Last week I started to write about what I’ve learned about missional living over the last two years.  You can read the first post here.

Seeking to imitate Jesus in the world by loving as He loved, I’ve learned, is the heart and soul of missional living.  It is the focus.  It is the point.

We (the Thingy) are obsessed with being the love of Christ in our communities.  In every relationship, in every encounter, in every moment of every day it is our goal to love as Jesus loved.

This is different than the institutional approach to being the church we all came from.  Instead of group activity, we emphasize individual empowerment.  We don’t build programs.  We don’t create models or strategies and recruit people to them.  We encourage and empower individuals to find their tribe (the group of people they feel the Spirit has called them to love) and serve that people wildly.

This is different than traditional relational evangelism.  In the traditional model of relational or service evangelism each interaction has an end goal in mind.  The objective is to get the person you are serving to give their lives to Christ.  The success of your relationship is based upon the amount of time it takes to accomplish that goal.  In missional living we long for people to come to Christ, but we recognize that the Spirit is working in each individual life.  It is up to the Spirit then to draw each person to Himself.  Our goal is to fully invest in each person with no regard to the end goal.  We serve passionately and love fully without concern for the end result.  We are intentional about listening for opportunities to share Jesus; but there is no pressure to push a conversation in a specific time period.

One might think this sounds like a lack of urgency on our part.  This is not true.  Our urgency is simply redirected.  Instead of looking to drive people in certain directions, we allow our urgency to leads us to intercession.  To quote John Wesley, “Nothing happens except in response to prayer.”

The strength of our approach is the lack of consumers.  We have no spectators.  Everyone is a missionary on the field.

The weakness of our approach is the loss of large group power and visibility.  In programmatic church models the larger the institution grows the more visible it becomes, the people are drawn to see what is happening, and the larger the institution grows.    Working as individuals in the field instead of in mass we lose the power of numbers.

For me though living as the church in this way is not about starting a movement or being a mega church (although I do see the potential for rapid growth from our model far beyond what is possible in an institutional setting).  For me living out this model is about calling.  This is who I feel the Lord has told us to be.  If we are faithful then the fruit of our labor is in His hands.