I‘ve added a new word to my vocabulary: missionalism. In fact I may have coined the word. All I know is that my spell-checker never heard of it before.
Missionalism defined: the belief that the worth of one’s life is determined by the achievement of a grand objective. Key word: worth.
I don’t know how long the word missional has been in use. I only began to hear it in the last few years as in “we’re a missional church.” Is missional really that different from being purpose-driven? I like both terms, but I know lots of churches (including ones I pastored) that were acting missional and purpose-driven long before the two words became popular. I remember thinking one day that missional sounds a bit Catholic, and purpose-driven sounds more Evangelical Protestant.
But missionalism is something else. It’s a leader’s disease. Like a common cold that begins with a small cough, missionalism catches on in a leader’s life and seems at first so inconsequential. But let this disease catch hold and you are likely to have bodies strewn all over the place, the leader’s and some of the leader’s followers.
A worst case scenario from a generation ago might be Jim Jones and his horrific ending in Guyana. The mission became all-consuming, and it turned dark. Not only did the leader go down, but most of his followers self-destructed, too.
Seeds of the Sickness
Missionalism starts slowly and gains a foothold in the leader’s attitude. Before long the mission controls almost everything: time, relationships, health, spiritual depth, ethics, and convictions.
When I searched the Bible for insight on this, I first lighted on Moses in his fortieth year. “[Moses] went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labor.” In other words, there was an arresting vision (of suffering) and a formation of mission (alleviate it!). Which is what Moses did a sentence later. Seeing an sadistic Egyptian beating a Hebrew, “[he glanced] this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand” (Ex. 2:11-12).
In advanced stages, missionalism means doing whatever it takes to solve the problem. In its worst iteration, the end always justifies the means. The family goes; health is sacrificed; integrity is jeopardized; God-connection is limited. In this one event, Moses succumbed to missionalism.
Perhaps that’s why the man spent the next 40 years living with the consequences of that impulsive act. He did wilderness-time learning the difference between a mission whose time had not come and one that would later be implemented in God’s way and in God’s time.
Missionalism catches hold when an idea is bigger than a person and overwhelms the soul’s ability to constrain it and direct it. Moses clearly saw the suffering of the Hebrew people. But his rash act showed that he was not prepared to operate under authority of the God of Israel. He had growing up to do.
What if Moses had been successful in that fortieth year? Imagine the word spreading like a wild fire. “Moses is our guy. He took on an Egyptian and killed him. We’ve got a leader. Let’s rise up against the Egyptians and take this country over.”
If Moses had sparked a successful insurrection, do you think the Hebrews would ever have left Egypt? I’m guessing here, but I suspect Moses at forty would have been an entirely different leader.
It’s no coincidence that four decades later, 80-year- old Moses would be known as “more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth.” Take it to the bank: those words would never have been assigned to Moses had he launched his leader-career at forty.
In my wildest dreams, I never foresaw—thirty years ago—that today there would rise up across our country a generation of bright younger men and women who would plant amazing churches all over the countryside. What they are accomplishing as they put technology, management, artistic skills, and passion into play simply amazes me. I am so glad for them.
But the old guy in me sees a darker side to this phenomenon. Daily I read the e-mails and letters of this same generation as they migrate into their forties. Many are struggling with exhaustion, superficial relationships, spiritual shallowness, and the what’s-next syndrome. Perhaps there’s too much adrenaline in this new leadership lifestyle.
Too often the story is predictable. Leader gets to work, a church gets planted, the staff gets recruited, the buildings get built, and the branch or multi-site churches get created. The leader writes a book telling how it was done, gets TV time, speaks at major conferences, and starts traveling the world (maybe even in a chartered jet). And he/she isn’t yet 40. What does he/she do with the rest of his/her life? And how does one build a soul with enough capacity in it to form a foundation that can sustain this maniacal public life?
What is behind this almost hectic need to establish and enlarge and expand and keep on doing it with one more project and one more vision? Is it all really about winning the world to faith in Christ? Or do we have to be careful that darker motives might intercept the original call?
A leader in his later 30s writes, “The church is growing, and there’s excitement everywhere. But personally I feel less and less good about what I’m doing. I’m restless and tired. I ask myself how long I can keep this all up. Why is my touch with God so limited? Why am I feeling guilty about where my marriage is? When did this stop being fun?”
Missionalism—the passionate need to keep things growing and growing so that one proves his/her worth—can catch hold from various sources. For some of us, it came early in life when we discovered that we got a lot of love when we went forward to dedicate our lives to Christian service.
