This online guide to Mission Groups from The Seekers Church is a summary that I may want to journey through on this blog as reflection/meditation on what the Church is meant to be (IMHO). As readers of this blog may well know, I have been struggling mightily with finding any local expression of the kind of community we are called to be. The conservative-leaning churches are too into the culture, baptizing various things as being “OK for God’s people” and thereby becoming virtually indistinguishable from that culture. The “Liberal/Progressive” churches are doing good things, but neglect the discipleship. It is a classic example of the issues raised in Elizabeth O’Connor’s book Journey Inward , Journey Outward, where the journey of the various “Intentional Christian Communit[ies] In the Tradition of Church of the Saviour” into the constant struggle between discipleship/community and mission are narrated via several stories of the development of their forming of that intentional community they sense God is calling them to be.
This guide is dedicated to all those whose frustrating experience with Seekers mission groups has taught us how important it is to be clear about what a mission group is and how it functions
Source: Mission Groups in Seekers Church
Such a summary is something I feel is an invaluable vision that begs for expression via the Web, as a “proposal” of sorts for a new structure that seeks to burst the bounds of cultural pressure to “do community” in “acceptable ways”; “acceptable” in the way of protecting that culture from being subverted or challenged. If we cannot perceive this as a battle for the formation of our being, then we are fair game for adopting the strategies and structures of the secular world, which have the agenda of keeping us obedient and subservient to the values of that culture. David Fitch, in his wonderful book “The Great Giveaway”, talks about many areas in which the evangelical church in America has participated in just such a “Giveaway”. Individualist and capitalist and “security” oriented, these forces keep us from the kind of discernment that is needed to recognize the call of God to something more; to something OTHER. I continue to look and listen and wonder how one who feels isolated and seemingly bound to a concept of church that seems to “lock me out” of “settling for less” (which , in numerous moments, seems a bit “standoffish” and conceited, but also keeps before me the realization that I may well be “Giving Away” that role to something that falls pitifully short of what God intends for his people, if I relent and decide to “cast my lot” in some expression that demands far less, and ends up aiding and abetting a culturally bound expression that forms us into good stewards of the culture rather than as agents of change and representatives of God’s kingdom whose life together cannot help but BE a politic. This is the TRUE God’s Politics. (And much of it finds agreement in the “platform” of the “God’s Politics Issue Guide“, and yet missing there is the path to that kind of “politic”: the “wineskin” for such a politics; the Community called by God to BE that politic, so that the world may know that is the world (hat tip on the latter point to Stanley Hauerwas).
