The Road to Heaven is Strewn with Missional Roadblocks

Decades ago, in the famous words of C. S. Lewis, I was ‘dragged kicking and screaming into the Kingdom of God’. My long-fought capitulation to Christ occurred in my office in the district of Wanchai, on the Island of Hong Kong. I have always seen this life changing experience as an example of not only God’s overwhelming Grace, but also of his sense of humour. For it always amuses me that it took place in the middle of the pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers of Wanchai then the Red-Light district of the island!

The rest is history as they say, but a permanent characteristic of that history has, from day one, been a driving passion to see people rescued from the abyss of an eternity without God that Jesus repeatedly warned about, that is being transferred from the Kingdom of Darkness to the Kingdom of Light.

Fast forward to 2025. It’s Sunday afternoon and I’ve ‘been to church’. Nothing world shattering about that you might say, Sunday is the day when most Christians ‘go to church’.

For most people present in many (but by no means all) church services today there wouldn’t have been an obvious reason for leaving with a sense of despond. For the pews were full, the music was good and the sermon biblical, the atmosphere was enthusiastic, and the people were friendly. It all looked positive.

That however is because few look deep enough.

So what is the reason for despond? The reason is that it is all an illusion created by what I call, the Transferee Mirage. This is a common characteristic of most of the few churches that are actually growing numerically, for their growth is nearly always largely due to transfers. Alleged ‘Success’ is based on an uncritical interpretation of attendance statistics which fails to recognise that 95% plus of the congregation is made up of long-term members or people transferring from other churches.

The brute reality, one that few in ‘growing’ congregations wish to talk about, is that only a very few of these new members are unchurched or de-churched, what the National Church Life Survey (NCLS) calls Newcomers. Of the hundreds of congregations in the region where I live, the proportion of Newcomers is less than 2% per year. Claims of growth are usually numerical church growth not Kingdom growth.

The first reason for despond is that the Transferee Mirage is rarely called out, so the illusion remains.

The second reason for despond is that, while we praise God for the Newcomers that there are, the numbers are light-years away from those required to achieve the rate of multiplication of fellowships needed to reverse the catastrophic decline in church memberships and Christian influence on the nation in general.

However, attending church services today you would not have any idea of this.

Then there is a third reason for despond – Missional Roadblocks.

 The number of people becoming disciples of Christ has been declining in western nations since the last century. This certainly true in Australia, where the decline is now catastrophic. This despite Jesus’ specific, I would argue most important, mandate to the Church which is to ‘go and make disciples’, a commission we have generally been failing in for decades.

We are surrounded by millions of the lost who are stumbling in a Christ-less darkness. They are the people who Jesus died for, that they may have eternal life. It is this fact that makes the Churches failure to obey Jesus’ disciple-making mandate so heinous.

So why the failure? It is to a large extent because the Church strews the road to heaven with a whole range of Missional Roadblocks. