Missional Culture

Woodward says we are born into a world filled with words. The world was created with words. Words create worlds. Words bring life and death. Words shape us and form us. Language is central to any culture, because it is through language that a people have a narrative to inhabit. With our tongues we can build a missional culture, and with our words we can destroy it.

His test is a common sentence. When someone says, "Let’s go to church," the phrase reveals ignorance of the nature of the church. The people of God are the church. We go to a weekly gathering. We attend a worship service. We are the church. He then asks the question this page keeps: what does the language of the congregation you serve reveal? Do the words people speak reveal that God is missional in his essence, that we, like him, are a sent people, and that we are to live in the world for the sake of the world?

Chapter 16 treats language, with artifacts, as central to the web on the cross. A slogan can be one of those artifacts of speech. Imago Dei in Richmond says, "Reflect One, Restore Many, Renew All." Trinity Grace in New York City says, "Joining God in the renewal of all things." He lingers on the second because it says God has a mission, that we are invited to join it, and that the mission is cosmic, communal, and personal. The words are doing theological work whether or not the congregation notices.

are cultural goods. With Crouch, Woodward says we become culture makers when we create cultural goods to be shared, from omelets to poems, from bridges to laws. An essential artifact for Christ followers is the Holy Scriptures. Inside that divine-human artifact is the narrative that shapes a missional congregation. History, poems, proverbs, psalms, prophetic utterances, Gospels, letters, and apocalyptic literature show God on mission. He says the Spirit was breathing on people to write those scriptural books as they were on mission, so later readers can see how the good news incarnates itself into cultures through time.

He asks how the congregation approaches that artifact. Do they seek a theology of mission in the Scripture, or do they recognize that Scripture is a byproduct of mission, a missional theology forming them to join God? Do they look to Scripture to inform or to transform? Do they spend more time critiquing the Scriptures, or do they allow God to critique them through Scripture? Do they treat the Scriptures as static or dynamic?

The bread and wine are primary artifacts as well. They are earthy and divine. Jesus takes the elements of the Passover meal, the memory of rescue from Pharaoh, and transforms them into his body and blood. Woodward asks whether people at the Table remember that Jesus' body was broken for all and his blood spilled for the whole world, and whether they then seek to be bearers of God's saving purpose, or whether they view themselves as exclusive beneficiaries of grace. Jesus extends the table of fellowship to tax collectors, prostitutes, and those left out by the religious system. Hymns and inherited liturgy are artifacts too. Congregations with missional cultures, he says, take their cue from former generations and write new songs for new times and new places, and thus become culture makers.

The dominant story of a culture gives meaning to its language and artifacts, and it forms a community. Woodward says the narrative of Scripture provides the church a sufficiently truthful account of our existence, his quotation of a line he footnotes, by which the community can navigate ambiguity. The presuppositions a community holds, knowingly or unknowingly, rest on the primary narrative they live by. The narrative is the guiding story that helps them answer, What is God's calling for our church?

He wants that story judged the way Stanley Hauerwas judges narratives, by the richness of moral character and activity they generate. The local test is whether the community's narrative is shaping people to love Christ more, to be more like him, and to engage the world so that God's kingdom becomes a greater reality.

Three things travel with the narrative: theology, stories, and doctrine. Theology is a systematic approach to the story across biblical, historical, contextual, practical, and philosophical work. A missional culture, he writes, needs a move from a theology of mission to a missional theology, because Scripture is created by people on mission, for people on mission. Stories means the primary stories shaping the group: Scripture stories that help them love God, neighbors, and enemies; testimonies; stories from the church's history; current missional stories retold. Those retellings convey what is valued. Doctrine is the community's primary teaching, formal and informal. He asks whether it reflects a missional theology, and he cites Paul's charge to Timothy to watch life and doctrine closely, because for Paul doctrine is a practiced theology and a lived spirituality.

In chapter 16 he says the church's calling is something we discover. It asks who God is calling the church to be and what God is calling her to do. His own assumption, stated there, is that conversion is necessary for every man and woman who does not live under the reign of God, and that mental assent, without a concern for personal and global transformation, falls short of conversion as he describes it. The good news is an invitation to switch stories and join God in the renewal of all things. Truth, as he is convinced of it, is discerned communally through Scripture as narrative, through the focal images of community, cross, and new creation.

are procedures or routines fused with meaning. They answer the question, What are our core practices? Woodward sorts them into rites, practices, and liturgies, and he tells the reader to keep assessing the congregation while reading.

