Leadership in Context with Keith Tucci
Episode 011
Being Missional, part 1
What does it mean to be missional?
Missional means to be clear and fruitful about your mission. Developing a missional culture is one of the most significant things you can do in a church, in business, in a family. It affects and defines not only everything you do, think, believe, and feel, but also what you end up doing—what you put traction to.
Missional vs. Consumer
A consumer congregation is based on the services that you offer. Most of us want something deeper, a culture that will reproduce itself. Missional is what we do and why we do it, not just what we receive and the benefits we get out of something (like being blessed). If you look at the American church today, as a whole, most of the thinking of people coming into church is: What do I get out of this? How do I get blessed? That is in part because we have trained them to think that way.
Think about it. In worship, we can have a steady diet of songs that are all about us—what God does for us, how we feel about it, etc. Those aren’t bad; they just shouldn’t be the main course. We can hear sermons about how important, wonderful, talented, and blessed we are. Then we wonder why we have divisions over petty things in the church. We have trained people to think that the church exists to take care of their needs instead of helping them mature and contribute to the work of the ministry.
Small Churches
Being missional is not something that only “large” churches can do. Small churches can be missional. Don’t be a wanna-be church and say, “When we are a certain size or we have a certain staff or a certain building…then we can.” Begin to do the things now, in seedling form— what you want to do and look like when you are growing and moving. A missional church begins to prepare the soil so that in the days to come, the seed that you are sowing now has something to take root in.
Easy to Lead Missionally
In spite of how broken people are, how confused people can be, in spite of our failures, most people want to make a difference. Many corporations give a percentage of their profits to charity. Retailers have figured out that people want to participate in something that is making a difference beyond their walls. How much more do we see that in the church? People want to serve and give to what makes a difference. A leader who can connect the dots from what his church is doing in-house to what his church is doing beyond its walls—the missional aspect—is a leader who is going to lead a healthy church.
We want to develop people who are not just spectators, but participants in the Kingdom. Next week, I’m going to give you questions to ask yourself to make sure that you are communicating clearly and creating a missional, not consumer, culture.
Join us next week as Keith Tucci continues to put leadership truth in the context of the local church. And as always, please like, share, rate/review, and invite others to listen. See you next week!
