Church Follows Mission

You can read the whole post from Alan Hirsch here, but this quote is worth considering:

"The church follows mission and not the other way around."

Hirsch's argument is simple, and he is not alone in his opinion. In my reading and research over the past six or seven years into the nature of church, it is clear that much of the effort given to working out a "transferable model" of church - whether your definition of transferable involves a large megachurch infrastructure or tiny, informally connected house churches - has failed to produce the desired results on a wide scale. Touting a particular model might increase the presence of a brand name or coax more pastors to a leadership conference, but church is notoriously difficult to franchise. That is why the new fad of megachurches is to create satellite services instead of planting multiple churches. Technology makes it easier to broadcast what is already "successful" rather than risk something that might fail. On the other side of the spectrum, house church leaders attempt to reproduce what worked in their neighborhood, or in China, or the book of Acts. But I don't live in their neighborhood, or in China, or in first century Asia.

Mission, God's mission, is all about place and is inherently risky. When you are sent to participate in some aspect of God's mission - remember the definition is broader than you think - you are first called to somewhere concrete. The gameplan, tools, and resources necessary to actually do the mission come later, usually not on your timetable. Along the way, you will make friends, allies, and perhaps partners, but it is in the course of following the mission that church appears. Predicting the form that church will take, or its "model", is irrelevant compared to following the mission.