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So what is “missional,” anyway? Dr. Alan Roxburgh, scholar, pastor, and co-director of Allelon, “a movement of missional leaders,” began his March 6 Weber Lectures by responding to (if not answering) this inevitable question. He noted that at a recent Allelon conference, one participant said, “I’m a busy guy. If you can’t give me a clear and concise definition of this ‘missional’ thing, I won’t be sticking around for the afternoon session.” Dr. Roxburgh, in turn, asked people to develop a “clear, concise” definition of the kingdom of God based on Jesus’ sayings and parables. After a few dutiful minutes and a couple of tentative suggestions, someone blurted out, “This is ridiculous! It’s an impossible assignment.” The problem, according to Dr. Roxburgh, is that missional leadership, like Jesus ‘ invitation into the kingdom, calls for exploration, not definition. The real question is, “How do we go about constructing learning communities in the new space in which we find ourselves?”
The main problem with most theological thinking (and education), Roxburgh believes, is that it remains centered on the church, and assumes that “to define a problem clearly and then bring the best and the brightest minds to bear on it is the best way to solve it.” These assumptions lead preachers and professors to focus too much on the study and the sanctuary, and not enough on actual engagement with the world in which God is unceasingly active.
Instead of asking the usual question, “How does the church use the Bible to get into the culture, to get the culture into the church?” Dr. Roxburgh holds that we should be asking how to steep Christians in the biblical narrative in such a way that they can interact with current narratives “where they live.” “The church is only derivative of that engagement.”
This insight is especially crucial in times like these, when church and culture find themselves in an in-between place where old rules no longer apply and everything is strange and unfamiliar. The business of the theological seminary in such a period (and perhaps in every period) is not so much to turn out experts who bring preformed tools and ideas into the church as it is to develop “local poets of the biblical narrative” who can weave “God’s capacious story” into the actual circumstances of real people in particular places.
The good news is that this is the kind of creatures we were made to be. Dr. Roxburgh notes that human life is essentially ambiguous and mysterious, suspended between the spiritual and physical, the known and the unknown, even between ourselves and those mysterious “others” whom we love most deeply. And this, he argues, is precisely the place where God’s free and faithful Spirit calls us to be, in the deep trust that, in ways we cannot predict or control, we are participants in God’s own future.
– Steve Simmons, Director of Continuing Education |
