I was amazed after watching this video. As many of you know I have been thinking and talking a lot about missional church lately and what it means to be missional.What does it take a 100 year old church to move? here is a quote from a from ‘sets ‘n’ service where I found the video.”Moving a 100 year old church means moving people, not merely a building. As we all know but can at times forget the church isn’t bricks and mortar its people. People visibly gathered together to celebrate Jesus, and people who though invisible at the moment, will in God’s time come to a saving knowledge of Christ and join the visible community who are bold enough to celebrate Christ 100 years and beyond!”

In his book Building missionary congregations Robert Warren writes:

“A church effectively engaged in mission will see that participating in the missio dei will involve shifting emphasis from a focus on the life of the local church, and a concern to keep everyone in it happy (which too easily passes for ‘pastoral concern’), to a concern for the world in its needs, joys and struggles.

The work, for example, of engaging with the sick, the grieving and the dying, as well as with the moral issues of such roles in society as those concerned with wealth creation or medical ethics, is indeed pastoral. It is the shift from the maintenance and ‘keeping people happy’ mode in which the church all too often operates, into engagement with these situations that will bring the church into the pastoral-in-mission mode of operation.

For such a shift to take place, the structure of the local church will need to be simplified, and new priorities adopted. However, much can be done within existing ways of operating. The intercessions each Sunday in public worship give a marvellous opportunity to engage with the hopes and fears of everyday life. Home groups geared outwards to engage with whole-life issues can also contribute significantly. The description of the Christian faith as ‘the Way’ gloriously expresses this understanding that the faith is not so much about doing different things, as it is about doing things differently.”