Rev. Joel Sherbino was once sitting in a conference. This is how he tells it: “The whole conference was based around this one question: ‘If your church were to disappear tomorrow, would anyone in the community notice or even care?’ And I think for me, that is where the rubber met the road.”
That’s a harsh question, and it led Sherbino to rethink his approach to ministry. “I’ve been minister at Paris, Ont., for almost nine years.
Previous to that I was working with International Ministries overseas in Blantyre, Malawi. For me that was really kind of where I began to get a better working practical theology. We saw people’s needs every day. The stories that Jesus taught in the gospels really hit home hard. When someone comes to your door and is literally asking for a glass of water. This is not a theological discourse, this is ‘I am thirsty,’ ‘I need a job,’ ‘I need some food.’
“And so here in Paris, we’ve started moving back into the community. We feel that church should be less about making your life busy and more about providing avenues to build your faith in whatever spheres God has placed you. And so one of the things that we’ve done is to actually pull back from developing programs and specific ministries because we want to free people up to be involved in their daily lives with their families, with their neighbours, with their communities.
“There’s an expectation that I’m not in my office, that I’m actually living this out in the community as well. I hesitate to use the word ‘organic’ because that’s just thrown onto popular phrases, but it’s just trying to be much more dynamic in terms of living out our faith in Paris, Ont., and figuring out what that looks like for us.”
Sherbino also doesn’t toss out the phrase “Missional Church” casually, perhaps because of the same caution since it has become a buzzword. But that is why I interviewed him, alongside Rev. Glen Soderholm, to talk about what it means to be a Missional Church.
If you break down what he said above, you’ll get a working definition of Missional Church: First, ‘Church should be less about making your life busy.’ That is, it is not a thing you do on the side, another thing to make you busy. Second, ‘Church is more about providing avenues to build your faith in whatever spheres God has placed you.’ Yes, that’s the key to understanding church; you’re doing church at work, at school, at the gym, at the corner store, wherever God has placed you. And so, as Sherbino says, “We want to free people up to be involved in their daily lives …”
Think also of what he said about Malawi—if a person is thirsty, that is not a metaphor, you give them a glass of water. That practical need for practical theology may be obvious to identify in Malawi; it is perhaps subtler here in Canada. Or perhaps we haven’t sought it out. Missional Church theology asks we seek it out.
I suspect many of you reading this may feel uncomfortable with that idea—to take church out onto the sidewalk, into the mall. The model of church we’re all comfortable with, and comfortable in, with our own comfortable pews and comfortable habits—is known as “Attractional.” As in, “Hey, look at us, we have good stuff for you inside our fortress.” It was a working model for many centuries dependent solely on the centrality of Christianity as one of the pillars of society.
Then stuff happened and many of those pillars, including government, family and community, lost their centrality. The stated authority given these institutions, including the church, has diffused. The reasons for this are myriad and complicated as historians, sociologists and others study the details. And while the rubble continues to be examined we know this with certainty: That very authority must now be earned by those very institutions. Whatever the values were that defined our society have now disintegrated into competing ideologies.
Missional Church theory argues that the Attractional Model, the very thing of Christendom itself for which many are still deeply nostalgic, sought to bring glory to the Church and not to God. Darrell Guder, in his book The Continuing Conversion of the Church, argues that the word ‘mission’ as used by North American churches in the last century “basically meant the Western expansion of its own culturally conformed Christianity.” He writes of the word ‘evangelism:’ “All assumed that the Western missionary brought the correct understanding of the gospel to the non-believing culture …”
Guder is the senior fellow at the Centre for Missional Leadership at St. Andrew’s Hall, Vancouver. He is also professor emeritus at Princeton Theological College and is considered the one who kickstarted the Missional Church movement. His theologically rich arguments upend common clichés about church. He challenges us to think of church outside our comfort zones. (He edited Missional Church, generally regarded as the book that started the movement. It includes a very good history of the creation of Modernity.)
In Continuing Conversion, Guder quotes Karl Barth: “God is a missionary God. Mission is thereby seen as a movement from God to the world: the church is viewed as an instrument for that mission. … There is church because there is mission, not vice versa. … Such an understanding of mission moves the subject far beyond the level of program or method. It disallows any definition of mission that makes it a sub-topic of church.”
And that is why Joel Sherbino is careful to separate it from programming. “Church programs,” the thing we’ve been doing and funding for decades, is passive. It is what we do inside our walls, asking others to come to us.
The Missional Church demands something much more active. That we break down our walls and go into the world—keeping in mind Guder’s provisos that it is God’s mission not the church’s we are doing.
This for me, at least, is where things get confusing: In my half century I have been trained to think of church as God. That the Church is the mission of God; the Bride of Christ with all the complicated metaphorical attachments.
