Missional Care
By Nathan Smith
Nathan Smith is a student of missions theology and practice on both the graduate and post graduate levels who seeks to create sustainable restoration strategies that allow the church to once again be a restorative force in our culture.
I have worked as a type of missionary with an unusual people group in my own community for years. Most of my educational effort on both the graduate and post graduate level has been largely focused on how we engage this affinity group with the Christian message in a way that is restorative in nature while being both easy to appropriate and reproducible.
The affinity group that I am referring to is the tangibly broken. By this I mean those that suffer from some form of symptomology that separates them from God and their fellows. A perfect example of this population that has been growing at alarming rates is those struggling with drug addiction and alcoholism. Drug addicts and alcoholics alone comprise the fastest growing affinity group in America.
I have found that reaching a population that often has a negative opinion of Christianity because of either real or perceived harms is not nearly as hard as it might seem. But it does require some thought and sensitivity. Struggling people want practical solutions to life and faith. Engaging faith needs to provide simple foundational components for them to begin to build a restorative theology upon that is context specific to their need without giving them more information than they need.
I have found that there are three verse sets that help us engage the faith need of the broken and move them toward sustainable restoration.
Brokenness is messy. Where do we begin? Broken people that have been participating in some form of self-destructive behavior universally have an identity issue. They have lost sight of who they are and who they were created to be. Genesis 1:26 tells us that we are created in the image of God. It answers the question who are we.
Once we have begun to unpack what it means to be created in the image of God what do we do with that information. We follow Matthew’s advice and work toward loving God with all of our being and loving our neighbor as ourselves. This keeps us grounded in the identity development started with Genesis because if we don’t learn to love ourselves our neighbor is in trouble.
Now we know who we are and are committed to the idea of moving out of self-focus toward God and neighbor through love. But how do we do it? We stick with Matthew and the Great Commission. We GO out into the world, inviting people into relationship, so that we have an opportunity to share with them the experience, strength, and hope that we have found on our own Christian journey.
While this is by no means a comprehensive missional theology, it is a very effective and easy to appropriate way to engage the broken in your own communities. If you would like more information visit MissionalCare.org to view the Missional Care outline that details the process more fully.