Maintenance and mission

This post is from the defunct blog "Dying Church"

Is the task of a mission community to maintain itself? Organizational constraints quickly eclipse the theological assumption that particular communities exist for their mission. The community owns property, has staff, makes commitments, and must therefore ensure that the budget is raised and the program continued. Maintenance replaces mission as the guiding principle of the community's life. The challenge confronting the church in North America is a radical one. It is that neither maintenance nor survival is an adequate purpose for any particular community or ecclesial structure. The organizational structures that guarantee maintenance and survival are often missiologically questionable. These structures may be transformable, but they are not justifiable as they are... Business as usual will not work if our local congregations are to become missional. We must be willing to question our value systems, particularly with regard to property, wealth, and endowments. We must scrutinize the criteria of success that we transfer to the church from our society... (Missional Church, pp.240-241)

Comments

[Wayne]

I am somewhat new to the conversation about the missional church. I am actually sympathetic to the issues raised. But some of what I read seems to be strawman-ish. For example: "The community owns property, has staff, makes commitments, and must therefore ensure that the budget is raised and the program continued. Maintenance replaces mission as the guiding principle of the community's life." I don't see why owning property, having staff and making commitments necessarily means you're doing maintenance, whereas (by implication) not owning property, not having staff and not making commitments means your on mission.

[Darryl]

Wayne, I think you're right. I think we could say that maintenance can *tend* to creep in and replace mission, but it is possible - necessary, actually - to be missional, even if there are maintenance issues to deal with.