It's Time to Become Missional...Again!

“Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything that I've commanded you. Look, I myself will be with you every day until the end of this present age.”  Jesus (Matthew 28:19-20)

The first call of the Church is to be missional…to go out to the people in the name of Jesus!  That was the way of the earliest Christians.  It is still the way that Jesus calls us to today, even though it is easy to forget.

It is time for the Church to be missional again!  We say that.  We all nod our heads in agreement.  We dream about what the Church would look like if we lived it out.  Then go on living as we always do.  We wait for people to come to us, hoping that we can produce something that will be attractive.  We watch as people bounce from church to church hoping that they will land, at least for a time, on our soil.  We try not to upset people already here, for fear their needs will not be met and they will start bouncing.  We wonder why attendance in worship slowly declines and why fewer and fewer people seem interested in making faith a priority.

It is time to become missional again, to get out of self and go where the people are, to build relationships in the name of Jesus, to love people with a grace that they will experience nowhere else in life.   It is time for us to have a purpose, a task, and a mission!

Let me repeat…it is time to become missional, again!  I am not just saying this to the Church as a whole, but especially to you and me as individual Christians.  We have to get up and live it!  It is time to get outside of our comforts and preferences and grow the Kingdom of God.  It will mean a heart change that puts God first, even above self, and a passionate and unrelenting desire to reach people with God’s love.  This is the fire of the Spirit, so often talked about in the Book of Acts and other places in the Bible, living in our hearts. 

Let me be clear about this missional way of life.  I am not talking about high-pressure sales tactics that get people to simply sign on the dotted line for Christianity.  I am not talking about awkward conversations where you inquire if a person knows where they will go “if they die tonight”.  I am not talking about being judgmental or self-righteous until people become like us.  While perhaps well intentioned, for most these simply affirm the negative images people already have of Christians.  Besides, since God is already working, it is our love more than our cajoling, that will help them hear God singing in their hearts. 

What I do mean is a deep passion for God and people.  I mean the peace and joy that comes from a life in God.  I am talking about meeting people who don’t know that kind of peace and joy, getting to know their story, learning their passions and their struggles.  It means showing them through a relationship what the love of God looks like.

Being missional means being creative and intentional about seeking people, for the sake of God’s grace, and having a genuine interest.  It means learning something from them.  It means inviting them to join you in worship.  It means sharing gradually, in word and deed, the story of how Christ has changed your heart and life and thus inviting them to make space for Jesus to do the same in theirs.  It means listening as much as talking because I promise that God is already working in their life and maybe our role is to help them to see it.  We can’t do that if we are doing all the talking. 

In essence…being missional is building relationships with people in the name of Jesus.  Do you have a missional heart?

The time has come for the Church (and individual Christians) to be missional, again!  Our call is to do more than save our local churches, it is to build the Kingdom of God.  It is time to stop trying to find churches that meet all our wants and desires.  It is time to stop spinning our wheels to make our churches what they were years before.  It is time to stop spending our energy finding everything wrong with the churches we are in.  It is time to become missional…to put our lives where are words are…to go out and meet God’s people in the world, to love and to serve all for the sake of Jesus.  Otherwise, we become miserable, dissatisfied Christians, withering away in despair.  God wants to give us more! 

So here is a simple way for you to become missional right now:  Stop what you are doing and pray that God will show you one person that He wants you to build a genuine relationship with, in His name.  I promise God will show you someone…that is your mission field…walk with grace into it.

It is time to become missional, again!  This is still our calling.

Together we are the hands and feet of Jesus!

Brett