Rites of passage dramatize birth, graduation, marriage, and death. He points to the early church's catechism for new Christians from among non-Jews, four phases marked by three rites: welcome into the church, enrollment of names, and baptism, documented in The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus around A.D. 215. He asks whether the congregation has a missional catechism with rites of passage, as a way to instill a missional DNA. Calendrical rites give a social meaning to time. The Christian calendar, as he walks it, remembers Christ's birth, life, death, resurrection, and coming, and the birth of the church at Pentecost. Advent, Epiphany, Ash Wednesday, Lent, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter, and Pentecost each carry a missional memory. He asks how the congregation uses those rites to give time a missional meaning in a habitual way.

Practices, or spiritual disciplines, reshape desire and point the heart. He quotes Dallas Willard's definition: activities in our power that we engage in to enable us to do what we cannot do by direct effort alone. Liturgies are thick practices. Drawing on James K. A. Smith, he distinguishes thin habits, such as brushing teeth, from thick practices, rituals of ultimate concern that form identity and carry a vision of the good life. Chapter 16 says identifying core practices moves a church beyond espousing values to living them. He places rituals on the left of the cross and ethics on the right because liturgies shape who we become. The core set is what the community considers most vital. Other practices should be encouraged as well.

Some may consider that thinking about the church as an institution runs contrary to creating a missional culture. Woodward answers that institutions shape and mold people and represent stability, and that institutions can be an ally to movements. He writes that institutions will be with us forever. The problem he names is the institution taking on a life of its own and rewriting the story that gave it birth, or overstepping its bounds until bureaucracy makes death inevitable. He writes, "Families, church and government are good; the wrong use of them is what is bad." Institutions answer the question, How will we fulfill God's calling together?

He borrows Miroslav Volf's definition, reached with Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman: an institution is the stable structures of social interaction that develop when at least two people do the same thing together repeatedly. By that definition the church is an institution. Volf's two factors, as Woodward uses them, are the pattern of power distribution and the internal cohesion of the group. A missional institution, he believes, needs a polycentric approach, equippers enabling fellow priests to live to their sacred potential, so the whole body is activated. He asks how many people understand themselves in the words of 1 Peter 2:9.

Structures, symbols, and systems travel with the institution. Structures ask how power is distributed, who decides, and how the group is organized for its strategy. He asks whether authority is hierarchical or revolving and dispersed, whether there is a bottleneck or a more open-source approach, whether cohesion comes by rigid authority or by relationships and collaboration. Symbols, from a wedding band to the architecture of the room, signal what the community prizes. Systems ask which behaviors are celebrated as faithful and which are frowned on as disloyal. Chapter 16 calls this cluster the missional method. Means ought to correlate with ends. He describes Kairos West LA's pattern: missional spaces, discipleship communities of about fifteen to fifty, and worship gatherings, including the Westwood dollar dinner for UCLA students every other week.

Every community has moral convictions that inform how it lives. Those convictions are the ethics of the group. Equippers remind people that ethics are not limited to outward compliance, because God is concerned about the heart. Missional ethics is relational. The community lives in covenant with a holy and missional God and is called into healthy relationship with one another and with all of creation. Equippers encourage the community to do good in the world for the sake of the world, and to avoid doing evil. Ethics answers the question, What does it mean for us to be faithful and fruitful in God's mission?

He asks whether that understanding is more substantial than how many people come to a service and how large the budget and building are. Chapter 16 names the thin scoreboard in plain speech: butts, bucks, and buildings, or, in the United Kingdom, people, pounds, and pews. Quantity alone, he says, makes a shallow and thin definition of success. He quotes Henri Nouwen on the difference between successfulness and fruitfulness. Success comes from strength, control, and respectability. Fruit comes from weakness and vulnerability.

The inner shape of ethics, for him, is being, doing, and reflecting, repeated as a cycle. Doing proceeds from being. In Christ a people have a new identity and a new telos, joining God in the renewal of all things. Being is abiding. He points to John 15:4. Doing is bearing the fruit of the Spirit and walking in the Spirit. Reflecting is praxis, action and thought informing each other, which is why he lingers on Paul's line to "practice hospitality". Chapter 16 then offers pictures of marks: the creedal marks read by Charles Van Engen as proclaiming, reconciling, sanctifying, and unifying; Hauerwas on a people who can risk peace, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, and love; Fowl and Jones on servants who forgive and feed the hungry; Stassen's picture of Jesus' incarnated life; and the five equippers' focal concerns. Vision, once calling, practices, method, and marks are named, is the next hill in six months to a year, a living expression of faith for day-to-day life.