Welcome to the third instalment of our what we do blog series. The purpose of these posts is to set out our four part framework for our ‘mission’… in other words, the stuff we’re meant to focus on as a church. So far we’ve discussed worship and discipleship, this time we’re looking at mission.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it
If I say the word ‘mission’ (in a church context!) what comes to mind?
Usually we think about mission we think serving the poor, going overseas, loving the needy, and so on. These of course are missional activities, but mission is much larger than church programs.
Mission, when we zoom all the way out, is the sum total of everything that God is doing to bring about his Kingdom here on earth. It’s not so much that the church has a mission, rather, the mission has a church. And the church is not an institution – it’s a people!
So if we (both ‘the church’, and us as individuals) play a part in God’s mission, what do we actually do? As in—when we wake up on a Monday morning, how do we go about participating in God’s mission?
It would be tempting to think becoming missional means totally upending our lives to go and do something radical and classically ‘missional’. Move to Africa, start a soup kitchen, maybe work for an NGO. These are all great things. And after all, many of the people we read about in scripture upended their lives in response to God. But can you imagine if everyone in the church did this?
I think for most of us, the radical response to the salvation we have in Jesus is not so much about where we go, or what we do, but how we do it. A more complete vision for Christian mission looks like living as Christ’s ambassadors wherever and with whomever we find ourselves. Whether that be the schoolyard, office, gym, family, or university, we’re given the task of creatively representing the love and goodness of Jesus to those around us.
Of course, there is tremendous value in serving together as a church too. We’re not trying to discount this, and we will continue to actively look for missional things we can do together. The point is, if we’re doing a good job of discipleship (which you can read about here), the overflow is a community full of people who all have a strongly developed sense of personal mission.
After all, serving the kingdom is not the same as serving the church.
A missional vision for TVC
Someone once asked me a cracker of a question… if your church disbanded tomorrow, would anyone outside the church notice?
The slightly flawed premise of this question assumes that serving the people in the church isn’t a huge part of what we’re here to do. However, that aside, it does pick up on the fact that as the church, we need to have a meaningful impact beyond our own proverbial walls.
From the section above, it should be clear that our primary emphasis is on producing missional people. We don’t necessarily need the TVC name attached to what TVC people do.
Yet we do feel it’s important to bring a coordinated missional effort to bless our city.
One thing we have been pondering is the long-term origins of many of the social problems that currently face our city. If you think about youth crime, homelessness, or poverty, and wind the clock back 10-15 years, you get broken family of origin almost every time. There are a number of wonderful services (many run by the church) in Toowoomba that address these issues imminently. But is there a way to cut them off upstream?
We’d like to think part of the answer is education. Life education around things like marriage, parenting, finances, and conflict resolution have a huge potential. What if, as a church, we used our resources to bring this kind of education, which is so often left out of schooling? What if, rather than invest our money in a meeting space we use once a week, we created a community space where we can reach people the other six days a week?
These are big thoughts, and well beyond our current means. Yet it’s absolutely possible to start small and see where God leads us.
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Do you have thoughts? Feel free to drop them in the comments below. If you’d like to follow along with this blog series, you can subscribe to our ‘almost weekly’ email here.
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This post is part of a four-part series on our vision and mission. You can find the other posts here:
- Worship
- Discipleship
- Mission (this post)
- Community
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