A Letter from Pastor Mark - November



Dear Friends,
By now, I hope you have noticed that my monthly newsletter over the past few months is about how the church can become a missional movement.  Review: a missional movement is when every disciple who is a part of the church is so in love with Jesus that they live his message in everything they do, and Christ’s message goes viral passed on from person to person.
In order for the church to become a missional, movement it must contain missional DNA or mDNA.  The six elements composing mDNA are the following:
· Jesus is Lord
· Disciple-making
· Missional-incarnational Impulse
· Apostolic Environment
· Organic Systems
· Communitas
So far we have looked at the first two elements, and this month we are investigating     missional-incarnational impulse.   This means that as a church we will realize how important it is to live Christ’s message in the world.  When Jesus became flesh and entered into the world, we call that the incarnation.  The church becomes incarnational when we allow Jesus to live through us and we become Jesus to the people in the world today.  

For a church to embody an incarnational impulse, the people of the church will know how     important it is for each person to engage the culture and spread the goodness of Jesus into the world through how we live.  A church that has a strong missional-incarnational impulse will love to get together to worship.  They will thrive on the energy and re-charging that happens when they gather and worship with other believers.  However, a church with a strong missional-incarnational impulse will know that what they do in worship together serves only to   strengthen them to go back into the world to become the visible expression of Jesus to those who need his love and healing.  The missional-incarnational impulse drives us not to seclude ourselves from the world behind the four walls of the church building; it drives us to become a part of the world around us so that Jesus, through us, will be real to others. 
When we surrender to the missional-incarnational impulse, then we truly become the church in the world, not the church separated from the world.
Next month we will see what is meant by the element of apostolic environment.
In Christ’s Abundant Love,
Pastor Mark




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