Post date: Jul 1, 2013 3:07:32 AM
Mission: Redefined
For a long time I have wrestled with the primary purpose of the church. Over the past year, I’ve written a number of times to you about this topic, as we as a congregation have wrestled with our purpose as a church. A few months ago I wrote a newsletter article differentiating between maintenance and mission. Even as I wrote that article, I continued to think about and research and read about the word mission. You see, I believe we have a problem with the word mission. Our problem is that we do not have a unified understanding of what we mean by mission.
For some people, mission means serving those outside of the church through food cupboards, taking care of the homeless, and other acts of service in the community. For this subset of our congregation and the wider Christian community, mission involves taking care of people beyond our own physical walls and our own group of congregation members.
Other people struggle greatly with this understanding of mission, because to them our mission is more closely related to growing closer to God by explicitly naming and focusing on Jesus and what it means to be followers of Jesus. This second group of people believe the primary mission of the church is to worship, to learn about, and deepen our relationship with our God in Christ.
Perhaps by laying out these two seemingly competing understandings of mission, you can see how we get confused in our mission talk. Both groups use mission to describe what they seek to accomplish. And both groups talk past one another and miscommunicate with one another because they think the other understands them when they use the word mission.
I have come to believe that both groups are partially correct in their understanding of mission. Part of our mission as Christians is to take care of other people, to follow the example of Jesus and take care of our modern day equivalent of the poor, the orphan, and the widow. Another part of our mission as Christians is to participate in meaningful worship and learn more about and grow closer to God. The good news to me is that these two groups do not have to see one another as being at odds with one another in their Christian mission.
Both outreach (the term I am now using to describe the first group’s definition of mission) and God-connecting (my term for the second group’s definition of mission) are aspects of a wider understanding of mission. Healthy, vibrant congregations participate in both of these activities because they both are part of mission.
Mission is “the expression of the church’s deep, abiding beliefs.”* This is my new favorite definition of mission, a definition that I believe I have been seeking to help me articulate this central Christian idea for a number of years. We, as faith people, have deep, abiding beliefs that include regularly gathering together to worship and grow closer to God and include being sent out into the world in service to our neighbor. Our mission is to do both. How do you live out God’s mission in your life? What do you understand to be the church’s deep, abiding beliefs?
Hopefully, we all have both outreach and God-connecting as part of our understanding of mission. Some of us will emphasize outreach while others of us emphasize God-connecting. Together as the people of God who call Bethel our faith home, we do mission when we focus on both of these missional activities.
Another way to describe this wider understanding of mission is that we need to be a community of faith who gathers together to experience God and then is sent out into the world so that that the world may experience God through our words and deeds.
Seeking to be missional with you,
Pastor Adam
*This definition of mission is from A Door Set Open: Grounding Change in Mission and Hope by Peter L. Steinke p. 78.