Frontline Missionaries to Muslims Build New Paradigm in Mission Strategy (Part 3)

Sep 1, 2023 by Dave Doveton

By David Virtue, VOL.

VOL: How do you define church to these new Muslim converts?

ARGO: We don’t define anything ourselves. We take the Believers to the Word and have THEM define church. We recently worked on this with our local leaders. But as ever, we didn’t answer the question. We took them to the Word to find the answer to “what is church?” “Okay boys and girls, let’s open our Bibles!”

After a day of digging through the New Testament together, what they came up with is: The Church is a group of baptized Believers committed to obeying Jesus, committed to one another, and committed to doing everything they see the church do in Acts 2:37-47. Not bad.

VOL: You are quite critical of Western church structures. Explain?

ARGO: I’m actually not so much critical as I am pointing out the obvious. Stop rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Stop trying to do a better job of what wasn’t working and will never work. Wake up! There’s a new normal and it matters. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” You MUST make sense of the changing landscape and the new normal.

One problem is we tend to love our church the way it is more than we love Jesus. That’s idolatry. It’s all about us and our comfort level. We “go to Church” trying to find comfort and security in a bumpy world. Jesus didn’t describe following Him like that. The Church should be out in the world being incredibly uncomfortable and getting in all kinds of trouble. We call it “Kingdom mischief.”

I’d say most church leaders now recognize there is a problem. Great. Step one in recovery is admitting you have a problem. But they don’t know what to do. I think that’s where things presently stand. Realization and . . . confusion. We’re trying to show them there is a way forward. The biggest move of God in history is now underway. And It’s now ramping up in the West.

The problem is getting the paradigm shift. That’s hard. I understand. But once you get to the point where you realize, “Hey, this isn’t working” you have to ask yourself, “What is absolutely essential and where can we bend/change?” If your list of essentials is pages long, you won’t get anywhere.

Read here.