Measuring What Matters

A Review of Missional Renaissance:
Changing the Scorecard for the Church

by Reggie McNeal

(©2009, Jose-Bass, ISBN: 978-0-470-24344-2)

A robust language like English encourages neologisms, usually by borrowing from other languages or combining existing words and forms in new ways to express novel concepts. Some of these new words are useful like “internet” to explain something that has never existed before with a term that is readily accessible. Other times, the new word is either pointless or just sounds wrong. The first time I head the term “missional,” I thought it was a tedious invention. It had a grating sound, belying an entirely unnecessary creation. The word “missionary” was entirely adequate to cover the topic, or so I thought.

I had read a number of bloggers who were strong advocates for a “missional church” but nothing I read online did anything to disabuse me of the impression that they were doing little more than stating the obvious with a new buzz word. But then I read Reggie McNeal’s latest book, Missional Renaissance. For the first time, I found an author willing to take the time to explain what being missional is really about. McNeal not only explains what “missional” means, he makes the word seem necessary.

In his introduction, McNeal points out three shifts in thinking and behavior that mark the missional movement. First of all, he says that our current focus on internal ministry to our selves will shift to an external focus on others. Instead of our primary focus being on meeting the needs of the membership, we will see ourselves as part of a community and the bulk of our ministry efforts will be aimed at serving outside the church. Next, we need to move from spending time on program development and move toward people development in terms of our core activity. Finally, our leadership agenda should move from being church-based to kingdom-based. As a result of these changes, how we measure what we do in terms of how many, how often, and how much will shift to evaluating how externally focused our ministry efforts are, how well our people are developing, and whether or not we are kingdom-oriented. The rest of the book fleshes out these three key ideas and provides scorecards for each.

On the surface, this does not look like much of a shift. The reader can be excused for thinking this is just one more in a long line of Church Growth books majoring on  how bad the institutional church has been and minoring on what we need to do differently. What sets McNeal apart, however, is that most other books say the church needs to do something different. while McNeal begins by saying that we need to be something different. He says that if we talk about church as a place to go and something to do, we have missed the entire focus of the missional movement. Instead, he tells us that church is something we are called to be. It is not something we join. It is something we are. It is not a place or a vendor of religious goods and services. Rather, it is “the people of God partnering with God in his redemptive mission in the world,” (p. 24, italics in original).

Just to give one example, in discussing the scorecard for moving from measuring programs to helping people grow, he contrasts the activities of the program-driven model with that of the people development culture.

The program model would measure:

• Number of people involved, attending, or participating

• People recruited for church services

• Church activities

• Spiritual disciplines

• Money gathered and spent on church needs

• Church turf

• Church-centered “opportunities for growth”

• Staff devoted to program management

The people development culture might measure

• Relationships that people are intentionally cultivating

• People released into service

• Personal life development

• Money spent on people rather than buildings and administration

• Life turf (home, work, school, community, and so on)

• Life-centered growth

• Staff engaged in coaching people for their personal development (p. 112)

This book is radical in concept since it overturns so many of our preconceived notions about what the church is, what we should be doing, and how we should be doing it. What sets McNeal apart from the cacophony of criticism that comes from many who have grown disillusioned with the current state of Evangelicalism is that he provides an inspiring alternative that turns us back to the mission as outlined in the New Testament. Not content to point out what is wrong, and in fact doing very little of that, McNeal points forward into a future that is truly inspiring and energizing, one that offers hope and an alternative to the program-oriented church we have become accustomed to.

by Rick Presley