Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch on Church and Mission… and Jesus

A few years back, Mike Frost and Alan Hirsch wrote a book together called The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2003) (pdf samples available on this page) in which they wanted to say, among other things, that the whole notion of a missional church paradigm is not just an add-on programme to the church but right at the heart of what it means to be the church of Christ.

The challenge they present is for us to think seriously what it looks like to consider church where mission becomes the organising function.

Typically, evangelicals have understood their ecclesiology (their understanding of the church) around the four main functions of the church – worship, fellowship, discipleship (formation, teaching, rebuking, encouragement, etc.), and mission (engagement with the world, evangelism, church growth, etc.).

There is an obvious interplay between these functions. But, in general, say Frost and Hirsch, churches tend to organise themselves around the worship function. So, how does the church show its concern for building community and fellowship in its people? Through our worship services… with refreshments served at the end… How does the church form disciples? By making sure there’s a teaching slot at the heart of the worship service. How have we done evangelism? We’ve invited people to our worship meetings, or simply hoped that they will come in to our meetings. Or we have disengaged mission from the church completely, or have outsourced it somewhere else, putting it in the hands of parachurch organisations, for instance.

But what Frost and Hirsch do is look at how mission might become the organising principle of the other three. What if we organised church around mission? Is it possible to imagine what worship, discipleship and fellowship organised around mission would look like? And they have come to the conclusion that we form disciples better this way. If we see mission as the organising function, we build a community by taking people into mission, where discipling happens on the go.

It’s important to say that they are not playing worship and mission against each other, but they are wanting to recalibrate worship, fellowship, and discipleship around mission.

More recently they have pubished another book, called ReJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2009) (pdf samples available on this page) which is very helpful in adding a certain perspective in bringing us back to Jesus. They’re still concerned about the centrality of mission, but they want to think about the missional church in light of the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus – and to say that a rediscovery of the Jesus of Scripture will mold our understanding of God, church, and the world.

Towards the start they write:

‘We must admit that both of us are somewhat obsessed with mission and what it means to be a missional people. But we both remain convinced that it is Christology that remains even more foundational and therefore the primary issue. We have elsewhere asserted that it is Christology (the exploration of the person, teachings, and impact of Jesus Christ) that determines missiology (our purpose and function in the world), which in turn determines our ecclesiology (the forms and functions of the church). Both of us (together and apart) have written books about a distinctly missional form of discipleship and ecclesiology. In writing this book, we feel we are now getting to the nub of the matter. We are going back to the founder and recalibrating the entire enterprise along christological lines’ (5-6).

‘In short, it’s about re-Jesusing the church’ (7).