Sully Notes Special | 13 Marks of a Faithful Missional Church – Mark 4 of 13

Mark 4 – A Church Striving to Live as a Contrast Community – of 13 Marks of a Faithful Missional Church in the 21st Century American West  

Sully Notes are meant to provide you with direct quotes from some books I've read in the last year, so you can get a taste of the overall theme of the book and then begin to chew on what your life might look like if you applied what you read.

This series of special Notes are touching on a subject growing in recognition and discussion within the 21st century American church. What is the missional church? Is it something we do or who we are? What does a church look like that is living out the mission of God in their cultural context? How does a church remain faithful to the good news of Jesus, the Spirit of God, the Scriptures, the church throughout human history and around the world, and the mission of God that the church is called to join, while also meeting the questions, needs, and desires of the people God is sending us to in the cultures and contexts we live in today? I have found no better book to answer these questions than in Michael Goheen's A Light to the Nations: The Missional Church and the Biblical Story. 

For these 13 posts, my goal is to share the final chapter of the book – Chapter 9: What Might This Look Like Today – with you. In this chapter, Goheen shares from his pastoral and professional experience in answering the question, "Ten Things I'd Do Differently if I Pastored Again." The list grew from ten to a lucky thirteen. I think all thirteen are essential for considering how Emmaus City will be a faithful church for our city – Worcester, MA. 

Each blog post will feature one mark that will take about 5 minutes to read. Here is the full list featuring links to the previous posts:

• Mark 1: A Church with Worship That Nurtures Our Missional Identity
• Mark 2: A Church Empowered by the Preaching of the Gospel
• Mark 3: A Church Devoted to Communal Prayer
• Mark 4: A Church Striving to Live as a Contrast Community
• Mark 5: A Church That Understands Its Cultural Context
• Mark 6: A Church Trained for a Missionary Encounter in Its Callings in the World
• Mark 7: A Church Trained to Evangelism in an Organic Way
• Mark 8: A Church Deeply Involved in the Needs of Its Neighborhood and World
• Mark 9: A Church Committed to Missions
• Mark 10: A Church with Well-Trained Leaders
• Mark 11: A Church with Parents Trained to Take Up the Task of Nurturing Children in Faith
• Mark 12: A Church with Small Groups That Nurture for Mission in the World
• Mark 13: A Church That Seeks and Expresses the Unity of the Body of Christ

Mark 4: A Church Striving to Live as a Contrast Community

"Out of a communal life rooted in the gospel that comes to know God's saving power in worship, preaching, and prayer will flow a community that embodies the new life of God's kingdom in the midst of its particular culture. We live as part of our culture, and yet as a contrast community we challenge the religious spirits that are incompatible with the kingdom of God. What might a contrast community look like in the twenty-first century?

The following list flows directly from what I believe to be some of the most urgent spiritual currents of our culture that the church must challenge and fulfill in its own life. In other words, this list is highly contextual: this is what a church that is faithful to the gospel in this particular context would look like as an attractive alternative community in contrast to and in fulfillment of the religious currents of Western culture. What spiritual currents in our culture must we live against? What do those spiritual currents reveal about the religious hunger of our contemporaries to which our lives can be good news? By way of illustration I briefly list seven characteristics.

1) A contrast community would be a community of justice in a world of economic and ecological injustice. The statistics of global economic and ecological injustice are distressing. The people of God living in God's new world of justice and shalom cannot be a people oblivious to these problems but must seek ways of embodying and seeking justice in keeping with the gospel.

2) A contrast community will be a community of generosity and simplicity (of 'enough') in a consumer world. Steven Miles asserts that 'consumerism ... is arguably the religion of the late twentieth century.' In this global context members of the Christian community must develop an ethos of extravagant generosity with their financial resources as well as with their time and in hospitality. A life of simplicity, of having enough, will run counter to the increasingly consumer-driven lifestyles of Western culture. Can Christians offer the good news of a generous God if their lives look little different than their contemporaries?

3) A contrast society will be a community of selfless giving in a world of selfishness and entitlement. Western culture is a culture that revolves around the hub of the self. Politics is formed around individual rights, and economic life is given shape by economic self-interest. Today we are witnessing the rotten fruit of this cultural center: selfishness that is apathetic to human need, self-absorbed narcissism, a deep sense of entitlement, a victimization that refuses to accept personal responsibility, and an obsession with rights, self-esteem, and self-fulfillment. A consumer society tutors us to think first and foremost about our own needs. In a culture that is turned in on itself, the Christian community must follow Jesus, who offered his whole life as one of selfless service. A life of sacrificial giving consumed with the needs of others would offer a powerful witness to the world.