A single line in all my reading and research and interviews helped me to understand. It appears in Missional Church: “In Jesus the reign of God has become present.” And the next line: “In his actions and resurrection he demonstrates that God is acting incarnationally to redeem and renew creation.” God is in the flesh, through Jesus renewing humanity.
Now I am in that photograph—or as Sherbino said, trying to figure out what it looks like for me. And you are in that picture as well working in your sphere. We are not mediated through the church; Jesus is with us.
I’ll be honest—this still scares me. I’ve got a lot of cultural learning to unlearn.
Rev. Glen Soderholm and Sherbino meet regularly over lunch to talk basketball and church. Where Sherbino is guiding an established congregation towards a missional model, Soderholm is starting a new church, Two Rivers, Guelph, Ont., within the new model.
A quarter-century minister in the Presbyterian Church in Canada, Soderholm is known to many as a singer-songwriter. Two Rivers is a calling he had several years ago. There is no church building. No administrative office. He started it by hanging out in public spaces, coffee shops, let’s say, and talking to people. He met people where they were. He invited them into his home, into each other’s homes. He met them playing sports. Not all of them are Christians, not all of them are even spiritual. But they meet, and talk.
He tells a story that illustrates some profound ideas:
“We had a woman participating in our community who was not a follower of Christ and she was sort of catching onto this. She had gone down to the river with her two dogs and was describing how the dogs had been splashing around in the water on this beautiful sunny day. And she was talking about how she had seen the light refracted through the droplets of water and just the beauty of that moved her and then she stopped.
“And we all kind of went, yeah, exactly, that’s it. Where have you felt most fully human this week in pain or brokenness? And can we share those things together and help people to start to have their eyes open to those moments, those experiences of God?
“That to me is a picture of the reign of God at work in our lives. And the more people become aware of those things; I think we’re doing our job. I think that people will hopefully begin to understand that they are participating in something that is bigger than themselves and beyond them. And of course we know who that is, we know what that is, we call it the Triune God of Grace, the love of God shown to us in Christ.”
In unpacking this story, we first, and most importantly, see that God spoke to a person. And the person didn’t necessarily know that God had spoken to her. But, luckily, she was part of a community that could help her discern what she had experienced.
God speaks all the time. We don’t always hear or see or understand.
To do that, to discern what God is doing, we need to make an effort that requires us walking outside of the comfort of our church buildings and into public spaces.
Read Soderholm’s story one more time. Think about it. Have a beverage, do a chore, go for a walk. Meditate on those questions in the middle—where have you felt most human recently, and do you recognize that as a God moment? And, where can you share that?
Or think of it this way: What if your church had no walls? What if you did church in a coffee shop? How comfortable would you feel?
But it’s not about comfort, is it? Church was never meant to be about comfort. It became about comfort.
I heard a talk on the Missional Church in Vancouver several years ago. It sounded good and interesting but went over my head, perhaps because I was uncomfortable with what I heard. When that same speaker gave the same talk again last year at St. Andrew’s Hall, Vancouver, in the days before General Assembly, I arrived early to hear it again.
Alan Roxburgh contributed to Missional Church, the book Guder edited. He has been at the forefront of this movement. In his pre-GA talk he said, “Discern what God is up to in your neighbourhood. The reason I use the word ‘discern’ is because this is not a strategic plan, not a needs assessment of a community. It’s not even an asset assessment of a community. Lay those things down. They’re barriers to doing the discerning. You don’t need demographics to tell you what’s going on in the neighbourhood. Discern what God might be up to and out of it create an experiment.”
Near the end of his presentation, Alan Roxburgh had the congregation break into small groups and read Luke 10:1-24. (So, go take a moment and read it now.)
After a lengthy period of reading and discussing the text in our groups and then as a whole, Roxburgh commissioned us:
“The harvest is not a metaphor for evangelism. Jesus is literally standing in the midst of fields that need to be harvested and there is a huge literal harvest and not enough people to take it in. Jesus is saying to them, ‘Go to the towns and villages, become part of the households in taking in the harvest.’ In other words: If you want to know what God is up to, you’ve got to become a part of the neighbourhood. You’ve got to dwell and become part of the way of life.
“Here is the other fun part. Why the instruction, ‘Eat what is set before you?’ The clue is, they’ve been sent to Galilee of the Gentiles. So, what’s gonna happen? They’re gonna be given pork, lobsters … This text turns upside down many of our preconceptions. We’re always thinking, ‘What’s the strategy, what’s the program to go out and get people to come in?'”
This helps me cut through a lot of clutter: Dwell, work the vineyards, be with God. The vineyard is right outside the comfortable buildings and it is ripe for harvest. We must harvest it. But it will not be easy because our preconceptions will be challenged.
So simple.
