Missional Fatigue

4 comments | Aug 16, 06:58 PM | | by Earl Creps

When I visit casual contemporary and traditional churches these days I’m meeting what could be called “a new kind of Christian:” believers who used to attend aggressively missional congregations elsewhere in town. Often a thirty-something couple with two or three elementary age children, these transfers sometimes seem motivated to explain to me their presence in more inwardly-focused settings. In the telling of their stories some patterns have emerged…

Stage 1: intense involvement in the ministry of a missional congregation (however defined), often as key leaders

Stage 2: weathering the financial emergencies, ministry shortfalls, and discipleship pressures that inevitably accompany this kind of enterprise

Stage 3: realizing that the stress of serving in a climate that one friend of mine called, “a miracle on the verge of a disaster every day” is never going to end

Stage 4: identifying a gracious exit strategy, often explained as the need for better children’s or teen ministry

Stage 5: transitioning to another high-quality church that is more family-focused.

Stage 6: feeling somewhat guilty over abandoning the missional scene to do more conventional church

I have absolutely zero evidence that this type of experience is widespread, but meeting several high profile examples has made me wonder if “missional fatigue” receives very little comment because of #6 above, those living with it may just not want to talk about it much.

So, if you will spot me that this “new kind of Christian” is out there, perhaps this sort of fatigue might be inherent to any form of missional ministry simply because of the burdens that it involves: minimal financial support, aggressive newcomers attempting hostile takeovers, handling lifestyle issues, and the fact that the thing has to be invented almost a day at a time. Along the way, leadership is dealing with people who don’t know the Christian “script” and will not be ready to be the Sunday School Superintendant three months after their first visit.

Seeing radical changes in the real lives of unchurched people is a wonderful thing, but dealing with it is also very draining because it involves so much more than packaged, programmatic measures. No wonder the characters on Law & Order: SVU keep mentioning that they are only allowed to serve in the unit for two years, although most of them have been around for much longer than that. Similarly, some hospitals put limits on the number of years a staff person can work in their trauma centers.

What if we thought of ministry the same way, producing some questions about Missional Fatigue:

1. Does it exist, and how widespread would you estimate it to be?

2. Is this why half or more of church planting core groups generally end up leaving the plant to return to a more established environment?

3. Could missional ministries anticipate fatigue onset and develop strategies to do something about it? What would that look like?

4. Is all of this just a normal and natural life-stage issue that revolves around the needs child-raising, perhaps leading to the conclusion that we should build this assumption in our thinking so that the fatigued don’t need to feel as if they are betraying something? See 1 Corinthians 7 on the impact on marriage on ministry, for example.

At the end of one conversation with an M-fatigue couple, I told them that their current sojourn in a mainstream church seemed like more of a seasonal than a permanent thing to me. I encouraged them to think this way and to look for opportunities to return to the “mission field” one day, perhaps when their children are older. I hope I was right.

Your thoughts?