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)