Do you have a mission statement?  I think ours says something about being an authentic community of Christ followers or some such statement.  Have you ever really sat and thought why you have a mission statement?  There was probably some point in the late 1990's early 2000's during some church growth seminar in which some well meaning person equated the church with the business world.  They saw the business world creating vision statements and mission statements and thought it would be a good thing to adopt into our Christian marketing portfolio.

But have you ever really thought about what a mission statement is, it's real purpose?  A mission statement says absolutely nothing about the organization to which it is attached.  It is meaningless.  A mission statement is merely the means by which an organization controls the perception of others of what it is that the organization does.  In reality the organizations work is not only different than the mission statement, it is antithetical.

Take the insurance industry.  A health insurance company may have as it's mission statement; we exist to provide our customers with the best health care options at the lowest price.  That however is not the mission of the company.  Their real mission is a simple economic one; to spend less money than they take in.  The insurance company however realizes that if they owned up to this real mission that no one would do business with them.

But you may say, the church is different than a business, we are real and authentic.  Really?

There are a couple of different reasons why a church would have a business statement.

1. To attract Christians from other churches with code words that denote that they are indeed cooler than your current church.

2.  To act as a placebo for the congregation to believe that by having a mission statement they are actually being missional.

Let's unpack those.

Often the mission statements of a church are front and center on their marketing, their slides, their literature, etc.  When in print however this is nothing more than a co-opting of the secular marketing world's idea of 'branding'.  Make no mistake that a slogan is nothing more than a public relations vehicle by which you attempt to control the public perception of your purpose, it is not your real purpose.  It is not our job to control the public perception of our intent.

I also say that a mission is often a placebo in that it becomes a mantra by which the organization lulls itself into the false reality that they are actually doing what it says in their mission.  By having a mission statement we allow individuals and organizations to mask over the shadow missions that are the reality.  We slowly begin to believe we are actually fulfilling our mission by the very virtue that we have a mission statement.

If a church is truly being a church then a mission statement is not only needless, it is boarder line idolatrous.  After all, there is but one mission; and it is God's.  When we adopt mission statements that causes the attention of the individual to fall on the church, rather than the God of the church.  So please, drop your mission statements, precisely so that you may embrace your missional calling.