Discovery Number Three: A Mission-Shaped Church instead of a Church-Shaped Mission

The Sunday morning church service comes once a week. That hour occupies such a small sliver of a person's waking hours in a week (about 1%). Yet churches pour a huge amount of time and resources into thinking about, planning for and executing the weekly gathering. And no matter what they do or how well they do it, the vast majority of people will never show up or even consider showing up. This is true for nearly every church I know.

The Sunday morning worship gathering is what churches in North America know how to do. Those with bigger staffs, newer buildings and more money are obviously able to do it at different level from most churches. Regardless of size, however, churches tend to measure their success based on that one hour. It's the primary focus. It's the main entrance into the church family. It's how churches teach, train, disciple, encourage, communicate, and evangelize. And yet, year by year, despite such massive investment, the number of people who show up for such gatherings gets smaller and smaller.

The North American church has a serious problem. Instead of having a mission-shaped church, we have a church-shaped mission. What we typically do to reach and disciple people is rarely based on our imagination for the mission of God.

Churches tend to shape their mission based on what they already know how to do. How to grow? Get a better worship facility! How to stop losing people? Preach more compellingly! How to revitalize your church? Make worship more exciting! The list of "fixes" goes on and on. The most common solutions for "how to fix a declining church" focus on doing the Sunday service better or promoting it more effectively.

The common theme here is that all of these so-called "fixes" reveal a church-shaped mission, not a mission-shaped church. Typically speaking, churches aren't reforming the shape of the church in order to meet the changing shape of our world. Churches can't seem to imagine anything different.

Church of Peter and Paul, Northleach, Cheltenham, UK

In late June, we made our way to the little English Cotswold village of Brimscombe. It's not unlike other Cotswold villages: slate roofs, stone walls, beautiful buildings, bucolic countryside. Looks like a scene from a BBC movie.

Brimscombe is also akin to neighboring towns in another key way. Its parish church, which once stood not just at the center of town but also at the center of community life, has been dying for decades. By way of comparison, the nearby town of Northleach has a glorious old cathedral known as the Wool Church. It was built centuries ago with money from woolgrowers. Today, that church shares a minister with seven other churches in towns close by. One minister for eight churches because the membership of those churches is next to nothing.

Church of Peter and Paul, Northleach, Cheltenham, UK

The story in Brimscombe was similar just a few years ago. But something dramatic has changed. Church officials have backed a pioneering church worker and his team who have built an unbelievable mission project. This project, which occupies a key spot in central Brimscombe, looks nothing like church as we know it. This is a town where church leaders are reshaping church to meet the mission rather than trying to shove the mission into the shape of the church. 

We were blessed to have lunch with Will Mansell, the lead pioneer for this impressive undertaking. They are blending thrift shops with a pay-as-you-can breakfast/lunch café and even a monastic community. Below, you can see the board that highlights all eight enterprises housed in this "church facility" that employs almost 50 people.

Will and his team aren't just focused on creating jobs or selling used furniture. Most of their workers and "customers" aren't Christians, and that's the point. This isn't church for the already churched. It's a mission-shaped church meeting people where they are and where their greatest needs lie. They're focusing on discipleship and on forming small Christian communities. Sometimes they do this openly. Sometimes it feels covert.

But at no point do they pass out fliers for the Sunday church service. They are bringing church into the lives of people all throughout the week. They gather at various points and times during the week for varying forms of spiritual growth and worship. Together, all of these endeavors fall under the umbrella of the Brimscombe Anglican Church. It was both breath-taking and eye-opening.

Photos from the Brimscombe Mill, Brimscombe, Stroud, UK

The Anglican Church has been angling toward these kinds of works for decades. Since the 1980s, English churches have seen the growing crisis of church decline. While some church leaders doubled down on modernizing worship, on reforming church bureaucracy, on improving the preaching, or on raising up healthier church leaders (all church-shaped mission ideas), some began to tinker with new ideas of how the church might find new wineskins for its mission (mission-shaped church).

These endeavors were often led by "ordinary Christians" or by "fringe parishes" that no one traditionally looked to for ideas or models. But as they took root, church leaders like Bishop Rowan Williams took note. They began not just to back these fresh expressions of church. They amplified them. The idea of a "mission-shaped church" became the title of a major study published by the Anglican Church in 2001. In it, they encouraged churches to look at how to adapt to better bring the gospel into the lives of the unchurched.

While not every bishop has understood this or been on board with these ideas, most have whole-heartedly endorsed this not just with words but with resources. Having visited Brimscombe and seen the possibilities with our own eyes, I can begin to imagine it for myself. Instead of a church-shaped mission that waits for the world to figure things out and come on over for our great or not-so-great worship services, shouldn't we invest in a mission-shaped church that goes into the world so that we might form Christian communities among the unchurched where they are? I'm very excited to see what God might do.