We were awash with the call to a kind of heroism. If I heard it once, I heard it a thousand times, “The world has yet to see what God can do through a person totally committed to Jesus Christ.” It was an inspiring statement, and it conjured dreams of whole nations converted to Christ through preaching. How many times I knelt at altars and begged God for a fervency, an overcoming of the power of the Holy Spirit, a sense of abandonment that would make me willing to take up the cross to follow him. I wanted to be that one person.
I do not regret those moments, but I do regret the fact that it took too long to learn that for every ounce of growth, there needed to be a corresponding ounce of depth. The truth was that few of us were prepared to handle the pressures of success. And a lot of good men and women have gone down as a result. If I have survived the grind (which, most of the time, I have loved), it is because of grace, friends, books, and an incredibly resilient marriage.
Things We Do for Love
Comedian Robin Williams, who has lived his life rather frantically, checks into a rehab clinic (our modern version of a monastery) and when he comes out two months later, tells Diane Sawyer what he’s learned.
“All any of us want is to be loved,” he says. Could that be what’s behind missionalism? A suspicion that if I build and build and build, doing all these good things, that people will love me? Do bigger accomplishments equate to more love?
I meet leaders whose conversions came in young adult years. They are romanced by the appeal of a gospel that liberates them from bad habits and terrible addictions. It all captures their entrepreneurial spirit, and they launch out to reach everyone in their path. It is wonderful to see. But again, the pressures rise, and more than a few discover that their conversions, though powerful, are not deep enough to withstand everything that comes their way.
When I entered ministry, I remember the battle I fought against pastoral discontent. Why wasn’t the congregation growing faster? Why weren’t more people joining us? Each time I heard of some leader whose work seemed more fruitful, I had to battle the demons of competitiveness, maybe even envy.
My father had been a successful preacher in his early twenties, and it was extremely difficult not to compare myself to him at corresponding ages. Even that was a part of the missionalism that began to bind itself to my soul.
Then I read the story of F.B. Meyer, who was used to speaking to sizable crowds each summer at Moody’s Northfield Conferences. One day a dazzling young preacher named G. Campbell Morgan came to the conference, and the crowds migrated away from Meyer and toward Morgan.
“How are you handling this?” Meyer was asked.
He responded, “I pray fervently for him every day, and all things are settled.” That was a powerful, insightful story for me—a very young man—to read.
I have written of this event before. I sat one evening at a banquet where a well-known Christian leader was to speak. I greatly respect and admire this man. It was the introduction that killed me: “Our speaker for this evening was in Singapore ten days ago. A day later he traveled to Australia and spoke in three cities. Then he flew to Honolulu to lead a seminar there. On Sunday he was in his home church to preach. On Monday he chaired a board meeting for XYZ college. On Tuesday he was in Chicago speaking; on Thursday he was in New York; and here he is tonight in Boston. He’s authored 40 books, serves on eight boards and is president of three organizations.”
Admittedly, I have slightly (ever so!) exaggerated to make my point.
As the introduction progressed, I wanted to scream, “Don’t tell us all of this. We don’t need to know. Every young leader in this room will be reminded of all he/she isn’t doing. Everyone will be tempted to be dissatisfied with their lives. Everyone will feel that they haven’t done anything until they can boast of a ten-day period like this.”
I see Jesus dealing with the onset of missionalism in his disciples.
He was doing this when he rebuked their insensitivity to the poor, the infants, the infirm, the morally corrupted. Remember their shock when he spent prime time with the woman at Jacob’s well? They’d gone to Sychar to get food that day and returned with nothing but food. But he turned the town upside down, spiritually speaking, by engaging in conversation with someone at the lowest level of town life.
Jesus did not want these disciples to grow up talking about and programming for the poor and the obscure but never meeting them.
Jesus was dealing with missionalism just outside a small Samaritan village where he and the disciples had been refused overnight accommodations. Some suggested calling fire down from heaven to assuage their sense of rejection. How could such a town treat Jesus and them with such disdain? After all, they were on a great mission. So nuke ’em! Jesus said (in effect), “That’s not what we’re about.”
I smell missionalism when Simon Peter rejected Jesus’ teaching about a pending cross. He and the others saw Jesus on a throne, never on a cross. They saw power and recognition; he saw power through love and sacrifice.
I see the disciples grasping for first-century versions of what tempts most of us today. Privilege, influence, connection with the pretty people, domination, welcome into the corridors of the strong, a confident swagger. It took three years of walking after Christ to get most of it wrung out of them.
Disease Control
So how do we resist the disease I call missionalism?
The truth? There are no novel, breakthrough answers. I kind of feel like the clinician who identifies a sickness and then says the only antidote is to “keep washing your hands.”
