Mission Statement on Mission

Of the making of Mission Statements there is no end. And we had a great afternoon brainstorming the Mission Statement on Mission - one of our 45 Mission Statements that we committed to when we produced our new Mission Statement on Mission Statements, which you may remember was:

"To produce Mission Statements covering all 45 "arcs of action" as identified in the "Mission Statements Missional Mission Meeting".

Which, to be honest, wasn't a great Mission Statement, but we all agreed to it

Anyway. It got heated at times. Everybody agreed that we wanted to draw new people into the Beaker Folk, but we couldn't agree, at least in fine details, to why. Some saw it as expanding the Kingdom of God, while others talked about "salvation", and "eternal life", which many saw as irrelevant to the Mission of a church in the 21st Century.

And for some people, the concern was that if we put our energy into our Mission, and lots more people arrived - for whatever purpose - we'd have to do something about it. And would we by having these new people have carried out the Great Commission? Or would we have to develop a Mission Statement on the Great Commission to understand this?

And if these people arrived, obviously we wouldn't want them to detract from our core Missional activities, whatever they were. Oh no. Too many people with children might distract the Community from Mission to children's work. And we hadn't identified that as one of our 45 Arcs of Church Mission Statements. Except in a subsidiary way, in our Mission Statement on Worship, where we agreed we would be working for "godly", "peaceful", "meditative", and "ordered" worship - which just about covers it for kids, I reckon.

So the Mission Statement on Mission is as follows:

"To work out God's mission quietly, in a godly manner, hoping that by doing what we're doing, in the way we do it, we will attract into God's Kingdom [whatever that means] just the kind of low-maintenance people who'll want to do the things we do, in the way we do it, without too much encouragement, education or radical behaviour change, but will be unaccountably keen to part with their money."

I'm not saying it's terribly inspiring. And the bit in brackets is the subject of a minority report dissenting from its inclusion.

But at least everybody could sign up to it.