Home Outreach Leaders Articles for Outreach & Missions The Unintended Consequences of Missional

The Unintended Consequences of Missional

In principle, leading a church in a missional direction should be straightforward.

1. Find out which activities and programs help people who aren’t Christians encounter God, and which ones don’t.

2. Stop doing all the things that don’t help.

3. Invest all your time and resources into the things that do.

4. Sit back and enjoy the results.

Boomtown.

In practice, things are not so simple, in large part because of the law of unintended consequences. People are complex; groups of people are more so; churches, which are comprised of lots of highly diverse individuals and groups within them, are almost unimaginably intricate.

You make a decision here, and three years later it comes back to bite you in a completely different department. You flap your wings over here, and there’s a hurricane over there a few weeks later.

Church life, made up as it is of a huge number of interactions between mentally, emotionally and spiritually complex creatures, is full of unintended consequences.

Here are a couple of highly overdrawn examples.

A local church, seized by a passion to reach unchurched children and their families with the gospel—after all, building children is easier than fixing adults—starts a series of Kidz Klubs in local council estates.

It invests significant financial and volunteer resources in a relatively intensive program over many years, with buses going out into the estates every week, regular home visits, a team of 50 people, including many teenagers, and a consistently high profile in the church at large.

But over time, it is noticed that for all the good work being done, very few children and families are becoming Christians through the program. Hundreds of children come, but few stick past the age of 11, and of those that do, many fade away as teenagers because their families continue as they always have.

As a result, after much soul-searching and with considerable sadness, it is decided to end the initiative, and redeploy the money and the volunteers elsewhere, especially into their newly attractional (and missional) Sunday meetings.

The church doubles in attendance over the next five years.

But there are unintended consequences.