Externally Focused Church Webinar

Last Wednesday I listened to a webinar with Eric Swanson and Rick McKinley. I've listened to and read quite a bit from Rick McKinley, and I always come away with some new insight. This webinar was no different. Below are some notes.

Four Paradigm Shifts a Church must make to become Missional

1. From How-To to Want-To

• If we are not on mission, it's not because we don't know how, but rather because we choose not to be.
  
• If we desire to be on mission, the first step is repentance.
  
• Only God can change our sinful and selfish hearts.
• We talk a lot about sins of commission, but we also need to deal with sins of omission.
  

2. From Coming to Going

• Attractional churches (how do we get people to come to church) vs. Incarnational/Missional churches (how does the church go to the people)
• It's not that one is good and the other is bad (it's not a good thing if your church is un-attractional). However, if we are going to influence the culture, we need to figure out how to be incarnational.
  
• We often believe that the world exists for the church. This is a faulty belief.
• We are the Sent people of God
• The church's best expression isn't on Sundays. It's when we see our workplaces, schools and neighborhoods as our mission fields.
• We are not here for our own agenda but for Jesus' agenda, and his agenda is about loving people.
• Which is more difficult, to get our church to go out into the community or to get the community to come to our church?
  

3. From Protection to Proclamation

• Our focus is often "Us vs. Them", especially when we see the culture all around us changing. Yet we aren't here to protect. We're here to proclaim.
• Here in the U.S., we're not going to be killed for proclaiming. Why, then, are we still in protection mode? Does God need to be protected?
• Our job is to joyfully serve and proclaim His reign (Kingdom of God)
  

4. From Relevance to Influence

• Relevance became such a hot topic for the church because we were often very irrelevant to the culture at large.
• However, many of us have stopped at relevance, and we're not even sure why we are trying so hard to be relevant.
• The purpose for relevance is so that we will have influence in the culture. That is the goal.
• We can't be so focused on relevance that we fail to preach the entire Gospel (including the difficult parts).
  

Final Thoughts

• We need to teach the people in our churches what redemptive work looks like. Their work has a gospel-based focus and a gospel-based outcome.
• Do the people in our churches know how to "Go?" What does this look like?
• Our budget has to reflect this shift
• Rick McKinley: "If you took away the work we were doing in the city, and I was just preaching every Sunday, it would make a major difference in our influence."
• Rick was asked, "How do you lead a very traditional church to becoming missional?" His response: "You have a better shot at making them missional than making them attractional. You have to be honest with your condition. If you are an older congregation that sings hymns, that is not a bad thing. The question is, are we willing to go through the process of repentance?"