In, Out or Round and Round?

The Missionary Impulse of the Church

Over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about churches as ‘inward facing’ and ‘outward facing’ with respect to evangelism and discipleship. I’m sure that if you are in ministry you have heard a lot about these two terms, and we have linked them to either being attractional or missional. I get it, each term seems to map, but over the last 20 years we have largely switched terms but our posture as churches has more or less stayed the same. Peter Drucker famously said that culture eats strategy for breakfast, and I think that this underpins the issue. Our strategy is to become one thing, but the culture it creates isn’t strong enough to overthrow the prevailing culture currently in action.

We can hear it from the conversations we read online or perhaps have with other church leaders. Of course, we talk about missional living, our oikos, ‘glocal’ outreach, community witness. These are aspirations that we’ve all read about and heard in the last generation. However, when we dig into it, the base strategy peeks out as do our fundamental desires. If only we had better buildings. If only we had the right music, branding, children’s programme, preachers, and coffee. Then perhaps the church would begin to draw people! This has been the pattern of church in the last 50 years, and in many ways it has been successful in drawing people into an organisation. However, we are starting to see stalled leadership transition, a culture of consumerism, and a comfortability in church life that leads to fewer people feeling ‘called’ into mission, particularly in cross-cultural settings.

But the deeper issue is whether the basic movement of the church is inward or outward. Does the church exist primarily as a place people are expected to come to, or as a people sent into the world? Is Sunday the destination, or is it the gathering of coals that require reheating in the warmth of congregational worship to once again burn bright on mission?

Three physical images have helped me as I tried to figure this all out. Centripetal force, centrifugal force, and the whirlpool effect. (Can you tell I’ve been recently helping my son with his science exams?!) Centripetal force pulls toward the centre. Centrifugal motion moves outward from the centre. A whirlpool sucks everything down into itself.

The historic attractional model is centripetal. It pulls people in. The missional model is centrifugal. It sends people out. The consumerist or survivalist church becomes a whirlpool. It draws energy inward until almost nothing escapes.

The question for Ireland (and indeed some of the Western world) is, in light of this, whether we have confused gathering with mission.

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The Centripetal Church

The attractional model has a simple logic: come to us. We can argue that this is a
Gospel informed posture, surely the disciples were led by Jesus into this ‘come and see’ strategy. If the Gospels ended in the early chapters, we might be correct in our thinking. However, I’m not sure this is what we are primarily doing.

Come to our service. Come to our building. Come to our Christmas event, youth night, evangelistic course, café, Sunday service. The assumption is that if the centre is compelling enough, people will be drawn toward it. If we build/plan/organise/advertise it, they will come. In some contexts, this can work. Where there is still a broad Christian memory, a well run church can attract those who are drifting, disappointed, curious, or lightly disconnected. We can see this is cities where students arrive each year and employment is transitory enough to create a revolving door of people from other places looking for a faithful church, a place to worship, and a people to be among, even if only temporarily.

But in general Ireland is not that place. Not among those for whom evangelical Christianity feels foreign, strange, sectarian, or irrelevant. It might ‘reawaken’ something in someone, or provide a place to sit within a culture that the person has previously experienced, but it rarely breaks light into darkness. It just shines a brighter light for people who already enjoy the light. But it’s rarely light in the darkness, more like a neon sign pointing to a place which people are already aware of.

This is where imported attractional models begin to plateau and eventually decline.

Many of our ministry instincts in Ireland have been borrowed from places where evangelicalism had a different social location. Some came from suburban America. Others came from large city churches in the UK and the North of Ireland, where density, transport, student populations, and institutional history created possibilities that do not translate neatly into Ballinrobe, Tuam, Castlerea, Cashel, or Clonmel.

Attractional models assume a population willing to travel for religious experience. They assume consumer choice. They assume people are already comparing churches, or at least that they recognise church as a category worth exploring. But in much of Ireland, the issue is not that people are looking for a better church and have not found one yet. It is that church is not on the mental map at all. We can polish the centre as much as you like. If people are not orbiting anywhere near it, they will not feel the pull.

