Conversations and Reflections on the Missional Order

Conversations and Reflections on the Missional Order

Its been gratifying to receive email from friends all over the world asking about our missional order gathering this October. I sense we are hearing something from the Spirit we must attend to as a movement. Earlier this month I was in Winnipeg with a group of church leaders for an evening. I delighted with new friends [Brother Maynard] and Jamie Arpin-Ricci who directs YWAM in the Manitoba region. As we talked about Allelon our conversation turned to the missional order. [Brother Maynard] wanted to hear more about the ‘why’ of the order. As we sat in a Perkins restaurant over breakfast and lousy coffee I reflected over some of the factors drawing me to this conviction that we need a missional order. I want to share some of these convictions here hoping that as others ask the why question you’ll get a sense of what is shaping our hearts.

Travels in the rural landscape of Lincolnshire.
In May, Bill Kinnon and I were in the UK visiting a number of contexts where mission shaped life was bubbling up among ordinary people in fresh expressions of Christian witness. Martin Robinson guided us to a wonderful, serendipitous encounter in rural England with Pete and Cath Atkins. This amazing couple is part of a band of folk re-imagining the shape of church life in rural England. Their stories are amazing testimony to the ways the Spirit calls forth fresh imagination among the people of God is a non-clergy led movement of mission. Pete is a medical doctor. He and Cath moved to Lincolnshire from the South many years ago and settled into this northeastern part of England, making it their home. They both have gone deep into the life of this land and its people. Over the years God has shaped and called them into seeing fresh ways of forming church in the context of small villages and towns. Peter now works two days a week in the medical practice and devotes the rest of his time with Cath to cultivating Christian communities across the county from the ‘Humber to the Wash’. It’s a beautiful story of God’s amazing people that we will report on in another edition of this journal.

The piece I want to share here comes out of the ways Peter pitched his tent in this Lincolnshire world with its rich Christian history. Late in the day we spent together he drove up to a tiny, unpaved laneway we would hardly call a road. He wanted to show us a place where he often came, alone, to pray. We drove the very narrow road in the midst of fields whose grass crop where now three or four feet high. We stopped at an even narrower cross-path. Pete pointed out of the right side of the car. Up the path some hundred yards or so stood a small Anglican church. It was a strange place, it seemed, because it stood alone in the midst of fields. It was once an active church but is now closed, Pete told us. Then he turned and pointed out the left side of the car window. His finger directed us toward a clump of trees some half to three quarters of a mile away. ‘Over there’ Pete told us, ‘just between those clumps, there once stood an active monastery. Each day, the Abbess would walk from the monastery across these fields and spend her morning in the little prayer building upon which the church is now built.’ This was going on around the 11 th and 12th centuries. I asked if we could walk up to the church to see it a little more closely. I wanted to catch some sense of what that must have been like to make this trek each day to spend those hours in prayer for the mission of God in this county. It was then that Peter told us that he regularly walks from home to this place to spend hours alone in prayer around the vision of planting thousands of vibrant Christian communities in villages and towns from the Humber to the Wash. There are rhythms of life going on here in God’s time that are far bigger and more of a mystery than all of our strategies and tactics.

As we walked toward the building Peter described the land about us. From the perspective of two outside strangers from North America we were walking up a narrow pathway between fields of growing spring grass toward an ancient building now closed off because people no longer came to see it as an important part of their busy lives. But here, some eight or nine hundred years ago, a woman who had oversight of a monastic community would walk every day to pray for the people of this land. Now we were walking with a man who did that in this very same place. Then, in the midst of the pathway, between the car and the church building, Peter continued to share out of the wealth of his dwelling in this land and among these people. ‘In these fields, all about us, right here, there once stood a medieval village that thrived in the 11th and 12th centuries. In the winter when the fields are in fallow one can fly over these fields and see the outlines of the village just beneath surface.’

I stopped in wonder! Not because I’m a North American whose eyes are constantly popped out with another bit of European or British history. I was born and grew up in this world so this wasn’t the reason. My wonder was about memory. I remembered that all over England and Europe during and after the so-called Dark Ages, Christians came together in monastery’s like the one Peter had pointed out under the direction and oversight of an Abbot or Abbess to form Christian social life for the sake of the people’s and the places where they lived. Around these monastic communities shaped by intentional rhythms of life and practices of Christian life villages and then towns sprung up under the care and shaping of these Christian missionaries who took a vow not to travel far from their place of belonging but instead to pitch their tent and dwell in a place. I was sensing in the midst of this field something God had done all over Europe and the British Isles long ago and I was imagining what all this might be saying about our vocation as God’s people today.

I have this sense that God is calling us to move into neighborhoods in cities, towns and villages to quietly form Christian life around a Rule of Life and a set of practices. The formation of a missional order, a band of people moving back into the neighborhood for the sake of the people, place and future of where they live. So I imagine that perhaps, in this simple and unpretentious way God might be wanting to give life and meaning back to the suburbs, inner cities, condo towers and gated housing projects where people are warehoused, commodified and so deeply, crushingly abandoned and alone in a culture shaped by spending and buying. I’m convinced that the only way we can discover and sustain this kind of mission-shaped life is through the formation of some kind of order.

