For the past few weeks, I’ve been home
on break in Atlanta. I love being home, especially since I get to
hang out and play with my dog Kacey. One thing I love about my dog
is how excited she gets when we’re going out for a walk or “bye bye
car” – I’m sure you can identify! There is barking, and jumping,
and inevitably, she steps on my feet a few times as we both try to
get through the door at the same time.
Don’t you notice that’s how it always
is? We get really excited about something, and our energy is just
bursting at the seams, perhaps so much that as God opens the door of
opportunity for us, we’re likely to step on a lot of toes in the
process. Then as we go charging into creation, we get that nice
little tug on the leash reminding us that God is still sovereign and
if we’re going to do this, we still need to be by His side.
I’m not sure when I caught the
missional bug – I think it was a long process of trying to make
something greater of my faith, and then one day I read something
about missional churches and said to myself, “This is it! This is
what I’ve been yearning for!” I had worked in churches for a few
years, in addition to spending 18 months serving Presbyterians in
Syria and Lebanon, and had reached a point where I felt if I was
going to continue following Christ, I really, really, needed to
actually follow him.
Maybe I’m postmodern/emergent/confused.
I was looking for a community that lived like Jesus did, and how His
disciples did. My old, traditional, mainline, denominational church
just wasn’t going to cut it; that was until I came home from Lebanon
in 2006 and discovered that other people at my church were yearning
for the same thing! The more I read, the more I recognize that this
isn’t just a postmodern discussion, but rather this is simply the
Gospel lived out, and we all need to get on board with it.
This is where I started stepping on
people’s toes. I told friends and peers that they had it all wrong,
and that missional was the way of the future (and the past). It
wasn’t long before I realized that I had probably done more harm for
the Kingdom than I had done good. I also realized that I tried to
effect change in my surroundings without God as my guide.
All this was overwhelming, and I felt
pretty burned out from trying to be missional. On top of that, I
felt like we were doing a lot of talking about being missional
(especially as a student at Fuller Theological Seminary), and not
enough actually being missional. It took a visit back to Lebanon
this summer to remind myself of where God is calling me, and calling
us all – to be agents of change in this world. Just as Abraham was
called and blessed, so are we (insert frozen chosen joke here).
Friends, becoming missional is not as
easy as putting your shoes on in the morning. In fact, becoming
missional may be more like an evolutionary revolution back to
something we should have been all along – where missional is part
of us, quite unlike having to put shoes on.
We need prayer. We need to pray. We
need to listen for where the Holy Spirit is leading us. We need to
discover how the Holy Spirit wants to change us also. We need to
forgive each other for our past shortfalls, and encourage one another
to live more like the radical that came before us 2000 years ago.
In this day and age, nothing
communicates a message better than modeling it out. If we’re going
to help lead our congregations into a new (old) missional paradigm,
it starts with God tugging on our leash reminding us that he will
lead us.
