Why the Missional Church
Will Fail
Mike Breen believes the missional church movement lacks at least
one vital aspect.
Editor's Note: Mike Breen is joining us
next week for ChurchLeaders LIVE, a free online event to
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virtual seat.
**
It’s time we start being brutally honest about the missional
movement that has emerged in the last 10-15 years: Chances are better than not
it’s going to fail.
That may seem cynical, but I’m being realistic. There is a
reason so many movements in the Western church have failed in the past
century: They are a car without an engine.
A missional church or a missional community or a missional small
group is the new car that everyone is talking about right now, but no matter
how beautiful or shiny the vehicle, without an engine, it won’t go anywhere.
So what is the engine of the church?
Discipleship.
I’ve said it many times: If you make disciples, you will
always get the church. But if you try to build the church, you will rarely get
disciples.
If you’re good at making disciples, you’ll get more leaders than
you’ll know what to do with. If you make disciples like Jesus made them, you’ll
see people come to faith who didn’t know Him.
If you disciple people well, you will always get the missional
thing. Always.
We took 30 days and examined the Twitter conversations
happening. We discovered there are between 100-150 times as many people talking
about mission as there are discipleship (to be clear, that’s a 100:1).
We are a group of people addicted to and obsessed with the work
of the Kingdom, with little to no idea of how to be with the King.
As Skye Jethani wrote in his Out of Ur post a little while back, “Has
Mission become an Idol?”:
Many church leaders unknowingly replace the transcendent
vitality of a life with God for the ego satisfaction they
derive from a life for God.
Look, I’m not criticizing the people who are passionate about
mission … I am one of those people. I was one of the people pioneering missional communities in
the 1980s and have been doing it ever since. This is my camp, my tribe, my
people.
But it has to be said: God did not design us to do Kingdom
mission outside of the scope of intentional, biblical discipleship, and if we
don’t see that, we’re fooling ourselves. Mission is under the umbrella of
discipleship as it is one of the many things that Jesus taught his disciples to
do well. But it wasn’t done in a vacuum outside of knowing God and being shaped
by that relationship, where a constant refinement of their character was
happening alongside of their continued skill development (which included
mission).
The truth about discipleship is that it’s never hip and it’s
never in style … it’s the call to come and die; a “long obedience in the same
direction.” While the “missional” conversation is imbued with the energy and
vitality that comes with kingdom work, it seems to be missing some of the
hallmark reality that those of us who have lived it over time have come to
expect: Mission is messy. It’s humbling. There’s often no glory in it. It’s for
the long haul. And it’s completely unsustainable without discipleship.
This is the crux of it: The reason the missional movement may
fail is because most people/communities in the Western church are pretty bad at
making disciples.
Without a plan for making disciples (and a plan that works), any
missional thing you launch will be completely unsustainable.
Think about it this way: Sending
people out to do mission is to send them out to a war zone. Discipleship is not
only the boot camp to train them for the front lines, but the hospital when
they get wounded and the off-duty time they need to rest and recuperate.
When we don’t disciple people the way Jesus and the New
Testament talked about, we are sending them out without armor, weapons or
training. This is mass carnage waiting to happen.
How can we be surprised that people burn out, quit and never
want to return to the missional life (or the church)? How can we not expect
people will feel used and abused?
There’s a story from World War II where The Red (Russian) Army
sent wave after wave of untrained, practically weaponless soldiers into the
thick of the German front. They were slaughtered in droves.
Why did they do this? Because they knew that eventually the
German soldiers would run out of ammunition, creating an opportunity for the Red
Army to send in their best soldiers to finish them off. The first wave of
untrained soldiers were the best way of exhausting ammunition, leaving their
enemy vulnerable.
While this isn’t a perfect analogy, I sense this is a bit like
the missional movement right now. We are sending bright-eyed civilians into the
battle where the fighting is fiercest without the equipping they need, not just
to survive, but to fight well and advance the Kingdom of their dad, the King.
The missional movement will fail because, by-and-large, we are
having a discussion about mission devoid of discipleship.
Unless we start having more discussion about discipleship and
how we make missionaries out of disciples, this movement will stall and fade.
Any discussion about mission must begin with discipleship. If your
church community is not yet competent at making disciples who can make
disciples, please don’t send your members out on mission until you have a
growing sense of confidence in your ability to train, equip and disciple them.
Here are some questions I have leaders I’m working with ask
regularly:
· Am I a disciple?
· Do I know how to disciple people who can then
disciple people who then disciple people, etc? (I.e., does my discipleship plan
work?)
· Does our discipleship plan naturally lead all
disciples to become missionaries? (Not just the elite, Delta-seal missional
ninjas.) 
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