Missional & Monastic

At Terra Nova Church we gather as monastics to worship together and live deeply in community and we scatter missionally to incarnate Christ in our world.

We often talk about trying to live life in both a missional and a monastic way. But what does that mean? We often talk about the church as being the Monastery. This is the place you come into to be trained up and made ready to live your life in a Christ honoring way to those you interact with on a daily basis. But it's a low walled Monastery, like St. Patrick built in Ireland. It's open to anyone.

There is a temptation on the part of all Christ followers to stay in the Monastery and create the "bunker church" but if we do this, we go contrary to everything the word of God teaches us. We must always keep the Monastic in tension with the Missional.
In past church models, there was this idea that the only time you really connected with those outside the Monastery was when the church created some sort of outreach event. The goal of such an outreach event was to get those were not yet Christ followers to come into the physical space we often refer to as "church", so that we could share Christ with them.

In learning to live missionally, you are simply looking around at the natural places in your life where you interact with those who do not know Christ and you are intentionally building into those places. It means that you have to have a social life outside of church. It means that you don't automatically put your kids in Christian School. It means that you get to know the people on your block, or at work,  not for the sole reason of pushing your faith upon them, but because you genuinely want to know them. When you honestly do life with those around you regardless of their connection to the church, you stop seeing people as targets for evangelism and instead, they become your friends. Of course, you continue to hope that they will see and know Jesus Christ as you have, but it is no longer a pre-requirement for your time.

We don’t want to live lives consumed by church activity.  We want the church to have every opportunity to be connected and engaged in our local community and in turn, our local community to have every opportunity to share life with us.  We hope this ideal is reflected in everywhere you look.  We worship on Sunday in a local cultural hub.  We hold our leadership meetings at our favorite local coffee house.  We support local business.  We open our doors to give local artists a venue for their creativity.  The people of Terra Nova Church serve others individually all over our region and serve collectively as a part of our compassion and justice initiatives.  We consider the work of serving people just as much of an expression of worship as our songs and our prayers.