JR Woodward - Creating a Missional Culture: Equipping the Church for the Sake of the World

As our best leaders know, in just about every Western cultural setting that the church finds itself, we are facing something of a crisis. The somewhat gloomy situation brought about by long-term institutional and spiritual decline has been forcing church leaders to ask some pretty probing questions about the churchs identity, purpose and practices. Its fair to say that there has been some panic, as well as a fair bit of denial. But a crisis there is anyway.

This is not all bad. While the theological, spiritual, organizational and missiological malaise poses a direct threat to Christendom church-as-usual, at the same time it presents us with an opportunity to clean out, to do some necessary pruning. Any decent crisis does this: when it is well-faced, it facilitates for the movement or organization a radical recovery of its defining ideas.

This is perhaps truer of the church than it is of other organizations. As people who believe in the authority of Scripture and the unique role of our Founder, we must constantly return to the selfsame energies that initiated the early church if we are to truly rediscover a sense of who we are, why we are here and how we must go about being the church that Jesus intended in the first place.

Learning systems theory asserts that all learning takes place when programming is subjected to questioning (L=P+Q). An organization begins to (re)learn when it applies honest, exploratory questioning to all key aspects of the organization/system. This questioning in turn initiates a search for better answers than the ones currently on offer. Applying the lessons of learning systems theory, then, what are the purposes of the church? What is the nature of our core message, and how do we actually embody and extend it? Is the gospel really capable of renewing the world and transforming the hearts of all human beings? Did God really mean for the ecclesia to be the focal point for the wholesale renewal of society? Are we really called to be a colony of a much-disputed kingdom, or did Jesus actually intend that we become the chaplains of a so-called Christian civilization in the West? Why do we do things the way we do? These are questions that take us to the roots of the church.

Undergoing such radical questioning initiates a serious pursuit for the rediscovery of our most basic scriptsor, to use another metaphor, our orienting mapsin an attempt to reorient or resituate ourselves in the world. In many ways it can be said this is exactly what constitutes the heart of re - newal. And if we do it well, with all the intellectual integrity and spiritual passion that we can muster, we will recover a much more authentic understanding (and experience) of ourselves as ecclesia than the one we now possess.

Having spent much of my adult years grappling with the factors that together form a dynamic, distinctly missional ecclesiology, I also fully believe that the ecclesia (church) that Jesus intended was specifically designed with built-in, self-generative capacities, and was made for nothing less than world-transforming, lasting, revolutionary impact (see, for example, Mt 16:18). We were almost certainly not meant to become a domesticated civil religion! As far as I can tell, Jesus intended us to be something of a permanent revolution no less than an expansive outpost of the kingdom of God. When we are not actually being that , then we have got to take stock in a big way.

We get glimpses into the design and purposes that Jesus intended for his ecclesia in various texts scattered throughout the New Testament. But few are as clear, authoritative, and significant for the church as those found in the book of Ephesians. Ephesians is rightfully considered the constitutional document of the church. Everything about it has the ring of constitutionality. To use another metaphor, it has long been considered as containing the basic genetic codes of the churchparticularly in its Pauline expression. Therefore the images of both constitution and DNA grant us direct clues to the defining nature of the text. This can be no less true for Ephesians 4:1-16 as it is of the rest of the book. I am on record as being utterly convinced of the sheer power of the typologies of ministry (what JR Woodward here calls the five equippersapostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers, or APEST) laid out in this passage to bring renewal to the life of the church.

Not only does Ephesians 4:1-16 point us to a dynamic manifestation of ecclesia, but it implies that there can be no lasting effectiveness to the churchs mission without the fully functioning ministry that Jesus has once-and-for-all given (v. 7) to his people. We are called to be the fullness of Jesus in the world, and according to Pauls logic in Ephesians 4:1-16 we achieve this not through the twofold shepherd-teacher model of ministry and leadership that we have become so used to, but through this fivefold, equipping approach.

For reasons I (and my co-author Tim Catchim) have tried to explain in The Permanent Revolution , by effectively exiling the apostolic, prophetic and evangelistic (APE) functions from the life and structures of the church, we have done terrible damage to the churchs capacity to mature. In order to respond to the missional challenges that we now face, we have to learn again what it means to operate with all five equippers . In particular, we must work doubly hard to integrate the exiled ministries of apostle, prophet, and evangelist back into the functioning imagination, language, leadership and ministry structures of the church. In the end I do believe that without these more generative and adaptive ministries, we will neither advance the cause of the church in our time nor achieve any significant and lasting missional impact.

JR knows this from deep personal reflection on the Scriptures, as well as from being involved in leading-edge church planting in difficult circumstances. As a result, you are holding a hard-won treasure. This is not some fluffy, shallow, exploration of the topicthose caricatures abound already. This book is well written, theologically well considered, and peppered with the kind of missiological insights that only an apostolically inclined leader can bring. As a long-time practitioner of these ideas, JR brings a distinctly practical edge to the equation, and so the reader is given real, live possibilities to implement locally. But by uniquely combining missional theology with the concept that each equipper creates a certain culture, which in turn shapes meaning and practices in the community, JR has developed an excellent heuristic for leaders to actually make Ephesians 4 a living reality in the local churches. By actively enhancing each distinct equipper-culture, and by developing what he calls polycentric leadership, he provides churches with a direct pathway to activating the dormant energies contained in Jesus ecclesia.

The sociologist Alvin Toffler once rightly observed that the illiterate of the future will not be those that cannot read or write. Rather, they will be those that cannot learn, unlearn and relearn. If you are indeed willing to unlearn the cloying, missionally impotent ecclesiology of the traditionalist paradigms, and subsequently relearn what the Bible itself (and the history of missions) directly says in this matter, then there will be much hope.

Alan Hirsch