Leadership column

Mennonite Church USA was born in 2001. In 2005, church leaders sharpened the purpose of this new denomination in the statement “Mennonite Church USA 2020: Joining in God’s activity in the world, WE develop and nurture missional Mennonite congregations of many cultures.” All vision work is hard. It’s been hard for the Executive Board, the church’s agencies, area conferences and congregations to figure out how to work on this task. We’ve “been to the mountain” and sense that God has a wonderful future for us, but the way that leads from here to there isn’t always clear.

In the process, fear is at work among us as we move toward this future. We are afraid that certain things we love about being Mennonite are slipping through our fingers. Listening to our fears while seeking God’s future has caused boards, agencies and conferences to decide that the most important work is strengthening congregations we fear are withering.

The thing we may have forgotten is that when the risen Jesus shows up, he says to his disciples, “Do not be afraid.” If we want to be missional, we begin with the belief that the peace and wholeness of God are more real and constant than sin, coercive power and brokenness. Missional people no longer wonder how the experiment of creation ends. Out of boundless love God’s mission fixes the fallen places where sin dwells in the world and makes them whole and new. God’s mode for doing this is the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

We all know that evil is real. But do we understand that evil is temporary? Jesus is alive on the throne, and of his kingdom there will be no end. This kingdom has come and is coming. This kingdom is good news and God’s preferred future. God has announced it. But let us not be confused. This kingdom is something God does in Jesus. We enter it and receive it, but we do not build it.

God so loved the world he sent his Son to the world. The risen Jesus has said, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you. Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:21-22). The fatal flaw in our failed attempts to become missional is that fear of our losses has placed congregations at the center of God’s mission.

We pour our best energies into making our congregations strong. But if we are sent as Jesus was sent, the focus of our energy must be directed to the world. If we are sent as Jesus was sent, the church cannot be static or fixed in one place. The sent church cannot be faithful without being present to those places that remain broken, alienated and enslaved.

Empowered by the Spirit, the church moves always deeper into the world’s fallenness to become a foretaste and the first voice announcing that there is a whole new creation under the reign of God.

The mission of the church in all its parts is not to build the kingdom of God. Rather, the church invites the broken places of the world that have yet to know the power of God’s love to receive and enter the reign of God.

If we keep directing our best resources to congregations hoping to keep congregations from weakening, denominational leaders and agencies will be seen as doing something to the church rather than with the church. Further, these structures will reinforce a false sense of mission in our congregations that the church is for the church’s sake. Jesus has sent us to be the church for the sake of the world.

In order to “nurture missional congregations of many cultures” denominational structures need to repent of competing for the attention and loyalties of conferences and congregations. All expressions of the church will join together to imagine changeable and nimble patterns in order to announce the love of God that has the power to transform death to life, slavery to freedom, sin to righteousness, and despair to hope.

Rather than understand the local, regional and national parts of the church as levels, they will become players on the same team, each player having its way of announcing to the world life under God’s reign. With the world’s need as the focus of the church’s mission, the church will find new ways of collaborating, relating and organizing to act with one voice and as one body sent to announce that Messiah has come for the sake of the world.

David Boshart is a member of the Mennonite USA Executive Board and is pastor at West Union Mennonite Church, Parnell, Iowa.