Going Missional

Dear Friend,

I couldn’t help but notice your distress the other evening when the topic turned to being a missional church. I agree that if anyone is saying that Faith church does not or has not had missions, outreach, and benevolence as a core value they are absolutely wrong! However, I don’t think anyone is saying that. I think the recent emphasis is that because we do have those core values we may be ready to embrace this newer “missional church” movement and take our mission to a new level.

I’ve been around Faith a long time. Not as long as some! I know benevolent giving is a strong value here. Actual personal involvement in service or mission at Faith, in my experience though, has been primarily driven by individual efforts. Some of those efforts have been broader and stronger than others. The broader the effort, the more inspiring it has been to us all. Faith has supported corporately the environment for those efforts but the efforts themselves have really been individually driven. Faith has also taken great pride in Frank’s efforts, and should. But I have sometimes questioned if we are relying too much on Frank and, in essence, saying, “Good, that’s taken care of.”

Early on in my faith journey, as well as my life at Faith, I went on a CASA weatherization team. Sounds simple enough; however the “house” we were assigned was literally a shack! Here we were putting plastic over windows while there were 1” chinks in all the walls!? The futility was overwhelming for me at the time!

I remember a Habitat for Humanity trip where there were way too many volunteers with inadequate supervision. The result was a support beam that had so many nails it had to have been weakened and useless. I am coming to understand that physical service and its effect on underlying problems are minimal in a fallen world. It is the spiritual support, relationships, and bringing of the gospel and its comfort that is at the heart of Christian service. This is a difficult understanding for me and I’m still trying to absorb it all; after all, I’m an engineer who wants to fix things. Without this understanding we are nothing more than a civic service club and likely doing service for the wrong reasons, i.e. personal gratification.

During the Katrina disaster, I heard that Eric Vroom was down at the Gulf and had relayed back that there was a big need for shoes. I wrote a short email and searched on the internet for just about any shoe company I could find and spammed them. I really didn’t expect much, but to my utter amazement the next day the administrative assistant of a VP for Shoe Carnival called. The VP was down there with a semi full of shoes, “Where would you like them delivered?” !!! I was stymied and put them in touch with Frank. I’m not sure much happened with it because I don’t think we were prepared for that. But it opened my eyes to such amazing possibilities!

I’m still trying to make sense of all this, but I personally feel that by embracing this missional church movement Faith can move something that is near and dear to its heart to a higher level. By becoming corporately involved in mission efforts, rather than simply supportive of them, we can truly become more focused and effective in the work the Lord really wants us to do. I hope and pray that this will lead us to better training and mentoring, better discernment, better matching of activities with individuals in different stages of growth, better discipleship, more real witnessing. We have such a wealth of resources at Faith; from willing servants, to contractor experience, to proposal writers that can chase grants, to business managers, to teachers, to health workers, to engineers, to loving caring faithful people. Much of it is untapped, waiting for the vision of our part in His Kingdom on earth to come into focus. If we let Him, where will He lead us?

Thank you so much for expressing your opinion! It has helped me to wrestle with mine and put it down in some semblance of coherent thought! I have been grappling with this for some time and will continue to.

Hopeful, Dave