This little essay is far from a “Best Practices of a Mission Developer”.  There are hundreds of “how to” church planting books out there, but rarely will they speak of the life lived between the expanse of best and worst practices.  So here’s a few reflections from ‘the expanse’.

Three years ago, when Church of the Beloved was just an ameba, the statistics available to us concerning the North American Church and specifically the ELCA did not look promising:

> 18-34 year olds made up only %8 of the ELCA, while the same demographic of 18-34 year olds made up more than a quarter of the USA.

> More specifically, 25-29 year olds in the ELCA were outnumbered by 85-89 year olds.

The people who had been tracking these numbers initially thought, “The kids will come back once they have children.  Just wait and see.”  And they waited, but they didn’t see.  At least not what they expected.

When we hear of these dire sounding statistics there is an tendency to ask:

…How do we make church cool for young people?

…How do we make church relevant to people who don’t care about God?

Essentially, we fall into the trap of asking, “How do we get people to want something that apparently they don’t want?”  And then spend our energies on packaging a ‘cool church’, a ‘relevant church’, a ‘new’ kind of church,

and miss the real content – which is the Good News of Jesus Christ.  The last thing the world needs is another church trying to be cool, what we need is the Word of Good News spoken in the language of our hearts.

So let us work to be always even clearer about this:

The Church is what’s born when the Spirit of God claims people as God’s Beloved by the proclaiming of Christ crucified ‘for you’.

I always get confused about which is which, so I try to remember how Luther distinguished between the “seed” of the Church and the “fruit” of the Church.  The Seed is the proclamation of the Gospel, and when this Gospel is proclaimed, when this seed is planted, it blossoms into all kinds of fruits:

Like feeding the hungry, befriending the lonely, dignifying all humans, giving access to medicines to people who are suffering, and saying “No” to injustice.  As well as saying “Yes” to beauty, to creating, singing, painting, and community… the number of fruit that comes from the Gospel is as varied as there are people.

But when I get mixed up is when I start to see myself and my community as centered around the fruit rather than the seed.  When we start thinking of ourselves as a social service, or an artist colony, or a country club, or anything else other than a Gospel community united by a common grace in Jesus Christ, in whom there is neither Jew nor Greek (no longer an ethnic division), in whom there is neither slave nor free (no longer an economic division), in whom there is neither male nor female (no longer a gender division), and in whom there is neither insiders nor outsiders (no longer status division), because Jesus is our peace, who has destroyed all these hostile divisions between us and reconciled us to God through the cross (that almost sounds biblical).

Here, in this seed, in the promise that says “you are forgiven”, in the bread that says, “me given for you”,

in the waters that say, “Beloved, you are my child”, we don’t simply learn about the mission of God, we experience the Missional God and become the subject of God’s mission.  Then, something amazing happens… something ‘fruitful’ – because of the cross of Jesus, new imagination sparks within us and we discover how God might be redeeming the darkest parts of our stories, giving ’reason to be’ to our little lives and imbuing the most mundane tasks with meaning and partnership in God’s mission in the world.

Therefore mission development comes from only one source, one impulse: The Galaxy Creator, who forever and inextricably became one with us in Jesus, God in humble flesh in a unique moment in time and history, in an exact place and location, in a specific culture and people.  So context actually does matter.  Particularity matters.  Even ‘style’ matters.   While the mission of God isn’t cool nor subject to the fleeting fads of culture, it does find an expression within an indigenous community, because it cares deeply about communicating in the right-now moment of people’s lives.  And that means that the expression will always be transitory… sorry King James Version.  But it should also be said that the world is too sophisticated to be baited.  Nobody wants grandma to dye her hair pink to try and connect with younger generations.  Not grandma nor her punk rock grand-daughter.  Phony imitation can be smelled a mile a way.  It’s best for us all to be stay true to ourselves… even punk rockers need real grandmas.

Let’s trust the Gospel to make room in us in order to hold space open for everyone at Christ’s table.

Okay… now here’s the down and dirty confession… read more.

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