ethans feet

So I had a total hand slap to the forehead moment the other day.

You see I have always used the term “missional church” without really realizing what it meant.  I mean I could have probably defined it in an academic way (I mean I’ve actually met the dude that made up the term) but I hadn’t made it concrete for myself in my setting.

And then, the other day I was thinking about my church and about how we always seem to me to be in danger of focusing on the important internal work of community formation and discipleship at the expense of the work of outreach and service.

And I thought (really for the first time) about how outreach and service, though different, both demand a posture of thinking of the person outside the church.  And then I thought that for all the other things we do well as a church, if we don’t have a posture facing toward the other then we have lost our mission.  And then i thought to myself that having a mission for any church really just means having a focus that lies outside the community that already exists in the church.  And then I realized that is what everyone else means when they talk about a “missional church”.

Duh.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.