Would you say that the people of your church are ordering their lives in such a way that as individuals and groups they are effective at reaching and meeting the needs of their non-Christian friends and neighbours?

If the love of God is being demonstrated and the Gospel is being presented regularly and faithfully then to that degree your church has missional power. This is different from simply having church services that effectively preach the Gospel. Those two things are not mutually exclusive at all and ideally you would have both. Great services that no one gets invited to are frustrating. Rubbish and ineffectual services that you have invited someone to, much more so.

But when the pace of life is fast and people are constantly distracted how do you motivate people to live in faithful disciple-making ways? There are so many things that keep people from investing time with people both inside and outside of the church, so how do you overcome this?

As church leaders we might be tempted to meddle with structures. Doing this feels like substantial and necessary work that also makes the church leader feel useful but fresh organizational structures rarely are the solution.

This week I took a day trip to London and headed to Westminster Chapel to hear my friend Todd Morr teach a group of leaders about missional living and the importance of missional communities. Todd put the questions like this:

• Do you want missional churches?
• If the answer is ‘Yes’ then you probably need missional communities or small groups.
• But to have missional communities you need missional people.
• So how do you get missional people?

This elicited a few different responses but his answer was that in order to be a missional person you need a missional heart.

So how do you get one of those?

In John 15:5 (CSB) Jesus says,

I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in me and I in him produces much fruit, because you can do nothing without me.

In order to be a fruitful people, both in terms of holiness and mission, we need to be a remaining or abiding people. No point trying to do either of those things without me Jesus says.

And how can we teach and train and help people to go about their lives in conscious abiding? Todd’s answer was prayer. To go about your day in prayerful abiding. Constantly asking God to be with you as you walk your dog, head into a meeting, play with your kids, talk to your spouse, go to the gym, take out the bins (and Todd did tell a story of how he got to know his Buddhist neighbour doing that chore) or whatever it is do it prayerfully, do it with the help of the Spirit of Jesus asking and expecting to engage with the Spirit throughout your day.

Life on mission can be hard, messy and difficult and there will be straight up times when you won’t want to do it. True for leaders, true for people. And we’ll only do it joyfully when our hearts are motivated by love for God and love for people. Willingness to sacrifice is a heart issue.

As a church leader when I feel the need to tinker and mess with things I need to remember that that will likely have limited results. Work directed at the heart, my own and the hearts of those in my church, and encouraging them to turn to Jesus in all things will bear much more fruit.