Discoveries in leadership formation

Over the last ten years I’ve been honored to work with a wide variety of churches and their leaders across three continents looking at questions of missional change and leadership formation. I’ve witnessed a growing number of programs aimed at cultivating missional life in local churches and showing leaders how to go about the process.

Some of these programs are pretty thin stuff - they demand little and promise change through a set of techniques used for a relatively brief period of time. But others are well thought through processes of change that make no bones about the hard work required over an extended period of time. In fact, one of the common learning experiences I have come to along with other colleagues is that this whole process of missional innovation is a long journey requiring commitment and discipline over the long haul. There are no easy fixes, no set of courses that make it all easy. Like some of the recent diet book plans found on the bookshelves, growing numbers of leaders are aware that missional change is not primarily about techniques and programs. It’s about culture or worldview change.

The question is: How does this kind of disciplined culture change occur? What makes the question so pressing is that even in the best training processes out there good leaders find it hard to stay with the journey over the long haul. This has forced some of us to ask about the factors and qualities that are common to those leaders who persevere. In brief, there doesn’t seem to be a list of leadership ‘indicators’ or best practices which, if followed, tend toward sustaining leaders over the long journey of culture change. But there is one element that does seem common to those leaders who sustain themselves on the way - they are rooted in some form of regular spiritual practices. This is the one factor that remains consistent.

Alongside this finding I would lay another. In our work with a great number of congregations we constantly discover two factors at work. First, people inside local churches are increasingly aware that formation must be at the center of Christian life. Second, they generally have no patterns, models or examples of how to go about the processes of things like the daily office or the practice of hospitality. Thirdly, pastors and other church leaders have taken some form of training in spiritual practices but, finally, the vast majority of church leaders have no daily form of Christian practice or formation in their own lives.

Just when formation in Christian practices is being recognized as an essential element for missional formation in local churches, a majority of local leaders have little sense of how to do this for themselves let alone lead their people in this way. And yet there is a hunger among leaders to discover again the ancient ways of formation. Conversations with leaders of the Northumbria Community more than a year ago revealed that increasing numbers of church leaders across the UK are entering into this ancient, well practiced way of the church. These practices of Christian life cross the boundaries of organized and ‘organic’ notions of church. The formation of an order provides the opportunity for many of us to move past the ideological divides so characteristic of recent conversations about the church and risk learning together about the way of formation for the sake of the church. It is this desire to invite leaders of all kinds to experiment together around a simple rule of life that lies at the basis of our desire to call leaders together to look at the form of such an order.

Welcoming the Stranger
This one is difficult to articulate in a few brief paragraphs. I spent almost twenty-seven years in a denomination. I thought I ‘belonged’ to the tribe over that time. In recent years I was in situations where I realized that if you didn’t fit the narrative a process of exclusion ensued. None of it was out loud or direct but, nevertheless, it happened. The details don’t matter as much as the kind of questions that began to form for me. I wondered what kind of tribe had I belonged too for so many years that could so easily exclude? What are the actual, operative theologies at work among such a group (theologies that I had shared in one form or another)? But much more critically, what is the understanding of God and the other that permeates a Christian narrative that can easily put the other outside? These questions took me to reading again some of the church Fathers, Benedict, and a 20th century Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas who was addressing the question of the Holocaust and otherness in modern Western societies. It was from a new understanding that in Jesus and the Trinity difference lies at the heart of God’s nature and creation that I have had to rethink not just my theology but my practices and responses to others. Out of this journey I have learned that to welcome the stranger (even the ones in our midst as tribes - and if we can’t do that what can be our basis for Christian witness?) requires a community of men and women shaped around a rule of life. One in which welcoming the other and practicing hospitality lies at the core. I believe this is a vision for a church wanting to become missional in our time.

Living Local
One of the themes you will pick up from Allelon as we seek to understand the ways of forming a multi-generational network of missional leaders is the call to re-enter neighborhoods and go local. We are compelled by the imagination of the Gospels were we are told that God came and pitched its tent beside ours in Jesus. We believe there is a deep call to re-enter neighborhoods. In the manner of Luke 10: 1-12, we are sensing that in the suburbs, cities and towns we are being asked to participate in a movement that vulnerably lives in, among, beside, for and with the other in our neighborhoods. We believe that answers to the questions of what God is up to in our time and what churches need to look like can only be answered from those willing to risk leaving behind their baggage (no bag, no cloak, no extra sandals) and entering the hospitality of the other. We are also convinced that this shift in imagination and practice calls for a missional order that seeks to intentionally live out of a rule of life.

These are some of the experiences, learning and imagination forming our call. We invite you to interact with us around these and other ideas.

Al Roxburgh

Afgelaai op 30 Oktober 2007 by