This does not mean the Sunday gathering is unimportant. The church gathers because God calls his people together. We come to hear the Word, pray, sing, confess sin, receive grace, bear burdens, and remember that we are not lone believers.

Gathering is biblical. Attractionalism is something else. Attractionalism makes the gathering the central focus of the Christian experience. It turns Sunday into the primary evangelistic engine. It trains believers to think their main missionary task is invitation. Bring someone along. Get them into the room. Let the preacher, the music, and the atmosphere do the rest. In doing this the sermon becomes the most important evangelistic event in the week. What this can do is to increase a desire for training preachers and musicians as the chief performers of ministry, all while the spectators enjoy the show.

That may reach some. Praise God when it does. But it cannot bear the full missionary calling of the church. The church was never told merely to create an event worth visiting. It was told to go.

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The Centrifugal Church

The missionary impulse of the church, however, appears to be centrifugal. It moves outward. Jesus does not gather his disciples simply to keep them close. He calls them to Himself and then sends them. “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” “You will be my witnesses” in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. These are only a few of the clear commands and missionary posture of Jesus towards those who will eventually become the apostolic wave of the New Testament church. Grace gathers, then grace sends.

Now, I have to be clear in this point, a missional church does not neglect the centre, because it still depends on it. But it understands the centre differently. The gathered church is not a religious event trying to attract spiritual consumers, but rather a covenant people being formed for faithful presence and Gospel witness in the world.

The building, if the church has one, is not the central place for mission. It is more like a hearth. People come in cold from the week. They hear again that Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again. They are fed and sent back into ordinary places with extraordinary news. Reheated, and illuminating the world around them.

This is important to understand in Ireland because ordinary places are where people are and in fact are probably the places where people will encounter the living epistles of the church of Christ Jesus. It might be the school gate, the GAA sideline, a building site, the office canteen, the mart, a café, the playground, the hospital ward, the WhatsApp group, the kitchen table after a funeral, the lift offered to a neighbour for a hospital visit. These are often the places where both credibility and plausibility is built slowly enough for the Gospel to be heard. So it begs the question; if some folks will never attend our ‘places’, why then do we put so much effort and energy both advertising them, and making them comfortable?

Imported attractional models and expectations struggle here because they are impatient with smallness. This is a HUGE issue in the language we use as church leaders. We want visible momentum, and in many ways it’s expected. We want the room to fill, or at least to look that way when we take our photos at a specific angle. But the true work of mission, in generational influence is slow and meandering. This is undersood in the towns and villages of Ireland. You learn who is related to whom (read, everybody!) You learn which families don’t warm to one another. You learn that “I must call in sometime” often does not mean what we think it means. Suspicion is not always hostility. Sometimes it is a memory of a painful past experience. Sometimes it is inherited caution from the history of the place that you live. So the church must recover its missionary impulse, not as another strategy, but as a way of life.

Mission then is not the ministry for unusually keen people. It is not the hobby of extroverts, the burden of the pastor, or the optional extra for churches that have their internal attractional structures sorted. Mission belongs to the whole church. Yet centrifugal energy without a centre becomes dispersal. We as churches can talk endlessly about being “sent” and still fail to form people deeply in Scripture, doctrine, prayer, holiness, and shared life. When that happens, believers do not so much enter the culture on mission as dissolve into it.

The missional church needs a strong centre. Not a flashy centre. Not a programme-heavy centre that exhausts everyone. But one which both draws people into worship of God, and then outward, overflowing with the joy of sharing Him with others. The question is not gathered or scattered. It is whether our gathering truly forms our scattering.

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The Whirlpool

There is a third movement, and it may be the most dangerous because it often looks like a responsible guarding of the faith. As a culture, this can be the most dangerous in the life cycle of a local church, irrespective if it has 5 people, or 105. The “Whirlpool Church” is neither truly attractional nor truly missional. It is inward, but not compellingly so. It’s busy, but not fruitful. It’s active, but not alive in the missionary sense. It sucks energy toward the centre, but nobody is really sent out. It might advertise missions, knock on doors, deliver tracts, or preach on street corners. But these are done because they ‘should be’ not necessarily because there is a desire there. I once met a guy who did mission in this way because (his words) he didn’t care for the people, but he cared about the eternal destiny of their soul. I found this odd, because we as people aren’t disembodied souls. That filters down in our churches, with a mindset that people need straightened out before the come among us.

