Since then there has been a number of others who have entered the fray including those listed below. Together they form a pretty good critic of Mr. Leeman’s scantily documented, poorly thought-out and generally uninformed article.
Leeman’s assault on the missional conversation should not be taken lightly, so I urge you to give each of these posts a read so you can become conversant with the arguments and rebuttals. Leeman may just be the opening shot of more to come.
A book review of Mike Yankoski’s “Under the Overpass: A Journey of Faith on the Streets of America.”
* Paperback: 224 pages
* Publisher: Multnomah Books (March 2005)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 1590524020
* Available on both the Sony Reader and Kindle.
I love this book. Read it from cover-to-cover in less than 72 hours. It is about two twenty-something Jesus followers (Mike Yankoski and Sam Purvis) who spend five months on the streets of six difference American cities as homeless men. They “went from upper-middle class plush to scum-of-the-earth repulsive overnight.”
As the publisher writes, it is a story about faith, identifying with the poor and discovering more “…forgotten, ruined, beautiful people than we ever imagined existed….” But it is also an examination of how other Jesus followers reacted to them – from complete rejection and contempt to wonderful acts of love. But this is NOT a book of condemnation, but of challenge, appraisal and encouragement.
Here are just two of the many stories.
When another guy walked upstairs, he, too, went to the far side of the room and plunked down his tray. On it I noticed a meatball sub and a worn brown leather New Testament. Soon all five, obviously strangers to each other, were busy eating their sandwiches.
“I [Mike] pretended to be reading a book, and Sam did the same, but the aroma of that meatball sub was killing us.
“After a couple of minutes, one of them asked the man with the Bible what translation it was.
“NIV,” he answered. “What version do you read?”
“NLT,” the guy answered.
“Really?” the girl from the other table chimed in. “I really like the NASB.”
“I guess it’s a matter of preference,” the guy in the middle said, taking another bite of his juicy meatball sub. The next ten minutes were filled with lively conversation between the five new friends. Across the room, Sam and I sat quietly, reading and reeking.
“Eventually the five ate their fill and crumpled up their wrappers. Getting ready to leave, the man with the Bible told both couples he would pray for them. Both couples thanked him honestly and said the same thing in reply. As they walked past us, Sam and I looked up trying to catch their eyes and nod a hello. But they carefully looked away. Each emptied their tray of garbage into the trash can next to Sam and turned to walk down the stairs.
“I remembered many times I had walked past a homeless man or woman sitting on the cold sidewalk, awkwardly averting my eyes and whistling to cover my discomfort. I wondered if those men and women had been as frustrated with me as I now was with the people who were walking down the stairs.” (78-79)
Then there is the story about a man named Rings. A kindhearted old chain smoking Jesus follower who lived in the cab of his pickup truck. Rings said he’d been told by God to feed the homeless.
Over the next minutes, Rings told us about his personal feeding program and invited us to help him out the next day….
The next morning Rings said, “Well, boys like I told you, you’re the answer to my prayers. I got a check yesterday, and my coolers are all empty in the back of my truck. When we finish our coffee, we’ll go to the store and buy enough food to cook up a feast. The [homeless] folks down at the park will be speechless!
“The last thought gave him so much obvious pleasure, he started to laugh, and that led to more coughing, and eventually to more cursing.
“I was impressed that a guy living in a truck cab would consistently give his entire (measly) government check to feed others in similar straits. Most homeless people we’d met blew their checks on booze and drugs within a couple of days.
“I gave him time to regain his composure. ‘Rings, who are you, really?’ I asked.
“I’m just a man,” Rings said with a wink. “Jesus saved me. Been a trucker, a carnie, a door-to-door salesman, a husband, a father. I’ve been in jail, been an addict, been a drunk. Now I follow Christ. All that I have is His. If He can save me, He can save anybody.
“We asked him to tell us more, but rings had other plans. ‘It’s been a crazy road, that’s for sure,’ he said. ‘But come on—the road up ahead is always better than the road behind. Let’s get started.’
“We walked out to his battered pickup, piled in, and drove off to a nearby supermarket. There we bought a hundred dollars worth of eggs, milk, orange juice, pancake mix, steak, tortillas, and butter. Then we headed for the beach…[where] Rings fed twenty or so that day out of the back of his truck. And what a sight that was, too. Hungry, forgotten people stood around in a circle in the foggy morning air watching an old man hunched over his propane stove cooking and smoking, cooking and smoking. I don’t think an eye ever left the chef’s hands as he worked….”
