Missional: Culture Makers (4/4)

There are basically 4 types of Christian organizational groups that exist in a general sense. Only one of the four seeks to make/change culture for the benefit of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

1)Hyper-Fundamentalists
2)Liberals
3)Para-churchers
4)Missionals
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Today, I will discuss the 4th and final group:

4)Missionals
(Gospel + Church + Culture = The Missional Church)

Well, what does Missional mean?

Most people will immediately think that Missional refers to having a heart for foreign nations, and desiring to bring Jesus to a different country or continent. And while being Missional does encompass reaching foreign lands with the Gospel, it mainly involves the community where God has put you. Sometimes Christians have no concept that they are missionaries in their culture, and that is why God has put them there.

Read Jeremiah 29:4-7 (ESV)
⁴"Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon:

⁵ Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce.

⁶Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease.

⁷But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

God specifically sends His people into cultures. Babylon was one of the most wicked of cultures (founded by a guy with the name Nimrod which should tell you something), and yet God sent His people into that wicked culture to live in the culture and love and seek the welfare of the city. This applies to every Christian.

As a church, to be Missional is to not forsake the culture or reflect the culture or follow the culture, but make culture by being a city within a city. This is giving the people in culture a cultural alternative with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We do sex, money, power, fame, dating, and relationships differently as a city within a city. And we do these things in public to give a counter-cultural view of how life could and is supposed to be in Jesus. This is a Kingdom view of life.

Additionally, this is exactly what Jesus did!

Jesus left the culture and community of heaven and came down to earth to live as a man to ultimately suffer and die for the sins of the very culture He came to. He went from heaven to earth to minister and serve in culture. He lived counter-culturally. He went in to culture (though He was not OF the culture) to show the culture a counter-cultural Gospel lifestyle through power, presence, holiness and grace of Himself.

Being Missional also involves contextualizing the Gospel. This concept scares people because they immediately think you are changing the Gospel to reach more people. That is far from the truth! You should NEVER change the Gospel, you should, however, change the methods in which you present it in order to make it clear to the culture you are in. Just like foreign Missionaries will train and adapt for a foreign culture, we too must figure out ways to best reach people in the cultures and communities around us. This gets the whole church body involved in church reaching lost people instead of being spectators of a production-type worship service. The Missional church trains their people to be missionaries in the culture in which the church exists. This entails participating in the culture much like Jeremiah 29:4-7 presents. All in all it is about relationships. How can you build relationships with lost people if you extract yourself and your family from culture? Going door to door as a stranger talking to strangers has very little Kingdom impact solely because the people you visit don't know you - they don't know if you really believe what you are saying - they don't see the Gospel at work in your life - they don't have any concept of what it means to be a part of the church. Much like someone coming by your door saying that they have a vacuum cleaner that will change your life and it will never break and by the way it cost $45,000. Wanna buy it? No, you want to see it work. You want to see the truth lived out before you. You want someone you trust to testify that it works - not some stranger in which you have to put your faith in.

To sum it up:
To be Missional is to live counter-culturally in culture presenting an alternative Kingdom lifestyle based on the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and do so publicly so it can be clearly seen by lost people.

Jesus says in John 17:15
I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.
Jesus desire us to be missional in our culture.
This is the heart of the great commission.

more to come soon on being Missional...

for more info: check out Mark Driscoll's Vintage Church and Radical Reformission