Open Invitation to Church Re-Missioning

There is an incredible invitation for established churches to follow the Spirit into a new future.

It is tempting to focus on all of the problems established churches must tackle (organizational ruts, historical barriers, institutional mistrust, mission drift) and then start throwing quick fixes at the wall hoping to simply survive. Hoping that something will finally stick. The reality is, the Spirit is waking up established churches to do so much more than to barely exist—the Spirit is helping existing churches learn how to thrive and make disciples again.

Re-Calibrating

The invitation set before established churches is to re-calibrate our existence around missional presence and the flourishing of our neighborhoods. This means embracing and honoring our past while innovating towards a new future. The hope is that established churches will rediscover a pioneering sensibility and learn from the missional work of church planters in an effort to re-mission our existing congregations.

Re-Missioning

The Church needs some Re-missioners.

Re-missioners are people called by the Spirit to embrace movemental ecclesiology and reproducible discipleship. Re-missioners will help churches to wake up from their theological, spiritual, and emotional slumber into a new day. Re-missioners will help established churches learn how to lose their lives so that they might find it again.

While there is an incredible invitation to re-mission existing congregations, there is also a tremendous challenge to live into this calling. Too many of our churches have Ryan Adam’s lyrics tattooed on their hearts:

“I couldn’t see the future

I liked the past too much”

—From the song “Blue Hotel”

Re-missioning established churches with movemental practices and missional theology is some of the most difficult and needed work in North America. The invitation is wide open but the challenge is high. The lure to complacency, survival, and hurry as a response to our dormant imagination has wooed too many established churches to believe re-creating the past the best pathway to the future.

While our history is absolutely critical in imagining the future, too many established churches and the leaders that serve them, can’t see the light on the horizon because they are too busy looking over their shoulder at what has happened in the past.

There is a new movement afoot where established church leaders are learning that baptized business practices won’t suffice to re-mission the local church. It will take the intentional and sustained work of leaders and churches to embody practices and stories such as:

• Spirituality of weakness- leadership that acknowledges limits and the pathway of the cross
• Creative destruction- churches who find themselves in the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and learn how to put that narrative into practice with intentional disruption
• Cultural assessment and identifying the gaps- developing the eyes to see and ears to hear the hopes and dreams of our communities and churches, while charting the gap that exists between them
• Pruning- recognizing that every practice, event, ritual, tradition and habit shapes us and learning to ask: what needs to be pruned so that your church can bear good fruit again?
• Traditioned Innovation- holding the past and future in creative tension to live more fully in the present
• Ecclesial architecture- committees, councils and teams are all on-ramps for discipleship and shouldn’t be wasted
• Creating shared experiences- utilize experiments as pathways of discovery and fresh imagination
• Movemental discipleship- embraces conflict, practices faithful presence, is rooted in APEST, and engages in adaptive leadership that is necessary for the long and slow cultural transformation of disciples and churches

Re-Focus

If you are interested in this work, as beautiful and as challenging as church planting, with a similar hope of seeing the Kingdom of God here on earth as in heaven, consider joining me and 9 others on this journey of re-missioning your established church. Church re-missioners are wrestling with questions like:

• Do we want to re-calibrate our church around missional presence?
• Do we face old policies and outdated procedures that prevent this?
• Do we long to honor the past while innovating towards the future?
• Is it possible for our established church to experience rebirth?
• Is it possible to gain clarity in our mission again?

If this sounds like you and your church, and you’d like to explore some of the practices and competencies listed above, consider joining the Re-missioning cohort. You will benefit from:

• Peer learning
• Experienced coaching
• Holistic training
• Finding a network of re-missioning leaders
• Missional thinking translated for established church contexts

There are so many challenges for established churches to cultivate missional presence in their communities and discern how they can be good neighbors amidst all of the policies and procedures, organizational ruts and historical barriers. Amidst all of these challenges, is the opportunity for established churches to re-mission. This cohort will help you to transition your established church—embracing the best of where you have come from while learning to innovate towards the future.

If you are interested in joining this beta cohort, at a greatly discounted price, sign up HERE

About the Author

Josh Hayden

Josh Hayden is the Senior Pastor at First Baptist Church in Ashland, VA. Josh studied leadership and organizational change while writing Creative Destruction: Towards a Theology of Institutions to receive his Doctor of Ministry at Duke Divinity School. He’s also the author of Sacred Hope, a book designed to foster conversation about the role of hope in our lives. Josh currently serves on the V3 Board of Directors.