Missional Movement?

There hasn't been a lot on this blog recently, but every so often something turns up that it seems important to take note of.  This latest post from Mike Breen is one such item.  He's discussing the effect of Western individualism on the missional framework. He begins this way:

Since we began experimenting with discipleship, Missional Communities, and the like in England in the 1990s, we have been partners and friends in what you might call the missional movement. It has been fantastic to see all that God has done through what we believe is a work of his Spirit in remobilizing the church for mission.

.....However, I think if we’re honest, it’s not producing the kind of church we see in the book of Acts. At worst it stirs up guilt that we’re “not doing enough,” and at best it produces people who have a vague conviction that they should be “missional” at work, at school, in the neighborhood, etc, but who don’t really know how to do it in a non-weird way, so we either end up saying something awkward or we say nothing at all.

This isn't a long blog post, but it's well worth visiting.

Missional/Discipleship

 I keep saying I won't be posting anything more here but there was an article by Mike Breen (with the provocative title: Why the missional movement will fail) that someone alerted me to this morning which I think is essential reading, and certainly very much related to the kind of material that has appeared frequently on this blog.  Here's how the article starts....

It’s time we start being brutally honest about the missional movement that has emerged in the last 10-15 years: Chances are better than not it’s going to fail.

That may seem cynical, but I’m being realistic. There is a reason so many movements in the Western church have failed in the past century: They are a car without an engine. A missional church or a missional community or a missional small group is the new car that everyone is talking about right now, but no matter how beautiful or shiny the vehicle, without an engine, it won’t go anywhere.

So what is the engine of the church? Discipleship. I’ve said it many times: If you make disciples, you will always get the church. But if you try to build the church, you will rarely get disciples.

More here. 

Conversion! - maybe

Late last year I blogged briefly about a book called Launching Missional Communities by Mike Breen and Alex Absalom.

Dave Fitch has just read it and claims 'conversion' to the attractional model of church, after having spent a number of years arguing for the missional approach as the best option.

His lengthy post, however, appears to arguing for something rather different to what most of us would have considered 'attractional' meant. My understanding of 'attractional' is a church where people basically expect non-believers to come to the central place/building - how the church members go about getting them to the church in the first place varies enormously, of course.

Fitch says Breen and Absolom are talking about something different: an occasional (say six weekly or even three-monthly) service for the believers which may or may not 'attract' any outsiders, and which is like a kind of major celebration for all those involved in the church (which in Breen and Absolom's case consists of lots of small sub-groups - missional groups, in other words).

So, as one or more of the commenters on Fitch's post say, he's been 'converted' to something rather different to the normally accepted version of 'attractional'. In fact, it may be that he hasn't been converted at all. LOL

Read the post and see what you think. And what does his post add to the argument about missional vs attractional - what does Breen and Absolom's approach add to it?

Missional vs Attractional?

Mike Breen is a writer I came across earlier in the year, and I've just been alerted to a blog post he wrote recently in which he discusses the (mostly positive) reactions of J R Rozko to the book Breen wrote with Alex Absalom [in discussing this review he writes: His review of Alex and I’s book - one of those awful things that slip into blogs because of the speed with which most of them are written - I hope!]

The book is Launching Missional Communities, and in it Breen and Absalom discuss whether attractional and missional need to be at odds with each other. Breen comments in the blog:
There is something inherently attractive about a group of people coming together to worship their Father and King once they’ve been actively engaged in the mission field. In other words, the gathered church, coming in from being scattered, is unbelievably attractive. Why? Because it is the power of the reconciled community.

One of the big discussions in the circles I inhabit seems to have been that attractional is on the way out and missional is definitely in. Breen and Absalom seem to indicate that the two aren't necessarily incompatible. Check out the rest of what he has to say here, and read an excerpt from the book itself here.

Clusters...hubs

Len Hjalmarson writes in a recent blog post:

One of the very large and looming questions we hear from churches is how to transition from inward and program oriented to outward in mission. As Mike Breen and Bob Hopkins point out so ably in “Clusters,” the question is not adding a new program, or shifting deck chairs, but a call for a shift in the very culture of the community. The most profound shift is from control to accountability: away from the centralization of ministry and the cult of leadership.

Our church has begun to work with these too, calling them 'hubs.' However, ours have begun for a somewhat different purpose. Being missional in our church wasn't so much our problem as building community, and this is what the hubs focus on. They also include mission, but for the moment that's a not the highest priority. Clusters or hubs usually contain up to fifty people, including children.

Clusters is a book that came out in 2008. It's subtitled Creative Mid-sized Missional Communities. Being a British publication it doesn't seem to have made the impact that an American title might have. However, you can read about Breen, St Thomas' Church in Sheffield, and more, at the St Thomas' site. The people at St Thomas have gone through several transitions, and detail them in the story. Their use of the word 'clusters' is explained on this page too.

The skeleton and the muscle

Len, on the Next Reformation site notes that Mike Breen essentially says we have two broad groups in the church, with two orientations.

* the traditional and pragmatic prefer the bounded set .. definition, boundaries, clear ways to identify who is in and who is out
* the “emergent” prefer the centered set.. direction, focus, purpose and an emphasis on process over location

Mike raises the body metaphor to compare these two groups and describe why they need each other. The pragmatic are like the skeleton, the emergent are like the muscle.

You can get a skeleton to stand up, but you can’t get it to move.
You can get muscle to move, but it wont’ stand up.

“We need to ask the Spirit of God to bring a great rattling so the bones will stand up, and then to breathe upon those bones so they will live so we will have a mighty army.”

Mike Breen is one of the founders of The Order of Mission - TOM - in Sheffield. To quote (at some length) from their website, this is what they're about:

TOM is a pioneering movement born out of a desire to fully give ourselves to making disciples of Jesus in this fast changing world. We stand in the tradition of the missionary communities of the past who lived as radical, pioneering pilgrims called to influence, serve and shape society and the church in their time: the Celtic monks and nuns who first re-evangelised these nations, the Methodists and the Salvation Army who called a people back to God in their days, the Protestant missionary societies who re-discovered global mission in the nineteenth century.

The Order of Mission is a dispersed community of pioneers, people called to lead and influence within whatever context and culture they live and work: cities and rural areas, developed and developing countries, business, education, arts, health and social care, public and private sector, family and church. We are a people who have committed ourselves to the vows of simplicity, purity and accountability. We take ‘Lifeshapes’ as our rule or pattern of life and seek to journey together, encouraging and challenging each other, as we follow God’s call on our lives.

Click on the link above to find out more about them.