Missional Living: Ask Yourself These Questions

As I am reading “Total Church” (which I can already recommend to everyone), Steve Timmis and Tim Chester encourage people to imagine that they are a part of a church planting team in a cross-cultural situation in some other part of the world and answer the following questions:

What criteria would you use to decide where to live?

How would you approach secular employment?

What standard of living would you expect as pioneer missionaries?

What would you spend your time doing?

What opportunities to share the gospel would you be looking for?

What would your prayers be like?

What would you be trying to do with your new friends?

What kind of team would you want around you?

How would you conduct your meetings together?

They make the point that most Christians expect missionaries in a foreign country to ask these questions, but we seldom, if ever, ask these questions of ourselves, in our own context. We are all on the same mission for God. Just because some of us do not need a passport, doesn't change our mission. We need to ask ourselves these question regardless of our location or vocation. This whole mindset that causes us to think radically about overseas missionary activity while remaining complacent in our own city and neighborhood is not biblical.

Missional living is not just something missionaries engage in or something for us to do once a month; missional living should be our lifestyle. Ask yourself these questions, and then in another month, ask them again. We need to start asking these questions and never stop.