It Is Time to Go on Mission Again!

This is the next article in the series on the book, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission. This week’s post is contributed by Matt Regitz who is a leadership coach with Divine Renovation Network.

I grew up in a neighborhood Catholic Church on the edge of the Bible Belt. From all external signs, Christendom was hardly dead; it seemed alive to my young eyes.  Fast forward to 30 years later and this particular parish became an area-wide suburban mega-parish with 10,000 registered families.

Now, Christianity may have lost a few pounds and the Bible Belt has tightened up, however, some parishes have remained full with balanced budgets, COVID notwithstanding.

The prevailing leadership model is simply maintaining the status quo. Business as usual and past success have allowed for the maintaining of the status quo to be the prevailing leadership model.

However, the great groundswell of apathy, disconnection, disaffiliation and even hostility to the Christian culture has been crashing against other shorelines. It has now reached ours as well.

These questions remain: Do we board up the windows and wait this period out?  Do we make some saving adjustments to our budgets?  Or do we have to change something that is provocatively new and transformative?

“All it (Christian institution) needs to do is carry on in a maintenance “business as usual” mode, and in a fairly short space of time, as the institution conforms to the dominant cultural forces, its inner spirit will have been lost to Christ.” (PG 43)

But really… any change from maintenance to mission is not something new and transformative. The shift is in reclaiming the Church’s initial mission from Jesus Christ, “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations…” Matthew 28: 19.

It is time to go on mission again.

The mission is not to a foreign land, but the people in our sphere of influence. The people in our own homes and those being purged from our Church pews.

The gravitational pull to maintenance is tempting and seemingly promising. But slight reallocations in our budgets and modifications to our plans will not suffice. It will take going all in.

Missional leadership requires a reorientation of our resources to support this change.  It demands that who we hire, what resources and programs we use, where we spend our money, and how we meet and pray, must all be at the service of the mission of the Great Commission.

This is THE investment – and it is costly.  Costly in the sense that it will demand our time, energy, and resources in a new way.

The investment will feel like heavy lifting at first and for a while, however, it must be done intentionally, over and over again, until it becomes natural and normal. And thus, cultural for ourselves and our teams to operate in this new way.

And again, it will demand some things to be eradicated as those things are a bad return on our mission investment. The removals may even mean jettisoning some of the parish’s “greatest hits” from the past as those “greatest hits” may be causing this gravitational pull back into the old maintenance way of doing ministry.

These removals will also cost differently as there will be pushback from those individuals who do not buy into this new investment- and it is important to recognize that some may never buy in.

However, to maintain the maintenance model will always be even more costly.  The maintenance model spends all resources keeping the doors open (quite literally) with no investment in leaving the comfort of our parish communities for the sake of going out into the community to make future followers of Jesus.

“Leaders in a mission-focused paradigm value measuring more than counting.  Rather than being fixated on numbers, resources, and attendance, they focus on outcomes.  In other words, they evacuate a program and processes not on how many people go through them but on the impact they have relative to relationship with Jesus” Keith Strohm Ablaze (page 73).

We would never label our Church as a country club, where our members pay for a membership and the Church subsequently provides for the expected needs. We do sometimes slip into the same operating paradigm. Country clubs exist for the sake of current members but Churches exist for the sake of those not yet members. However, we must let Her members know of this principle so members too can invest in the mission of the parish instead of investing in the costly maintenance model that most parishes are currently trapped in.

I work as a leadership coach for Divine Renovation Ministries. Father James Mallon, the founder of Divine Renovation, has experienced this shift from Christendom to Apostolic Age profoundly as a pastor. He has written two books illustrating how we can address this shift by making one of our own from a maintenance model of leading and being to one of mission. Our ministry now has grown to scale the globe as this is a global crisis that must be tackled in three ways: individually at the parish, at the diocesan level, and globally as a Church.

Ask Father James Mallon if he has this all figured out and he will tell you that the work never ends; it is hard but the rewards are both temporal and eternal.

This summer, I was on a mission tour in the UK with my co-worker and good pal Hannah Vaughan Spruce. We were spending time with parishes that were intentionally investing heavily in the hard, yet rewarding work of parish renewal.

As well, many parish priests were making some of these costly cuts and reallocating resources to prioritize evangelization.  Parish teams are learning new habits and uncovering their gifts and charisms. These teams are even praying and speaking differently so the result is to lead differently.

As well, innovative methods are being employed to “reach before they teach” people with the power and saving love of Jesus Christ.

After two weeks of encounters and events, Hannah and I arrived at a small yet beautiful parish in the picturesque outskirts of London for a final Mass before my departure for Texas.  We happened to be there for the ‘financial update’ Sunday.

The finance council chair got up to share the annual report, stating first that he had very good news to report. Wow! I sat up straight. I was trying to settle into my pew as a grateful visitor yet I found my leadership coach hat slipping back out of my bag and onto my head.

The finance chair then described this good news by saying something like, “we had budgeted for our bank account to be at £200K but we have had an increase in over £3K mainly due to a reduction in general costs because of a lack of activity.”  The good news was that money was saved because “we didn’t do anything”.

What an investment!  That is the definition of a maintenance mindset.  Do not get me wrong, we have to be good stewards and operate an effective budget, but let us remember the parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14-30).

A missional mindset is risky and costly.  But in a much different way than a maintenance-driven Church that considers success as simply saving money from inactivity.  

The cost of mission is not simply the dollars (or British pounds), but it will demand a complete reliance on the Holy Spirit to drive our mission.  This reliance will not simply change budgets and programs, it will change hearts and leadership.  Maintenance will continue but it will now be a passenger, not the driver on our missional journey.

So, the cost…is it worth it?  How will we know it is?  Well, I am over-investing in it, as a family, and as a leadership coach based on what I am positively witnessing in churches investing in mission around the world.

To conclude, I know what the cost is of not making this shift – and we cannot afford it much longer.  It is hard to measure the cost of souls we cannot reach.

Thank goodness the Apostles decided to stop measuring the cost of leaving the Upper Room and simply went for it.

It sure cost the disciples a lot, but the investment has paid off immeasurably!

© 2024 Brett Powell – Leadership Where it Matters Most

Photo by Erika Giraud on Unsplash