Becoming Missionaries in Our Own Land
Written by Clark Cowden, Executive Presbyter, San Diego Presbytery   
Monday, 16 June 2008 00:00
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clark_cowden.gifTwo decades ago, Lesslie Newbigin asked the question, “Can we have a genuine missionary encounter with our own culture?” This question began a conversation which launched what we call the missional movement.

Presbyterians effectively ministered to the Christendom culture of North America 50 years ago. But today, now that the sands have shifted, we find ourselves struggling to relate to a post-Christian culture.

Change that used to happen slowly and predictably, now takes place rapidly, discontinuously, and haphazardly. Stuck in the old mold, we still train pastors on what to do with people when they come to church, even though most people won’t come to us anymore. But our pastors can no longer be chaplains to a Christian culture. We must be a missionary people in our own land. We must move from a mindset that the church is a provider of religious goods and services for Christian consumers to the shaper of an apostolic people on a mission to a fallen world.

So, how will this begin to happen? It will not happen top-down. It will not come from a pronouncement from a hierarchy. It will begin with people on the edges of a flattened, networked world.

It will be “edgy”. It will begin in congregations. It flows out of the spiritual disciplines practiced in the church for ages. We need to develop habits and practices of dwelling in the Word and allowing God to speak to us through it. It will take a long time. It will not happen quickly. We don’t begin the process with answers, the answers emerge as we walk the missional path together.

It happens through dialogue and conversation in community. Our “rugged American individualism” will never discover it. We need each other. We need to be humble enough to say “I don’t know” and “What can I learn from you?” The dialogue is created from the question “What is God already doing in our community and where is God calling us to join that work?”

When we have some ideas on what God is up to in our communities, then we begin to create experiments in mission as we seek to move back into our neighborhoods. We give ourselves the freedom to fail. We learn from every attempt we make.

It will probably not happen without the assistance of an outside change agent to guide the process. Those of us inside the system have too many biases and blind spots to guide it effectively.

We need training and coaching from groups like Allelon (see www.allelon.org) who are on the cutting edge of missional change processes. Scripture gives us stories of God showing up in the most God-forsaken places. Scripture describes a God who surprises us, who calls people we would never call, who works in communities we would never enter, with a mission that we would never guess.

God is up to some mischief in our denomination. Over the next 20 years, it will be exciting to see what this is.

Clark Cowden, former Executive Presbyter of San Joaquin Presbytery, is now Executive Presbyter of San Diego Presbytery. His writings have helped shape the missional movement in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
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