Mission isn’t for Communities or Individuals, but for People
Mission and Learning – Part 2
Church programs or individual lives?
Is engaging in mission the job of communities of people together – or is it primarily about individuals living intentional lives of mission?
Part of the discussion following my last post on Mission and Learning was about whether missional engagement and learning should be understood as a group process or as an individual process. Is it that we each have an individual call of join God’s mission or is mission something which must be worked through in community?
Mission as the outworking of community
If mission is about building the Kingdom of God through authentic, loving relationships and supporting others, then it must be an outworking of community.
It can’t just be something we each do on an individual level.
In fact, we could define mission itself as the art of making and growing community.
And there must, at its very core, be a corporate dimension to the learning that takes place from engaging in mission. Stories need to be shared with one another, dreams dreamt out loud with others who feel similarly, and there needs to be a place for individual reflection to be challenged and drawn out through group reflection and dialogue.
There also needs to be a collaborative nature to the way we engage in mission. Lessons need to be learnt together by transferring and teaching skills, and learning together through trial and error. Working together allows us to invest resources that we otherwise wouldn’t have had, and to grow projects and ideas in a way that an individual alone wouldn’t be able to.
The problem with programs
The trouble, though, with this communal understanding of mission is that often it allows individuals to abdicate responsibility. A sense of personal responsibility is lost, and instead individuals begin to engage in and understand mission purely through a church’s programs and services provided for the local community.
Once missional engagement becomes incorporated into a system where participants no longer need to think at a higher level, suddenly programs become a barrier to learning.
Mission engagement in a way which is concrete rather than intuitive is a barrier to experiential learning.
There is no point playing at moving the furniture around if its all already been nailed to the floor.
Recovering an understanding of Personhood
Perhaps a solution to this problem of communities vs. individuals is to recover an understanding of what personhood really means. This understanding of personhood draws from the very nature of God as the trinity.
The Latin word used to describe the three “persons” that make up the trinity, is the word Persona. This was the word used to describe the masks that Greek and Roman actors would wear to portray a particular role – the outward sign of the way a particular character was related to the audience and related with the other characters in the play.
So, to be a person, rather than just an individual, we must be in relationship with other persons/people. Our person is defined by the way others relate to us and what of ourselves we relate to others. The trinity are one, but at the same time are three personas, relating to themselves in three distinct ways.
So, to become a whole human person in a philosophical/theological sense, is the integration of an inner identity with an outer persona. The mask becomes transparent so that others see our real identity.
Engaging in mission as people
Perhaps to understand the individual and community dimensions to engaging in mission, we need to build our understanding around this trinitarian understanding of personhood.
We are created to do mission in community – but as separate personas/persons/people.
We need to be one, collaboratively engaging in mission and corporately learning together from our collective experience. However, we also need to understand ourselves as separate distinct people, each with an individual calling to join God’s mission.
Engaging in mission as people enables our learning, reflection and discernment to have a corporate, community dimension, but also provides space for individual learning.
Taking personhood seriously means:
- Organising programs and projects in such a way that they enable individual people to shine through and develop whilst:
- Ensuring their individual learning and reflection can be drawn into a wider, corporate learning process.
And:
- Creating space and empowering individual people to live intentional, missional lives whilst:
- Ensuring that the corporate discernment and learning of the community is drawn into and out from the learning and reflection of the people.
What are your thoughts?
- Is this a helpful framework for you?
- Does it stand up to your critique?
- What is the practical application for you of engaging in God’s mission as a person?
Please feel free to comment and add to the discussion!