“When the tailgate feast was ready, and the first man stepped up to take his plate, rings had a speech ready.
“Do you know why I do this?” he asked his attentive audience. “I do this because Christ pulled me out of the mess I was in. then He told me to do this. You want to be free? This is freedom! Enjoy!
“And breakfast was served.” (201-204)
Great read for any Jesus follower and particularly those working with our friends on the streets. And yes, it will challenge you to see these people differently.
There has been some good private discussions going on about “experts” (in general) who pontificate on all thing missional yet don’t model it in their own lives. Michael Frost once said:
It is not any longer possible…that we sit in some command center telling other people how to go forth. I’m speaking in particular to those of you who are clergy. You cannot preach about, encourage or motivate or mobilize people into mission unless you model what missional proximity looks like. You cannot sit in some ivory tower spending days and days preparing sermons which are seeking to motivate people into mission unless you yourself are prepared to embrace that similar commitment to proximity. Do you follow what I’m saying? I’m not just talking about proximity like “our building is on the street corner on the main street with a gigantic sign and everyone knows that we are there.” I’m talking about personal, relational, and geographic proximity to people.
There is a wonderful place for dialog around the missional movement, but we all need to be doers as well as talkers and listeners — especially church leaders and those who hold themselves out to be authorities on the subject. Reminds me of what James told us, “Prove that you are real. Put the word into action. If you think hearing is what matters most, you’re delusional…” (James 1:22, The Voice).
This is one reason we want to see stories shared here at Missional Tribe. Please share what you are doing, not just what your you are thinking.
In today’s newsletter from Forge Canada, their lead article is about defining missional church. The bottom-line of the piece can be summed up in this quote, “For ‘missional church’ to mean anything, it can’t mean everything.”
How true. It seems like everybody is attempting to add the term missional to the current program they are attempting to promote or make cool sounding. As Forge Canada writes, “Leaders, churches and denominations have all used the term ‘missional’ to describe anything and everything from a woman’s fellowship to their latest evangelism program.”
Look at this diagram I found today on the internet. Tell me, what is a missional cyclopedia, missional console or, OMG, a missional zip code?!
So, do we give up on the term?
No way and Forge agrees. Like many of us they still see value in the term.
What we need, as fellow Missional Tribe instigator Brad Sargent once put it, is for “Purveyors of missional emptiness…to be sent to theological time-out until they have repented of their dilution of the term’s terms, meanings, and methods!”
Let us not give up on the term, but continue to be a humble and respectful corrective to misplaced notions.
Here is how Forge Canada defines missional church:
“The missional church vision is not a programmatic response to the crisis of relevance, purpose and identity that the church in the Western World is facing, but a recapturing of biblical views of the Church all too frequently abandoned, ignored, or obscured through long periods of church history. It is a renewed theological vision of the church in mission, which redefines the nature, the mission and the organization of the local church around Jesus’ proclamation of the good news of the Kingdom. Missional Churches seek to respond to God’s invitation to join Him in His mission in and for the world, as a sign, a servant and a foretaste of this Kingdom.”
Better than most, but still focuses exclusively on being on mission with God and misses critical aspects around the church gathered and Jesus followers living “the way of Jesus.” Missional is as much about “being” as it is about “doing.”
Michael Frost says that the missional paradigm takes seriously three fundamental doctrines; 1) Missio Dei – we are called to embrace God’s mission in this world and to go with him. 2) Participatus Christo – to participate in the work of Christ; to see where Jesus is at work and to dare to step into that context and work with him. 3) Imago Dei – all people bear the finger prints on their soul of the living God.
If we take these three fundamental doctrines seriously, Frost contends that there are at least four things (but not limited to these) which we will take seriously and that will inform our practices. Frost summarizes these in the four “P’s” of Missional.
The Four P’s
I’m paraphrasing Frost here.
Proximity: We step into the experience of those we seek to win and serve. We need to step out of our comfort zone and move into proximity of those who would not be in our normal circle of friends. Ministry happens in the neighborhoods.
Presences: We are to practice the presence of Christ in the midst of the world. We should be doing what Christ would have been doing if he was still physically walking in this world.
