ONE PASTOR COMMENDS 'RETREATING' IN ORDER TO IMAGINE...

Jim Street pastors North River Community Church, in Lawrenceville, Georgia.  The congregation represents some fifty households.  After watching Michael Frost on YouTube, Street decided to do something unusual: he took a one-day retreat originally slated for the church’s leadership and opened it up for the whole congregation.  Not insignificantly, nearly half of the congregation took part in a day organized entirely around Frost’s two presentations at the 2007 PGF conference. 

“The Missional Imagination,” (as the retreat was called) was not an effort to “come to any conclusions or create a five-point strategy,” as Street recalls.  “Rather it was to open up our minds to other ways of seeing God, ourselves and our neighbor that are more faithful to the intentions and purposes of God.” Here Street shares what he learned from the experience…

“I would say three major "learnings" came from the retreat.

First, I think many of those present began to see how conceptions of the nature of God are not simply abstract theological formulations but have real bearing on how we live our lives.  As I wrote before, the ‘temple’ view of God draws us to a building where worship (as a particular service rather than a way of life) is paramount.  (This, of course, has tremendous implications for seeing ourselves in ‘attractional’ terms.)  And, the ‘God-as-friend-and-companion’ view is comforting (and true as far as it goes) but does not challenge us in any way.  I think several folks began to see that if we see the ‘missio dei’ (or ‘mission of God’) as essential to God's character, then we must ourselves be engaged in the search and the finding of those who are lost, hurting and overlooked.

Second, I think many of us developed a deeper sense of the centrality of mission in the life of the church.  Many of the folks gathered had never conceived of the church in any other way than as essentially and necessarily ‘attractional.’  ‘We need bigger and better bells and whistles to get people (i.e. disgruntled sheep from other pastures) into our building.’  Folks are seeing that our primary obligation is to be out in the fields that are "white unto harvest" and out there in all humility...more ear than mouth, more hand than tongue.

Third, and I think this was huge for a few people, folks began to see the barriers that we Christians can erect between ourselves and those who are not believers.   Implicit in the temple model and the attractional process is the idea that others need to come to where we are and get cleaned up so they can be more like us.   Frost's presentation of the ‘imago dei’ (‘image of God’) really touched some folks and left them feeling freed up to see even non-believers as sharing some important things in common with believers...we are all broken yet created in the image of God…

…One of the outcomes of the retreat was that one of our small groups (all of the members of that group were at the retreat) began a study of Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline using the new DVD package that is associated with that book.  They clearly saw that this missional way of understanding requires a more serious commitment to spiritual formation/discipleship."

To request a copy of the curriculum that Street and his congregation used in their retreat, "The Missional Imagination," contact Street directly at jimstreetblog@yahoo.com.

 

Comments

[Bill McReynolds]

Does this mean that a missional understanding requires a reaching in before there can be a reaching out? If so, what is to keep a congregation from becoming comfortable with the inward focused part, never to turn outward? Isn't that, after all, one of the Church's problems already?