Authentic Missional Community: Me, We, Thee
Brian McLaren admits that, in his first definition of the values that need to stand at the heart of every congregation's mission, he omitted any overt reference to community. In his thinking, community should be implied in the value of making "better Christians." "Better Christians will pursue love and will thus inevitably create community" (p. 35). That's what he thought at first.
But in his later definitions, he has included a direct reference to building a community of more Christians and better Christians, acknowledging that, in modern Western culture, individuals have tended to be more valued than community. Indeed, in our culture, communal responsibility has often been portrayed as the enemy of individual freedom. And in the Church in Western culture, often "the biblical story shrank for us to little more than a simple plan describing how God would save individual souls from hell. Everything else--the environment, all human culture, even human history itself--would burn, would be lost; only individual souls would be salvaged." (p. 35).
And while I think that we Presbyterians long ago moved away from this individualistic approach to salvation, recognizing in our theology the centrality of God's promise to redeem ALL of creation, I don't know that we've always fully embraced in practice the value of authentic community. Instead, in practice, it's been more like we've felt that the community is fine as long as the community does not infringe on my personal freedom, placing demands on me, making decisions and taking stances with which I differ. As soon as it does that, we think it is perfectly fine, if not downright noble, for us to turn our backs on each other. It happens all the time in churches, and it's happening even now in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). And yet, I am reminded of a sermon I heard while I was a student in seminary. It was given by our seminary president, Dr. James McCord. And the line that I remember is this: "The greatest sin is not heresy, because that is a violation of doctrine. The greatest sin is schism, because that is a violation of love."
And so, our mssion is to build community that is authentic. That is, we are called into relationships with each other that are more deep and abiding than they ae shallow and disposable--relationships built on trust, not blackmail and power plays--relationships that are genuine, not merely convenient arrangements of the "I'll-scratch-your-back-if-you-scratch-mine" variety--relationships that are reliable enough that they remain open to the newcomer, the outsider, the stranger. We value individuals joined together into authentic community, but the community needs a focus beyond itself. Otherwise, it degenerates into nothing more than an exclusive club formed to provide religious services for its members.
The community needs to be "missional." That word is a relatively new one in the lexicon, and is very confusing. For generations, we have talked about the importance of mission, but most often we have viewed mission as one of many activities of the Church, alongside worship and Christian education, pastoral care and building maintenance. However, to value the building of a "missional" community is not the same as saying we need to spend more money on "mission"--although that could be one outcome. No, to say that we value an authentic community that is missional is to say that together we recognize that God is doing all sorts of things all around us. God has a mission dependent, not on us, but on the movement of God's Spirit, and our community is engaged in a process of continual discernment as to what part we can play in God's mission in everything we do. As we heard repeated during this past year's Mission Sunday, it's not that the Church has a mssion, but God's mission has a Church.
During February, Silver Spring sends out its ROAR (Reach Out And Rebuild) mission team, this year to help to rebuild in Smithville, Mississippi--a little town decimated by tornadoes this past spring. They will, as always, bring genuine skills and do valuable work in this rebuilding effort. But the thing that has always impressed me when talking with folks who have participated in a ROAR trip is the community that has been built between the members of the team, and between the team and the people living where they've been. With a common mission, very different folks come together. And there's a lesson in that for all of us, whether we go on a ROAR trip or not. As we share a sense of the part that we are being called to play in God's mission, very different folks come together, valuing "we" as much as "me," seeking to please Thee, Lord, more than "we."
