Ministry and Mission

[Notice some changes on the blogroll? More to come, but for now I've put a list of missional bloggers up there, using the new Blogger gadget. This is part of my plan to spend some time focusing on the issues and ideas that gather around the concept of the missional church.]

Today I want to get back to yesterday's two themes and kind of connect them up. Yesterday I talked about how Christian prayer tends toward intercessory ministry for the hurting. That is, you might say, the default position of public and private prayer. I was, by the way, riffing off a post by Steve Timmis at The Crowded House blog.

After that, in a second post, I quoted Alan Hirsch, a missional blogger, on the relationship between ministry and mission. I found Alan's post extremely interesting. You should read it!

As I said, I want to connect up these two themes. Hirsch opened his post with a statement that really got me thinking:

In a remark ascribed to Gordon Cosby, the pioneering leader of that remarkable community, Church of the Savior in Washington. DC, he noted that in over 60 years of significant ministry, he had observed that no groups that came together around a non-missional purpose (i.e. prayer, worship, study, etc.) ever ended up becoming missional.

If we begin with an inward focus, we will continue that way. It will be very hard to turn the group outward. This has been my experience as well.

Take a typical small group that meets for prayer. You ask people about their prayer needs, and the answer is usually about work, or family, or physical problems, or relationships, or past hurts that we keep dwelling on, or not being able to forgive ourselves, etc. Quickly the prayer warriors begin to flip through their Bibles looking for appropriate comfort verses and the big promises about rising up like eagles or God having a great plan for your life. People inevitably feel better (or at least say they do), and it is said of the prayer time that "God really showed up."

This is the prayer time everyone expects and desires. It is completely inward focused, and it never will be otherwise . . . maybe.

Let's get back to Alan's understanding of the proper relationship between ministry (like prayer) and mission. Hirsch again:

If evangelizing and discipling the nations lie at the heart of the church’s purpose in the world, then it is mission, and not ministry, that is the true organizing principle of the church. Mission here, is being used in a narrow sense here to suggest the church’s orientation to the ‘outsiders’ and ministry as the orientation to the ‘insiders.’ Experience tells us that a church that aims at ministry seldom gets to mission even if it sincerely intends to do so. But the church that aims at mission will have to do ministry, because ministry is the means to do mission.

I think this is getting the cart and the horse in the right relationship to one another. If we are a mission-minded people--having our minds, that is, on the things of God, and not the things of man--then the purpose of ministry (like prayer) will be to help us in our mission.

In such a case, the typical prayer-need would be something like this: "I need prayer for confidence to tell my co-worker about Jesus." "My heart is breaking for the poor in my neighborhood. I need prayer to show me how I might serve them." "My work is very stressful right now. I need prayer that I might be a source of peace and rest to those around me, rather than simply being just as stressed as the rest."

I'm going to start modeling this in my own small-group and wherever prayer-needs are solicited.

Any thoughts?