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Key: 100% Participation

How can we see 100% involvement from our church community in a culture of mission?

We must transition our church from gathering in the “stands” to playing on the “field.” 

God has supernaturally gifted every born again man, woman, and child to lead people closer to Him. Every one of His adopted sons and daughters have been uniquely equipped to shine His light. How exciting is it to see someone realize that God can use them? When you experience God using you to impact someone else’s life, you’re never the same.

But to think about one major disconnection between God’s people being gifted and seeing those gifts in action, let’s consider a sports stadium.

If you walk into a football stadium on game day, you’ll observe the largest percentage of people by far are in the stands cheering. And when you look at the field, you’ll see a small number of highly skilled people playing the game. The environment is created for the professionals to take action and the fans to cheer.

Unfortunately, this can also be an accurate description of many Christians’ experience in a church gathering. Regardless of the amount of people, often they are given an environment to observe, but not a space to get into the action.

Mission becomes something else, that happens somewhere else, by someone else. 

Though this may describe the experience of many primary gatherings of churches, most church communities do have some sort of ministry initiative that is connected to the community. To experience mission with the church, you’ll have to find the space to make another commitment to show up every other Thursday or Saturday morning (for example) to experience putting your faith into action with your brothers and sisters in Jesus.

Most commonly the percentage of people who consistently and actively show up to these community ministry times are significantly lower than the percentage who join the worship service.

So how do we reach the 100%? If we have a huge percentage of supernaturally gifted people only “sitting in the stands” and cheering but not “getting on the field” and playing, then we need to make a change. The gap in involvement won’t be closed by only better invitations to the ministries, and it definitely won’t help anyone resorting to guilt.

We need to make a mentality as well as a schedule shift. We have to see God’s supernaturally gifted family as Jesus saw the disciples. They may not have all the answers, but empowered by the Holy Spirit, they can be sent as ambassadors of the King and His Kingdom. It is thrilling to watch how God uniquely uses people, but we have to make the space to do so.

So where can we find the space to see all of God’s people activated for His mission?

Well, where do we schedule the most important practices of our church community? If we have a teaching, a worship song, an announcement, or an important need to give to, we make sure it happens during our primary gathering time. The prime real estate of our church gatherings.

To see 100% activation for mission, we must be wiling to make a change in our schedule. Whenever our primary gathering takes place, we must give everyone an opportunity to start practicing mission together. 

Do we need to send everyone out of the gathering with the instructions, “Lead the city to Jesus!”? That would be super intimidating for those getting started. Find simple steps that invite everyone to practice mission together. The transition from an environment of education to an environment that includes action may be a bit jarring for people already. So while some may welcome the change, it is important to start with simple steps that can lead everyone into a process of mission from praying for their neighborhood to learning to interact with people directly.

Mission can be a term that everyone uses with different definitions. In this activation context, we want to focus on the beginning of mission, which is creating deeper relationships with our local community. Deeper relationships are what gives us the best ability to share Jesus with others. More on that throughout the coming steps.

Implementing simple steps to learn mission during the primary gathering times is what will develop a missional culture for the entire church community. 

We can clearly see from Jesus’ example that His model of community did include teaching, but was also quite active. Just in Luke 9-10 we see the disciples were taken into the community to actively pray, serve, preach, meet strangers, love their neighbor, share meals, cast out demons, and heal the sick.

From Jesus’ example, we can see participation in the Kingdom of God is a team sport. 

What practices of missional culture could we implement during our main gathering times so that everyone can participate?