Out With The Old, In With The New

In this post, Rob Weingartner, Director of the Outreach Foundation and member of the PGF leadership team, offers his reflections on missional renewal in the church today. 

   Even as we celebrate the gift of God’s Son and “tell the old, old story,” we are invited to think in new ways about mission and the church. One way to describe the growing focus on the church’s missional renewal is to contrast old ways of thinking with some of the newer ways. For instance, we used to describe mission as a program of the church; now we’re discovering that mission is the purpose of the church. We used to talk about the church’s mission; now we seek to discern how God is at work in the world and participate in God’s mission. We used to plan and program to get the world into the church; now we’re working on getting the church into the world. We used to argue about whether mission was primarily about evangelism or justice; now we know that saving souls and compassionate action and advocacy are essential dimensions of the one gospel of Jesus Christ. We used to believe that the mission field was “over there” somewhere; now we know that the mission field is everywhere, including right here! We used to think that only those called to special service in far off places were missionaries; now we know that in our baptisms every believer is commissioned into a missionary society. We used to focus primarily on what we had to give and do in mission; now we understand that as we serve our lives are being transformed. There are things we must receive and learn.

   Mission used to be from the West to the rest; today it is from everywhere to everyone. The Presbyterian Global Fellowship seeks to lift up the truth that mission is not about church activities. It is about the church’s identity. God did not create mission in order to give the church something to do; rather, the Father who sent His Son out of love for the world and poured out the Spirit upon the disciples calls the church together and sends it into the world to bless the peoples of the earth in Jesus’ name.

   Think about your life and about your congregation. Are you thinking in old, outmoded ways about the church and mission? Maybe the time has come for a new beginning!

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