Chapter 22: Eccesial Imagination
Incarnational Kingdom
We need a little more imagination.
If we step into a new culture, we ask the question, “What will it look like for discipleship to take root here?” We begin to explore how a fresh expression of the church may emerge in that context. That is, one that is faithful to the gospel and congruent with the local culture.
In North America, most already operate in an inherited default mode when it comes to the forms and expressions of the church. To apply a missionary lens, we are going to need to have some ecclesial imagination. The culture has experienced seismic shifts. That does not mean abandoning the gospel. However, it does mean meeting people where they are — as the gospel has always operated — rather than where we simply want them to be.
Despite our default mode when it comes to forming church, there are a variety of expressions of shared discipleship as the church. Dinner church, for example, centers the worship experience around hospitality and a shared meal. Various expressions of house church frames the church body as a family-like experience. Third place experiences, such as pub church, brings the experience of the church body into public space where community & witness merge. To be clear, nothing mentioned here is a plug-in-play suggestion. Rather we must begin with the gospel, understand our context, and respond to it as a faithful witness. Those examples are all small group type of expressions, and as we’ve explored, small faith communities that can multiply are a core strategy for reaching a large popuation in many different mission contexts. However, a friend serving as a pastor of a church might ask, “what about preaching & teaching?”
Preaching & teaching on a Sunday morning can have a profound impact, but it helps to recognize we have stepped into an information age. Adding more content to an already flooded zone, highlights the challenges for proclaimation & instruction in the information age. If discipleship is the outcome we’re reaching for, then that is a filter we should apply as we adapt to our contemporary challenges. Teaching pastors are tasked with not only delivering content (that is, the gospel story), but the crucible for discipleship in a zone flooded with information is how to engage content and continue living the right narrative. Those most successful at creating content online understand that engagement is a key metric.
What if a church arranged its meeting space in groups, delivered a teaching block in a Ted Talk fashion, provided discussion questions for the groups to engage the content, listened carefully, and then delivered a conclusion & call to action based on the engagement experience in the groups?
What if a church utilized technology to enlist questions that could be selected & addressed following a block of teaching?
What if a church sent out content during the week ahead of Sunday morning and utilized the teaching time on Sunday morning for reviewing & engaging it together and helping the members of the church move towards practical application?
None of these thoughts are intended as plug-&-play solutions. Rather I hope to unleash our imaginations for meeting the world as it is with the reality of the gospel of Christ.
Is church limited to Sunday morning? As I was writing Crossroads of the Nations several years ago, I interviewed the pastor of a church serving a Chinese immigrant community in a large gateway city. The community they served worked outside of standard 9-5 hours. They hosted multiple services on Sunday and services on weekdays in the middle of the day (but would be the beginning of the day for someone who worked late night at a restaurant). They also planned worship services in three different languages, and as people moved from that gateway city to other parts of the country, they hosted a bible study through a cell phone radio channel on multiple days of the week. They saw their mission as reaching a specific community of people, and they met that community by adapting to the real circumstances and contexts that impacted people’s lives.
To apply a missionary lens in North America, it will call us to practice some ecclesial imagination. Some responses we might call “traditional" while others may feel very new & different. It’s okay. God has a diverse portfolio. Each ministry context may be a little different, so the task is not to simply copy someone else — though there may be some great ideas to incorporate as we learn from others. We must ask, how do we communicate the gospel to this community? How is discipleship formed in this particular context? What does it look like for Christian community to emerge?
May we seek the Spirit to inspire our imaginations for the Kingdom of God to be unleashed in a moment in history.