Missional living | Revolution in Jesusland

Missional living September 10, 2007

Posted by Zack in North Carolina , trackback

This morning, on our flight from Charlotte to Toronto, we sat next to Donna Sheets, who is the Missions Coordinator at Covenant Church in Winterville, NC. She heard us talking about this blog and struck up a conversation with us. In fact, she is part of the reason we have finally gone ahead and decided to make this blog public.

We were sitting there on the plane talking about whether it would be crazy to try to hold a conversation with secular folks about what radical Christians are up to—and whether maybe this “Christian revolution” is just a figment of our own imaginations and in reality is limited to just a few over-hyped churches like Mars Hill. Right then Donna pipped up and introduced herself from the seat next to me. Donna is completing her PdD at Regent University, which is the Christian University founded by none other than Pat Robertson. It was originally called “CBN University,” an outgrowth of Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network.

Donna started her job at Covenant fairly recently. We got her talking about it and she gave us an overview of all of the organizations they work with on local, national and international levels and explained to us their framework for community involvement (while drawing a diagram for us, above).

Her missions team sees Church mission work in terms of four levels: She called the first the “Cadillac” level—as in driving through a poor community in a Cadillac, throwing money out the window. The next is the “Popcorn” level, where church members pop in and pop out of oppressed communities, e.g., going to a soup kitchen for a few hours, dropping off a Thanksgiving turkey to a family, etc…. The third level is the “Relational” level, where church members actually get into life relationships with those in need.

But their church, like many others these days, is attempting to move towards a fourth level, “Missional living“, which means totally altering your life and lifestyle in order to live completely and totally in the service of others—”sacrificially,” in their language.

We’ve heard this same kind of talk from the folks at Christian Community Development Association, Mars Hill and elsewhere. But to hear it from a Regent University student…it was enough to push us over the edge and convince us that this blog is definitely called for. This movement is HUGE and its story needs to be told to secular folks.
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Update: Donna emailed a chart with the complete “Four Mission Styles and Characteristics”…

4 Mission Styles and Characteristics

Mark Lykin 03-19-2007
Based on: Matthew chapters 25 and 28

June 1, 2007

Mission Style Characteristics	Cadillac Mission Style	Popcorn Mission Style	Relational Mission Style	Living a Missional Style
	Self directed	Event directed	Connecting directed	Self directed by a deep calling
	Can be local / seasonally based	Can be local / seasonal / national based	Can be local /seasonal / national based	Across all bases
	One shot deal	2-3 times a year	2-3 times a year or ongoing	Daily Short or long term
Who is called to do this and who does it?	Individual	Individual/ group/ family Church wide	Individual/ groups/ teams Church wide	Individual/ group/ family
How to measure success	Easy to measure by numbers and short term	Easy to measure by numbers and short term	Need to measure by relationships over long term	Need to measure by relationships over long term
What is it driven by?	Usually guilt driven	Task or Event driven	Relationship driven	Relationship and lifestyle Driven and Transformation
Where does the call to do this come from?	General call to experience a step or the next step into missions	General call to experience a step or the next step into missions	More of a specific call to mission	Specific call to change lifestyle or to live in a new culture to live a missional lifestyle
Entry Points	As individual groups or families are moved by interest or by the Spirit	Serve’s Up Enter Mission	Specific training for Local/international mission Comission training DR Reunions and local training	No specific way at present, mostly by individual or family call