I think the first response has to do with the Sabbath principle the Bible so clearly enunciates. It’s there without much room for misinterpretation. You get six days to do your work. But you can’t touch the seventh … which of course is what most of us are doing all the time. The mission becomes so consuming and so self-justifying that–like an alcoholic taking the extra drink–we reason, “Well, I’ll keep working just this once.” And reason the same way again and again.
You know the old questions. Can a pastor study on that seventh day? Read and take notes and file ideas away? Can you engage with staff associates and key church members on the golf course or out to dinner? All the “hedge” questions that slowly erode the purpose of Sabbath: to back off from the work and pursue a re-ordering of self.
A second response is writing quality into our thinking and less quantity. I have this sense that this is exactly what Jesus did when the quantity of the crowds grew. He cranked up the teaching, scared a lot of folks off, and then concentrated on the small, more manageable number. How un-American!
I have never been in the league of most of our modern megachurch leaders, but I did lead a reasonably large New England church with all of its multi-staff challenges and its myriad programs.
The greatest single thing I did in all those years was to drop away from the crowd-oriented church activities and, with my wife, handpick 15 people a year with whom we met every Monday night for a year. We continue doing it today. And it has brought far more satisfaction to me than all the sermons I ever preached to crowds. And getting that close to teachable people so regularly has certainly put a guard on my zealousness for missionalism.
Let’s talk accountability again. Missionalism gets disciplined if a leader gets real serious about submitting himself to the guidance of a small group of older, wiser people who agree ahead of time what the rules of the game are going to be. They do the leader no favor if they encourage him/her to get out on the road, do conferences, travel widely. All of them may be expanding their egos, but they are putting the leader out on the edge.
A corollary of this is honest personal relationships. Obviously a marriage (assuming a leader to be married) is the highest priority. I can tell you one thing for sure, I have a wife who smells missionalism a mile away and speaks into it with ferocity. Some of our most vigorous conversations have centered on my need to save the whole world and her challenge for me to get interested in the block where we live.
Attached to this is the importance of a more-or-less permanent small group. Gail and I have met monthly with the same small group for 15 years. There is a sense of grounding through this attachment. In our friendships there is constant give and take about fresh ideas, intentions, challenges. Without even being conscious of it, they have become the filter through which most possibilities that would lead to missionalism are passed. They enforce a kind of humility. I’m no one but Gordon to them, and Gordon is all I need to be.
Less Vocal, Wildly Active
When leaders tell me that they are committed to a small group, I cheer for them. But I must tell you that a heavy majority of them admit, if I ask follow-up questions, that their involvement has been for a very short time and is spotty at best. Yet they infer to their adoring crowds that they are meeting regularly with a small group and so create a fantasy about something that’s really not happening.
I think we might contain missionalism a bit more if we all worked a bit on re-defining our lists of heroes. I’m the first to admit that in my Pantheon of great Christians are people like Patrick and Francis, Simeon and Wesley, the Booths and Henry Varley. In modern times, Graham, Henrietta Mears, Hybels, and Stott come to mind: all people hugely focused on a mission.
If they were all I had with which to measure the worth of my life, I’d slip into some kind of depression rather quickly. I would try, but I could never keep up with them.
But I’ve also chosen to look at Brother Lawrence, John Woolman, Charles de Foucauld, and–two of my personal favorites–Marvin Goldberg and Vernon Grounds, less vocal and wildly active people who remind me that much of life and its contributions emerge in the quiet and daily routines.
Finally, and it would have slanderous to leave this out, I think those of us who are susceptible to missionalism need a fresh encounter with Jesus quite regularly.
We need to dote on his resistance to fame: “But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all men. He did not need man’s testimony about man, for he knew what was in man” (John 2:24-25).
We would gain something by musing on his quiet but firm “dare” to the disciples as almost everyone rejected him, “Will you also go away?” In other words, “Here’s as good a time as any to jump ship–do it if you must!” He wouldn’t bend corners to keep the crowd.
If Jesus returned for something like a state visit today, he might stop by some big places where people are presumably honoring God in their missional ways.
But I’m going to bet that a heavy part of his time budget would be among “no-names” who never caught the bug of missionalism. They just committed to being faithful: serving some broken people, introducing a few to Christ, laying out the bread of life on a consistent basis.
Or let me say the same thing with the words of Elizabeth Patton Moss:
Saint Francis came to preach. With smiles he met
The friendless, fed the poor, freed a trapped bird,
Led home a child. Although he spoke no word,
His text, God’s love, the town did not forget.
Gordon MacDonald is Leadership editor at large and chair of World Relief.
Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
