Love Your Neighborhood Article

The Missional Frontier

On the missional frontier, there is less of everything: goods and services, peace and order, community and belonging, etc. The missional frontier is the place and space where the Kingdom of Heaven does not reign—where turmoil, divisiveness, defeat, chaos, and violence make up the environment instead of peace, patience, love, gentleness, and self-control. A life lived on the missional frontier can be described as brokenness instead of wholeness, scarcity instead of abundance, and isolation instead of togetherness.

To be clear, this definition can be a description of any place, space, person, or community. Affluence is not equal to wholeness; poverty is not the same as brokenness. The key is to not equate our cultural standards with the beautiful description the Christian faith provides for the Kingdom of God.

The Mission of God

Christopher Wright summarizes the Mission of God as the reconciliation of all things, and the Kingdom of Heaven being where a God of Mission meets a People of Mission, in the Arena of Mission. He refers to this as the grand story of Scripture. God sent His son into the world to begin the reconciling work, which we now are invited to participate in. We can look hopefully forward to when that work is fully completed, while getting to experience that reality now by loving our neighbors.

There is one very important qualification, though…we have to follow Jesus into the missional frontier. The missional frontier is the leading edge of the Arena of Mission and where God’s missionary people are needed the most.

Today's Missional Frontier

While we would never want to minimize the very real lived experience of our neighbors living on the margins of society, the oppressive places in our cities do represent the spaces where the action is. This is where Jesus is working. 

When Jesus left Heaven, he entered into his missional frontier, which is all of creation, but spent the vast majority of his public ministry meeting the lost and broken where they were. In the Gospels, we find Jesus at the well in Samaria, at tables with tax collectors and sinners, in the barren places where the religiously unclean were forced to live. The Son of Humanity came to those who needed healing, not to the healthy. In the same way, we must meet our hurting neighbors where they are.

As we look around at the perception of the Christian culture today, there seem to be a few broad receptions of the faith: apathy, complacency, and skepticism. Here is what we guarantee—if you join with Jesus on the missional frontier, where the Holy Spirit is moving to reconcile heaven and earth, and participate in that Kingdom work, your experience of faith will not include apathy and complacency. It will be exciting and engaging. Furthermore, when neighbors are loved, community restored, and hope renewed, we believe most skepticism will also fade away as an afterthought, and Christians will be received as bringers of good news.

The invitation of Jesus to his disciples at the Sea of Galilee is the same for us today: Follow me! If you respond to that simple invitation, you will end up on the missional frontier. 

So where is the missional frontier? In the broadest sense, it is anywhere God’s space has not yet fully reconciled with our space.

By definition, it is a pretty large mission field! And yes, we need disciples of Jesus SENT into all of these places. However, throughout Scripture, God showed special concern for those who have significant societal barriers to experiencing a flourishing life. 

In our context today, many of those neighbors can be found in disinvested neighborhoods all over our nation. The convergence of so many factors—generational poverty, dilapidated and abandoned infrastructure, systemic racism, etc.—is typically concentrated in a few neighborhoods in every community.

Invitation onto the Missional Frontier

Love Your Neighborhood is a framework for engaging in this missional frontier as God’s missionary people. Together as a People of Mission, we can experience a foretaste of the Kingdom of Heaven by joining a God of Mission in the Arena of Mission.

We can bring hope and restoration to our neighbors living on the mission field. Will you join us?

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