9. The missional community doesn’t do evangelism.
I think there are two realities to this. First, the reality is that in the last 20-30 years, we’ve seen a lot of evangelism done very poorly and through a lot of manipulation. Because of this, we have a generation or two of people who are very leery of actually sharing the Good News of the Kingdom and make it easy for people to step into discipleship who don’t know Jesus. Timid would probably be the key word. What we’ve done is jump from ditch to ditch. There are some major soteriological issues at play here, but I’ll just hop on one in particular by summarizing some thoughts by Dallas Willard. He says two things that I think are really helpful as we think about “evangelizing” people:
- The point isn’t to get people into heaven after they die, but to get people into heaven before they die. (The point of the Good News is that the Kingdom is available now. You don’t have to wait!)
- If that’s true, evangelism isn’t really about getting people into heaven after they die, but getting them before they die. (Which means if we aren’t evangelizing people toward discipleship rather than heaven, we’ve completely missed Jesus’ message.)
What we understand is that the Kingdom is exactly what Jesus said it was: available to us now. That means that the sin, pain, sadness, shame, brokeness, injustice and isolation that affects all of us, that all of us live in and out of each and every day, God can bring life to that today. Discipleship is the process of living in the Kingdom more and more each day while we are on earth. While we should be concerned about people being with us and Jesus for all eternity, it says something about us if we don’t really care about getting people out of the hell they are currently living in.
10. The missional community doesn’t engage with the supernatural.
I don’t think I’ll ever be accused of being a wild “charismatic,” but I’m not going to beat around the bush: If your group is not very good at praying (yes, I’m implicitly saying you can be bad at prayer in the same way you can be bad at tennis—it’s something you can learn to do better over time—in the same way you can improve communication habits with your spouse over time, you can improve your prayer life with your Father) or listening to the voice of God and responding or engaging with the presence, power and leading of the Holy Spirit, your missional community is pretty much done. Don’t believe me? Try to imagine the early church not only surviving, but thriving without the Holy Spirit on the forefront.
Prayer isn’t a box you check. Does your missional community actually believe you can do nothing without God’s leading? When your missional community prays, do things happen? I’m not saying things always happen like you envisioned them, but are things different in heaven and on earth because of the prayer life your family on mission is tethered to?
11. Bonus: Not every missional community makes it.
And that’s OK, even if you attended to all of the things listed above. Paul failed as much as he succeeded. So if it doesn’t make it, learn from what happened, grab a season of rest, listen for fresh vision from the Holy Spirit, and have another go at it!