This happens when the church becomes consumed with maintaining itself, it’s name, it’s existance, it’s brand. The rota must be filled. The programme must continue. The event must happen because it happened last year. The committee must meet. The same few people carry the same heavy load because nobody has asked whether the load should exist in the first place. Before long, the church’s life becomes a closed circuit. The members are not equipped for mission, but rather are drained by the treading water of ministry existance.

The grim irony in my experience is that this can happen in churches that talk about outreach all the time. Every willing person is absorbed into institutional need. Every free evening is occupied. The church says it wants to reach the community, but its posture needs to bring people into it’s seats and social media photos to justify its existence. In Ireland, many evangelical churches are small, and in many ways this danger is a sharp reality. Churches can become anxious churches, which often become controlling churches. Hear me though, most pastors, we don’t want this. We are simply trying to survive. But survival can become our theology very quickly. The question slowly shifts from “How are we joining Christ in his mission?” to “How do we keep this thing going?”

Jesus did not promise that the church would preserve itself by anxious management, or even that every local church would survive. He promised to build his church. That does not make us passive, but it should make us less frantic. The church is not a fragile religious club kept alive by human cleverness. It is the people of the risen Christ, indwelt by the Spirit, sent into the world. However, don’t assume that larger churches don’t feel this same pressure. The pressure indeed is greater, because the ‘mission’ quickly becomes raising money to keep staff, to run ministry, to manage social media, to fill the seats, to keep the brand alive. In some ways, this is far more dangerous, because when the first domino falls, we can see how fragile the foundation really was.

We can disrupt the whirlpool effect bby recovering the purpose of a church, not by necessarily trying to swim out of it at speed. Some things may need to die. Some programmes may need to end. Some meetings may need to stop. Some leaders may need to repent of measuring faithfulness by busyness. The budget might need to be reduced to a level that is achieveable through tithes and offerings. A church with no margin will struggle to be missionary, and a church with no confidence in the Gospel will compensate with machinery, organisation and flash.

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The Pulse of a Missionary Church

As I looked at these three images, I’ve written myself into a fourth! The healthy church is not simply centripetal or centrifugal, or even whirlpool-y. You can tell I’m stretching at this point! A healthy church actually pulses. It works in waves, both necessary to see the mission of the Gospel achieved.

It gathers and scatters. It worships and witnesses. It listens to God’s Word and then speaks good news to neighbours. It baptises believers into a visible people and sends them back into ordinary life as ambassadors of Christ. The rhythm is there in Scripture. The church in Antioch worships, fasts, hears the Spirit, and sends Paul and Barnabas. The gathered life produces missionary movement. There is a centre, but the centre is not a drain. It is a sending place, a launch pad.

Ireland needs churches with that pulse.

Not franchises of imported models that have been ‘successful’ elsewhere. Not pale imitations of global megachurches, or conference-stages. We need churches rooted in the Gospel and attentive to the place they are in. Churches that know their towns. Churches that understand the context and the people within which God has placed us. This will require patience, of course. As missionary churches in Ireland we may grow slowly and we may look unimpressive for a loooooong time. We may spend years building trust before seeing visible fruit. We may have to explain words others assume are obvious: sin, grace, Scripture, salvation, church, faith, repentance, even God.

But this is not failure or a failed strategy. It is missionary work. And in some ways, it makes sad the anecdotal evidence that length of ministry service in Ireland hovered around an average length of 18 months. We need to have more patience than this. We must not, indeed should not, expect things to move that quickly before we get dissatisfied and move on. Supporting churches and organisations need to realise the soil that people are tending to.

The attractional model asks, “How do we get them to come to us?” The missionary impulse asks a deeper question: “What would it mean for us to be faithfully present among them as Christ’s people?” We need gathered churches with enough Gospel gravity to form disciples, and enough missionary energy to send them joyfully into the world.

The church gathers because Christ is worthy. The church scatters because Christ is Lord. And between those two movements, the missionary impulse is kept alive.