Les Henson
Relationship is a central value of a missional church community without which you have neither community nor mission. I like to use the word relationship rather than community because healthy functioning relationships make a community a community. I suggest that sociologically, a community is a historically and socially dynamic set of relationships, continually growing in its identity, and bound together by 'principles of relationality'. It is born when a group of people who have something in common, nationality, religion, social class, ideals, or simply location, share their life together for a commonly agreed purpose. Communities are; thus, both people and life centred while focusing on an agreed purpose.
In many cultures of the world, community and relationship are more important than individual identity. However, we live in a hyper-individualism culture, which means that we have to address the autonomous individual's cult, which distorts our understanding of both community and church. As the church, we need to continually rediscover what it means to be a life-giving community and be open and accessible to those who are not yet the people of God. Because human identity is bound up in relationships, we are impoverished if we do not belong to a community where we can be accepted and grow in self-understanding through meaningful interaction with others. We become whole people through belonging to healthy communities, and therefore mission concerns the restoration of broken communities and the healing of broken people.
Thus, the church is to be a relational community, which embodies the mystery of salvation and the potential for the transformation of humanity in its own life. It is to participate in the mission of Christ, reconciling all things to God and to one another, including all of creation in and through Christ. Therefore, it is only natural to think of mission as forming communities of grace and of salvation that brings healing to a fractured world, fracture communities, and fractured individuals.