Risk Taking Missions

Bishop Robert Schnase, a name even harder to say than “Doepken,” talks about the importance of “Risk-taking mission and service” in his book, Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations.  We head out on a mission trip to Alabama on Friday.

Risk-Taking Mission and Service includes the projects, the efforts, and work people do to make a positive difference in the lives of others for the purposes of Christ, whether or not they will ever be part of the community of faith.  Some churches practice Risk-Taking Mission and Service by sending work teams to Mozambique, Russia, Mexico, or Honduras, or they assist closer to home in clean up and reconstruction after hurricanes or tornadoes.  Other churches focus on projects within their own community, such as after-school programs for at-risk children, food banks and soup kitchens, and ministries or witness aimed at forming public policy.  Others get involved in ministries to senior adults in retirement centers, regular services for the incarcerated, and efforts to challenge and change unjust or inhumane systems that affect the poor.

Risk-Taking Mission and Service is one of the fundamental activities of church life that is so critical to practice it in some form results in a deterioration of the church’s vitality and ability to make disciples of Jesus Christ.  When churches turn inward, using all resources for their own survival and caring only for their own people, then spiritual vitality wanes….

The word mission turns church service outward.  Mission reminds congregations that Christ’s compassion, grace, mercy, and love extend to the entire world, and these fruits are cultivated not only within the walls of the church or among the people of the Body of Christ who are regularly seen and already known.  Mission refers to the positive difference made in the lives of people beyond the inner circle of the church.  Mission spreads the faith by exemplifying the compassion, mercy, and justice of Christ in the world.  (pp. 83-85)