pat loughery

Yesterday I ran across the website of a church in my town. They’re a great group, I love the pastor, and they’ve been in our community for long years.

It was odd for me to notice, though, that the “Ministries” section of their website listed all of their inward facing work. Ministries were things like Sunday school teacher; hospitality; worship team; Bible study leader. None were ministries from the church to the community.

I’ve been in the worldview of a missional church for so long that I’m surprised to see churches with inward-only impulses. For me, the outward impulse is just more.. normal.

But, that realization got me thinking about how a missional church can describe its ministries. If we as the missional church take seriously the idea that the community and its members are ordained, trained, commissioned and sent into our world, then we should celebrate our mission fields somehow.

What if on Sundays, we made a big deal out of commissioning a missionary who’s going into a new job as a receptionist at the real estate office? Or somebody who’s now a waiter at the Mexican restaurant? Or a financial advisor working with folks planning to retire? Or an at-home mom or dad who’s focused on their family? Or the person who volunteers with the school PTA? Or the executive at Microsoft, or the woman who just made partner at her legal firm? Or the young girl about to enter Kindergarten? Or the retired person who goes to the local diner every day for a cup of coffee and conversation? Or the family moving to a new state with a new job?

What if our church websites, under “Ministries” (or partnerships, or missionary activity, whatever you want to call it), listed all these areas that our church was engaged in?

I can think of at least these benefits:

First, the church would take seriously its role as sending people into the community as an intentional act. We would think about how we would train missionaries to the grocery store, or paralegals. We would have to intentionally commission (and, perhaps, decommission or place on-hold) some of our folks.

Second, the sent ones would take seriously their role as embedded missionaries in their own context. They would be trained and understand that they were sent intentionally.

Third, our websites would be long lists of activity in our community, we would have different ways to tell the story of what the church is doing. For small, missional churches, this would give them a much better way to answer the question “how’s the church doing?” than “we had 18 butts in chairs last Sunday”.

Fourth, new member classes would be different. We would ask new folks what their occupations were, how we could help them there, and what their passions were. How do they want to change the world, and how can the church partner with them?

Those of you who lead missional churches, what do you think about this idea? Those who participate with missional churches, how about you?