Simply Missional

Written by Ed Stetzer and Eric Geiger

It was early in the morning when they came. There were two short knocks at the door and, when it opened, a polite greeting from one of the police officers standing in the stairwell.

Dell Computers has shattered the warehouse myth. Most companies love big warehouses. They feel safe with lots of inventory on large shelves in massive warehouses, always ready for that next order. In their minds, the well-stocked warehouse confirms the belief that they will always be able to meet customer demands and customer expectations.

Dell disagrees with the warehouse approach. In the technology business, the product literally rots in value on the shelves. Because Dell does not want their best resources on the shelves, they only keep two hours of inventory. Which means that if you order a PC on Dell.com, the parts will not arrive to Dell until two hours before your PC is shipped to you.

Dell wants their resources out there, on the street. Not in the warehouse, where the resources merely gather dust and produce no impact. So Dell has designed a very strategic process to move their resources to the street. Sadly, many churches are betting their futures on the warehouse myth.

Most churches build big warehouses and shelve a bunch of Christians (those rows look suspiciously like shelves). They design attractive programs to "retain" people in the sacred warehouse, keep precise records of how much inventory (people) is on the shelves and brag about their warehouses being constantly open. And warehouse managers love to show other warehouse managers their newest warehouses while dreaming together of bigger and better warehouses.

God is calling churches to shatter the warehouse myth, to change their warehouses into strategic distribution centers, where people are distributed as salt and light to the world. Some churches are strategically challenging their people to be out there, and these churches have a simple process that moves people from the warehouse to the street. These churches are simple and missional.

They are simply missional. We are often asked if there is a relationship between our two books, Breaking the Missional Code and Simple Church. Is there a relationship between a church being missional and a church being simple? Read Full Story »