4) A contrast community will be a community of humble and bold witness to the truth in a world of uncertainty. The confident and certain world of the Enlightenment has crumbled. Uncertainty, relativism, pluralism, and suspicion characterize the current cultural mood. In this setting how can the Christian community be light? The starting point must be a bold witness to the truth of the good news of Jesus Christ. There must be a deep confidence that this is the true story of the world for all, and that this story is a liberating one. In an ethos of suspicion in which all claims to truth are inherently oppressive and self-serving, it is important that the church be deeply humble in its grasp of the truth. There is no room for uncertainty about the truth as it is in Jesus; there is plenty of room for humility about our grasp of that truth. A firm hold on both humility and boldness will be essential in our world.

Further, we must not return to a Greek notion of truth as unchanging ideas, and the gospel as one of those theological propositions that stand above history. Rather, the gospel is an announcement of what God has done in a person and events in history that give shape to an understanding of cosmic history. That kind of narrative approach offers an effective way to dialogue with other faith commitments without compromising the universal validity of the gospel.

5) A contrast community will be a community of hope in a world of disillusionment and consumer satiation. Western culture is increasingly a culture without hope. We fear the future because of the military, ecological, and economic dangers that threaten our existence. We are suspicious of any stories that claim to know where universal history is going. Our wealth and consumer culture have offered us a variety of goods and experiences to drown our disillusionment. And so we have collapsed our lives into the present. We retreat into entertainment or seek distraction in new experiences or novel forms of technology as relief from our increasingly empty lives. We lose a sense of history and the future, and this leads to a diminished sense of hope. Hope produces a sense of purpose worth living and dying for, and that is why hope is so important in the New Testament. A community of hope and purpose will be a light in a world that says in many ways: 'There is no future worth living for.'

6) A contrast community will be a community of joy and thanksgiving in a hedonistic world that frantically pursues pleasure. The contemporary testimony Our World Belongs to God captures something important when it describes the fruit of hedonism in our culture today: 'Pursuing pleasure, we lost the gift of joy.' We are unable to live thankfully for the numerous gifts that come daily from God's hand. Ours has become a culture in which increasingly consumer demand is as much, if not more, for experiences rather than goods. It is a hedonistic culture that frantically pursues pleasure in travel, new forms of technology, vacations, retirement, entertainment, and more. Yet finding true joy and fulfillment in this frenetic quest is as elusive as grasping and holding on to smoke. True joy comes in living in the way our Creator has made us.

7) Finally, a contrast community will be a community that experiences God's presence in a secular world. It may be that the word 'secular' is the best adjective to describe the humanist worldview that lies at the core of Western culture. Whatever else the word might indicate, it describes a culture devoid of God's presence. Western culture has developed its worldview based on a world considered to be a closed nexus of cause-and-effect relationships that can be known by scientific reason and exploited by technology. If God exists, he exists outside this closed box, and sadly the Christian community has often conformed its theology to this deistic model.

Paul tells us that if we are living in the biblical story, it is in God that we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). The psalmists saw the hand of God at every point in nature and in history. Cardinal Newman rightly says that God 'has so implicated Himself with (the creation), and taken it into His very bosom, by His presence in it, His providence over it, His impressions upon it, and His influences through it, that we cannot truly or fully contemplate it without in some aspects contemplating Him.'

A church that can be trained to see God's work in creation, his providential care of creation and rule of history, and his renewing work in the Spirit will offer the kind of 'sacred' world longed for by a postmodern spirituality that has grown disenchanted with the scientific disenchantment of the secular world and yet has no way to fulfill that longing.

If our contemporaries are to believe the gospel, as a church we will need to manifest the salvation of the kingdom in a more attractive way. Friedrich Nietzsche rightly chastises the church for its lack of joy, vibrancy, and delight in creational life: 'They would have to sing better songs for me to learn to have faith in their Redeemer: and his disciples would have to look more redeemed!'" – pgs. 208-211

Tomorrow's post: 13 Marks of a Faithful Missional Church – Mark 5 of 13: A Church That Understands Its Cultural Context

– Sully

 
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