TSOTTC - book notes - Think Mission

"Don’t think church, think mission!" We don’t know how many times we’ve used that phrase in our lectures as part of the FORGE Mission Training Network. FORGE is based in Melbourne, and is a year long internship for radical church planters interested in developing missional churches....We have found it terribly difficult to get people to think in a missions-to-the-First-World kind of way, but those who can have felt liberated to dream creatively about new approaches to doing and being church. ... The seemingly steadfast refusal or resistance by the church to seriously contextualize the gospel is one of its greatest mistakes and will sadly hasten its declining influence on Western society. It is not taking standard cross-cultural mission principles seriously and is therefore not taking the gospel seriously.

There is a clear distinction between thinking about church and thinking about mission, even though, there really shouldn't be. I love the quote at the top. I am probably lucky, because as a component of a ministry, I'm not about church in the standard idea of it. I'm about mission. I don't have to worry about planning out the music in our church service this weekend, what kind of material our small groups are studying, how to prep the teaching team for the next week. Instead, I get to help plan with summer mission teams, dream about community outreach opportunities, reach out to current strategic GCC folks all over the world. Although the more that I think about it, and I think this is one of the tenets of the book, church should really look a lot more like mission.