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 The Missional Renaissance Is Upon UsAn interview with Reggie McNeal
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Reggie McNeal's new book, Missional Renaissance, calls for a new alignment of evangelical Protestantism with Christ's mission to restore creation. McNeal writes about how local churches should reorient toward having an impact on society. He praises the recent phenomenon of "missional communities"—small groups with a dedicated purpose—springing up to address particular social ills. He claims that what's happening today in the church may change the institution as much as the Reformation. I recently had a chance to speak with him about his book and the "missional movement" of which he is a prominent leader. Why does the church need to concentrate more on mission or becoming "missional"? Hasn't the church always been missional by nature? The term "missional church" would indeed be redundant if the church knew its mission. We have thought we were about building the church and inviting people to participate in it as the doorway into the kingdom of God. That is, we've thought that the church had a mission. The truth is that God's mission has a church. It's his mission, not ours. The work of the church comes out of God's redemptive mission in the world. What are the three major developments that need to take place in order for the church to undergo the missional transformation you are advocating? First, we must move from an internal to an external focus. The church does not exist for itself. When it thinks it does, we've created a church-centric world. Our perception of reality is skewed. By external focus of ministry I mean we radically reorient to understand that we exist primarily to do ministry beyond ourselves. Second, we need to move from a program-driven agenda to a people-development agenda. Over time, the North American church has largely become a collection of programs run by staff or lay leaders. While we will certainly continue to have these programs, I believe a new, people-development agenda will base its sense of accomplishment on how well its people are doing, not its programs. If you start with people, the programs then serve the people, not the other way around. The third shift is really a leadership response to the other two. It will require that leaders move from a maintenance or institutional model of leadership to a personal model—a "movement model" of leadership. Leading a movement is very different from leading an organization. Christianity was largely a street movement in its early days, when it turned the world on its head. Once we institutionalized it and put it into the hands of the clergy to run, then we lost the virility of that movement. It became all about institutional management. We have to return to the kind of leadership that's required in leading a street movement, if we're going to recapture that energy. |        
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