So, perhaps really just trying to break the ice, I said: “Well, I see that your church sanctuary could seat about 300 people – but somehow you have managed to ‘grow’ it down to 30. But – not to despair: Jesus only had 12 or so to start with!”

Pressing on, I asked: What would it take . . . what kind of church would prepare and send out 30 missioners this week, rather than those 30, or their leaders at least, ruing the fact that ‘golly, we only have 30 people around here anymore to ‘run the church?'”

We need local churches, if the only one in the community, and we need more than one, that preparing it’s people to go and for ‘as they go.’ Each one needs to be sent, as together we are all sent to be in mission, to be missioners. This is different than paying pastoral leaders to do religious things to us and for us, paying them to dole out religious goods and services on the church's turf. When leaders extol parishoners to go out and return with family and friends, they miss the point of mission. Attractive ministry can limit and destroy local mission; parishoners conclude they don't have to be in mission and ministry: their job, they wrongly think, is to get people into the building, into the church's programs, so that the gifted and the professionals can minister to them, if and as they come.

When they attract people to their church, they necessariy extract them from where they usually live and move and have their being (i.e. the neighbourhood, at work, where they work-out, etc.).

A church that prepares their people for mission and ministry 'as they go' will be turned around; it will be revitalized. People who share faith in word and deed (again, 'as they go . . .') will see the fruit of such witness. Then they may invite peope to come with them to the community-of-faith gatherings to also learn how to be in mission. We gather for certain wonderful things (fellowship, teaching, worship, rituals of grace and so on) and we do it well, at least we have in Christendom days. But now we don't know (to overstate it?) what to do when we go, as we scatter into Monday-through-Saturday life.

Churches that help us live and minister when we're not at the church and involved in the programs, receiving ministry there (from paid professionals and others gifted for our together-times), will come alive once more.

The work of the Church is bigger than 'church-work.'