Transforming the Church

“The church is a work in progress. Like a lump of clay on a potter’s wheel, the church bears the visible imprints of the invisible fingers of God.” –Stan Nussbaum

God is constantly transforming the Church towards a missional mindset changing the way the church sees its relationship to the word. There are two key perspectives my church has on their mission that need to be shifted based on Stan Nussbaum and David Bosch’s model “The Relation between the Church and the World”. First, like many churches, my church sees its members simply as Church people, not Kingdom people. The members are very involved in the church but they limit their work. Members may help every now and then with some form of Kingdom work (donating money, raising awareness, doing a mission trip, etc.), but that is where the line stops. They aren’t living as if they are Kingdom workers either because they don’t feel called, which isn’t the case because living missonally is a call to every Christian, or they just don’t want to commit to more than what happens in the church walls. There isn’t an “on-off switch” for doing missions. You aren’t just a church member, you are part of carrying out the kingdom. Second they struggle with their view of what the “world” means. They see the world of evil, not the physical and social world. I hear conversations of how “evil” the world is or how justice was served to a criminal when really it is much more than that. The world is full of hurting people, people just like our congregation members.

My church needs a shift in these thoughts but the only way that would come about is if their minds were transformed into a mission mindset. Help they may need for this shift would probably be lessons taught or sermons preached, or extra classes on it. I believe my church may have these views because they are unaware and oblivious to the fact that they do not have a missional mindset at their core. The members individually need to be informed and the church as a whole needs to come together to transform the way they view themselves and the world.