Powerlessness: Not spiritual powerlessness, but material or temporal powerlessness. Most Americans look at our churches and think that we represent a power base. They see us with enormous reserves of money, gigantic buildings, fabulous property – absolute power in a temporal sense. They think we will do anything to protect this power. Image if we could prove to Americans that the following of Jesus is worth more to us than the stuff of religious institutionalism. What would happen if we lost or gave up all “the churches” material wealth and only had the people left? Would we discover something about our spiritual power if we stopped relying on our temporal and material power?
Proclamation: Should we actually tell people about Jesus? If we move into the neighborhood and build relational proximity and are the presence of Jesus, going empty handed and naked as the powerless ones, sooner or later someone is going to want to know who you are and why you do what you do. The answer to that question is of course the proclamation of the person of Jesus. Without this proclamation we will be seen as just another good person. Of what value is that?
I’ve focused more on the last two because it is here where I believe much work needs to be done.
One of the Missional Tribe instigators Brad Sargent (aka futuristguy) brought to my attention a movement called The Seven Mountains.
Here is their guiding premise: “When we [Christians] lose our influence, we lose the culture, and when we lose the culture, we fail to advance the Kingdom of God.”
Now, I find this premise to be extremely disturbing, a completely non-biblical proposition and in opposition to the missional paradigm.
1) Jesus followers do not seek influence or power as The Seven Mountains movement advocates. Missionality is in part about being powerless. Not spiritual powerlessness, but material or temporal powerlessness.
2) We can’t lose something that is not ours. We live in a culture, we don’t possess it.
3) Not saying we don’t play a role, but the last time I check, God advances his kingdom, not us. And it certainly isn’t dependent on the culture one finds themselves in.
Webb Kline is one of my favorite commenter. Not only does he have good insights, but he is an evangelist and the evangelist is one of the voices that is missing in the emerging and missional conversations.
Webb agreed to let me share this story.
I have to share something that happened which speaks clearly to the discipleship/obedience topic.
A waitress, who was really moved by both the concert and our mission presentation at the bar, spent a long time talking with my wife and me. She is in her mid 20’s, I’d say, and she knows she has made some bad decisions with her life. Looking for help from God to get her act together, she began attending her mother’s church until the pastor told her that she wasn’t welcome unless she left her live-in boyfriend and stopped living in sin.
She told me that she really didn’t want to live with him, knew it was wrong and that it was also a bad example for her son. But, she said that she saw no way that she could make ends meet for the two of them without his help. She is trying to better herself and is taking classes at the local university in addition to waitressing. She thought that she could go to church where she could learn how to find a relationship with God and learn how to follow him and hopefully find a way out of her situation, but instead she was now both bitter and distraught over what happened with the preacher incident.
But, what we are doing in building this mission to the Ukrainian kids really got her attention and showed her a side to faith she hadn’t experienced in her mom’s church. Immediately, she wanted to help in any way she could. She told us she felt like she could jump on a plane with us and head for Ukraine were it not for her son. I explained that he could go too, as it would be good experience for him, although a bit young. We organize short term family mission trips, where the families temporarily adopt kids from the orphanage to stay with them and interact with them while they are there. It helps the orphans immensely and is life-changing for the entire family.
Anyway, I explained the unconditional love, grace and forgiveness of Jesus to the waitress and she began fighting back the tears. You could see the burden lifted as she began to grasp the idea of a God who would accept her at face value. She is looking forward to talking more with us.
But, here is what I see, and this is the kind of thing I experience all the time in evangelism:
This girl didn’t need anyone to tell here what was wrong with her; she already knew.
What she needed to know was that if she waited until she ‘got it right’ that she would never measure up, and that God just wanted her to give her heart to him despite how messed up her life was.
What she went to church to find, she was refused because some judgmental goof ball was unwilling to extend the same kind of grace to her that God extended to him when he got saved. I run in to this ALL the time and it is one of the biggest reasons, I believe, that people find religion offensive.
If this girl becomes involved with us in our mission, whether here or in Ukraine doesn’t really matter, her focus will change from inward to outward. She will grow more concerned with meeting the needs of others and will find true fulfillment in that, just as we all do. In the process, the sins that hold her captive will begin to diminish their hold on her because she now finds something much more worthwhile to live for.
