Missional Church

One of the things I love about LAMP is that the mentors are people from churches who are living out their faith in tangible ways throughout the week, at all kinds of different hours in the day and night, in places where a lot of people from Pittsburgh are afraid or unwilling to go, with at-risk kids that the world has written off. LAMP is a good example of the missional church. Church is not a what. It is not a building on the corner with lots of programs where people gather on Sunday mornings. The church is a who. It is people living out their faith in relationship to God, with one another, and with people in the world who are not Christians. God did not design the church for us to build church silos for ourselves where we have our own "Christian clubs." Followers of Christ should be spread out throughout society, in all sectors, on a daily basis, whenever and where ever possible... especially in places that may not appear to be very "churchy."

Reggie McNeal writes, "Church as who fulfills the covenant that God first made with Abraham when God created a people to partner with him in his redemptive mission in the world. That covenant indicates that we have been blessed to bless. Simply put, we are the blessing people. That is both our distinct privilege and our distinct responsibility. In our blessing of the world, we live out the passion that God has to bless all people so that they know this about him and are drawn to him. It means that the church does not have a mission; the mission has a church. The mission is God's. It is redemptive, addressing everything that sin marred across the entire bandwidth of the human condition. It is a mission being played out in the world beyond just God's people. In this biblical understanding of the church, we grasp that the church is not the point; the mission is the point. We have been created to be boots-on-the-ground partners. On a macro scale, this view of church means that every community should be better if the church gets the mission right. The scorecard can no longer be about how well our individual congregations are doing. The condition of our communities is the scorecard for how well the church is doing at being the people of God." - To Transform a City