does. The ministry of the church introduces strategies and processes that require the exercise of leadership and the development of organization within the church.8 The key point to understand is that the Spirit-led ministry of the church flows out of the Spirit-created nature of the church. What is also critical to understand is that the exercise of leadership and the development of organization need to function in support of this ministry. What is crucial is to keep these in the proper sequence when considering the missional church—nature, purpose/ministry, organization.

The missional church reorients our thinking about the church in regard to God’s activity in the world. The Triune God becomes the primary acting subject rather than the church. God has a mission in the world, what is usually referred to as the missio Dei (the mission of God).9 In understanding the missio Dei, we find that God as a creating God also creates the church through the Spirit, who calls, gathers, and sends the church into the world to participate in God’s mission. This participation is based on the redemption that God accomplished through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, a redemption that was announced by Jesus as the kingdom of God (which I prefer to reframe as the redemptive reign of God in Christ).10 This redemptive reign of God in Christ is inherently connected to the missio Dei, which means that God is seeking to bring back into right relationship all of creation. Or as Paul put it in 2 Corinthians, In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself (5:19). The Spirit-led, missional church is responsible to participate in this reconciling work by bearing witness to the redemptive reign of God in Christ as good news, and through inviting everyone everywhere to become reconciled to the living and true God.

Seeing the Triune God as the primary acting subject changes the way we think about both the church and the world. The world becomes the larger horizon of God’s activity. This represents a fundamental reframing of God’s primary location in relation to the world. When one starts by focusing on the purpose of the church, the church tends to become the primary location of God, which makes the church itself responsible to carry out activities in the world on behalf of God. A trinitarian understanding shifts the focus such that the Spirit-led, missional church participates in God’s mission in the world. In doing so, it becomes a sign that God’s redemption is now present in the world, a foretaste of what that redemption is like, and an instrument to carry that message into every local context and to the ends of the earth.11 In living out of this identity and living into this role, the focus for the church shifts primarily to one of discerning and responding to the leading of the Spirit—being a Spirit-led, missional church.

When this understanding is translated to congregations, we find that congregations begin to take seriously how to explore and engage the communities within which they are located. Leadership in congregations focuses on discerning the Spirit’s leading and discovering ways to implement ministry