We don’t spend a lot of time in [classic] discipleship training because we find that if we believe in someone, they begin to believe in themselves and they begin making the changes necessary in their lives as the Holy Spirit convicts. In the end, we have true missional disciples, not proud self-righteous Bible scholars who may appear religious but have little or no compassion or passion for those who are perishing. Of course, we believe this is true discipleship as well as the kind of obedience which pleases God.
All we really need to do is to go into all the world and live out the Gospel in their midst and God will take care of the rest.
Webb gives us a perfect illustration of the organic nature of the journey one takes to becoming a disciple.
In our modern thought processes we often see a persons progress towards being a fully devoted Jesus follower (a disciple) as a linear progression. This linear progression could be illustration this way:
But Ed Stetzer and David Putman, in their book, “Breaking the Missional Code” (Broadman & Holman, 2006), state that they have “come to realize that the way disciples are made is not always linear. Often a person will not move systematically from one stage to another. The process is much more organic in nature” (page 129).
The authors use this diagram (which I’ve shared before) to illustrate the point and the relationship to each function.
What do you think? Linear, organic, both or something different?
A common characterization of the average evangelical church among my not-yet-Christians friends and acquaintances is that it is judgmental and negative. And I’ve got to tell you that I can see why so many think this – because countless are. As Bono said, “Christians are hard to tolerate; I don’t know how Jesus does it.”
Here some of the things I’ve heard or read:
“All you do is focus on God’s wrath and punishment.”
“You all hate homosexuals, don’t you.”
“You condemn all other religions. It is arrogant of you to think you are the only way.”
“You’re a sexist, male dominated organization.”
“You’re against the environment and those who work to improve it.”
“All I ever saw in the church was endless bickering over nonessential doctrine and man-made rules.”
“Church! Why would I ever go there? I already feel terrible about myself. They’d just make me feel worse.”
“I rarely go to church, because the church is just there for money.”
Whether you agree or not with these sentiments, it is the perception of the general public which I find amazing since we should be known for the exact opposite — those who glow with the fruit of the Spirit, “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, [and] self-control.”
How did this happen? “This unflattering perception of the church and Christians comes from seeing Christians protesting on the streets with large signs telling people they are going to hell,” says Dan Kimball. “It comes from reading about various things Christians protest against, such as the teaching of evolution in the schools, or the removal of the Ten Commandments monument from a courthouse, or homosexual marriage. It comes from seeing Christians on television crediting God for natural disasters to punish sinners, and from being approached by Christians who ask leading questions to witness to them, putting them on the defensive and invading their privacy.”
What I’m not suggesting is that we abandon a call to repentance from sin and wrong living, but that we not make this the starting point for building bridges with the not-yet-Christian. At some point in time we have got to quit focusing all our efforts on what we are against and start being as concerned about what we are for, like the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed, the creation and the worth of every individual.
Let me remind you of something Jesus told us, “Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” The starting point is positive good deeds which then brings about the glorification of God, and I believe openness on the part of not-yet-Christians to hear the gospel message.
If you want to examine the message you or your faith community may be communicating, consider these questions I’ve summarized from Dan Kimball’s book, “They Like Jesus, but Not the Church” (Zondervan, 2007, page 113).
1. If you were to look at the sermons of your church over a period of time, would you say they are more positive or negative in tone and content?
2. What is your congregation’s attitude toward those who hold beliefs different from yours on secondary doctrinal issues? How do you talk about other denominations or Christian groups?
3. How is your church known in your community? How do you think people in your town would describe your church and the people of your church? Do they even know you exist?
4. Are there any ways your church is involved in compassion and social justice projects both locally and globally, demonstrating that the church is a positive agent for change in the world?
5. If you were to ask those you associate with daily, both inside and outside of your home, whether your talk is judgmental and negative or loving and positive, what would they say?
6. You may say that you are loving and accepting, but if someone came in to your church and began following Jesus, can you honestly say that that would be your foremost concern, not what they look like or how they dress or whether they drink or smoke or what language they use?
Looking at history, God seems to periodically shift the epicenter of his kingdom work, i.e., the place/people who profoundly shape the theology and praxis of the church for the rest of us. It appears to be an east to west progression.
I wonder if some most of the decline of the church in North America and the apparent indifference of its people to the “gospel” (however you want to define the gospel) is a reflection of God once again shifting the nexus of the kingdom to the west?
January 29, 2010 
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A book review of Mike Yankoski’s “Under the Overpass: A Journey of Faith on the Streets of America.”
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