On Missional Living

The blog title admittedly describes a double meaning.  “Missional Living” points both toward our calling to live vocationally as missionary-pastors on the Big Island of Hawaii and in the more broad and conceptual way of living missionally.  I want to take the time to flesh out a little bit of what this broader more conceptual understanding of missional means to us and why it matters for everyday living.

Over the past 15 years, it seems the word missional is the buzzword of Christian evangelicalism on both conservative and liberal spectrums.  Its wide use across varying theologies and church models tends to confound what exactly we mean by the word missional.  Some have incorporated missional as a church growth mechanism, crafting mission and vision statements that incorporate nice language but acts cosmetically.  Like a tool, it will be laid aside when not found efficient or functional.  Still others drift into missional language to talk about social justice programs and compassionate ministry work.  The missional presence of the church is seen through outreach and service planned on a calendar and worked into our budgets.  We can serve the poor once a month, but it rarely works into friendships that interrupt our lives or carry any real transformation.  Still others describe a missional movement as a way of life, an embodied reality that points toward a complete reordering of personal, social, and political relationships.

In their book Prodigal Christianity, Fitch and Holsclaw sketch a few signposts that help guide the church into the “far country” after Christendom.  They pick up Barth’s analysis of the first Prodigal- Jesus- going into the far country incarnationally.  They write,

As opposed to the attractional model of the modern church in America, where a church puts on worship services and expects people to come, the incarnational model challenges us to be a people who inhabit neighborhoods, go where the people are, live among them and listen to them, know their hurts and their hopes. From this incarnational perspective, we are called to minister and proclaim the gospel while following the Spirit in specific circumstances. According to this approach, the incarnation of God becomes a model for entering into local cultures, a model for mission.

The Christian understands that even within God’s very self there is a giving and sharing- a Divine movement of self-giving love for another.  When we speak of God, we always speak of Trinity.  This movement of love within God overflows in creation itself.  Even more, God longs to dwell with creation.  And when the created order acts and continues to act in open rebellion against God, God continues to move toward us sending Jesus and the Spirit to reconcile the brokenness of existence and bringing it back to harmonious commune with God. 

It seems to me that imbedded within the character of God is this type of self-giving movement for the life of the world.  Theologians call this divine kenosis and point toward an early church hymn in Philippians 2 in which Jesus gives up equality with God and becomes a slave to death, for the sake of the world.  And when Jesus enters the synagogue and preaches his first sermon, he simply says that the work the God has sent him to do is to bring justice, proclaim good news to the poor, set the prisoner free, give sight to the blind, and establish just and healthy economic practices (Luke 4:18).  It sounds like God sends Christ to give birth to a new world, to establish a new pattern of living. 

So if this is God’s mission, to make things right and dwell with creation, perhaps this is how the church as the Body of Christ ought to understand itself: as a movement of self-giving love for the sake of the world.  Which brings me back to this idea of missional living.  The church has been really good at creating bad theology on a mass scale (one need only to take a trip to Barnes and Noble to understand this).  The institutional academic church has also done a really good job of creating good theology and scholarship that seems to remain cloistered in the recesses of the mind.  But the church has done a terrible job of living theologically.  Or, the church has done a terrible job of being a community in which the language and story of God interrupts our daily lives in any meaningful way. 

To put it another way, if Jesus is who he says he is (Lord) then everything changes. Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we can no longer participate in the powers and systems of this world that bring death.  But, like the Prodigal God, we still choose to enter into hopeless and broken situations so that Christ’s life may be revealed.  This is why we (my wife and I) eat a meal with our homeless neighbors, why we consciously buy our meat and produce from local farmers/friends, why we speak out against drones, the death penalty, and war, why we no longer have cable, why we pray for God’s kingdom come, why we actively seek out communities that share resources, and why it matters where we choose to live.  Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we can talk of nothing less than the total restructuring of social Christian living. 

So this blog will be a place where we share both our ministry work and our everyday life, because there isn’t much of a difference between the two.  We’d love for you to follow us, interact with us in the comment section, hear about the work we do in North and Central Kona, look at pictures of our family, find new recipes, be inspired to start your own garden, help fund us in this endeavor, and pray for us on the way.  Welcome to Missional Living.