Recently, our Communitas North America team beta-tested a new online course we’re calling the Missional 101 Roundtable. It’s intended to help people discover the theology of living with a missional posture, and then brainstorm together practices to put our ideas into action. During one of the sessions, the images above were presented to us with the questions, “What do you observe in these photos?” and “How do you respond to them?” The resulting conversation was fascinating — and challenging.
Our discussion began with comments like:
“The architecture is pretty cool.”
“Those people seem really devout.”
Then the conversation went deeper with statements like:
“I don’t see buildings like that very often.”
“They seem devout, but I don’t know what they are doing… I guess they’re praying?
And then the conversation got serious:
”I’d be uncomfortable if I were there.”
“Would I be welcome to just show up there? Can you just walk into a mosque?”
“It doesn’t matter that it’s a mosque, really. It could be a lot of different religious places like Buddhist temples, Hindu cultural centers, or synagogs. They’d all be totally unfamiliar to me.”
“Speaking of unfamiliar, I don’t even know if I’d be welcome to just walk into most churches.”
“I have just walked into churches I didn’t know, and sometimes it’s felt just a strange as walking into that mosque.”
And then we hit pay dirt:
“That’s how a lot of people must feel about walking into a church these days.”
Bingo. That is how many, many people feel about walking into a church. These are the thoughts and questions in many people’s minds — whether they come from a different Christian tradition, follow a different faith entirely, or increasingly, have no experience or faith tradition at all. And generally speaking that’s why most of these people don’t ever just walk into a church.
The reason for that is actually rather simple, and quite understandable. Whether we recognize it or not, most of us reading this and considering the example above are deeply entrenched in Christian culture. So walking into that mosque involves crossing of significant cultural distance, which makes us very uncomfortable. Yes, religion is the most obvious cultural difference, but we’d also be crossing language, dress, economic, and social boundaries as well. And the farther the distance between cultures, the more uncomfortable we will be. (Some years ago in Holland I was given a tour of a mosque. Even though there were no worshippers there at the time, I was very, very uncomfortable. It was just completely unfamiliar to me.)
As western culture increasingly becomes ‘post-christian’, ‘non-religious’, and secular, the cultural distance is expanding between those within Christian culture and those outside of it. Not only is the cultural distance increasing between us, but as our society becomes more pluralistic and secular the number of people experiencing that distance is increasing, too.
Here is where the concept of the missional church fits in. What if instead of asking our friends and neighbors to cross all these cultural boundaries to ‘go’ to church, we as the church took it upon ourselves to close the gap in cultural distance and ‘go’ to them? Crossing cultures is, after all, a big part of what it means to be a ‘missionary’. Or at least to ‘practice a missional lifestyle.’
For those of us in Communitas that’s the task at hand, and what the Missional 101 Roundtable is all about. Exploring how we ‘go’ out to others, loving and serving in Jesus’ name, expressing and inviting others - in understandable ways - to experience the kingdom of heaven. Learning to meet those we know and love right where they are, so that they don’t need to do the hard work of crossing cultural boundaries to come to us. We’re learning, once again, to be missionaries.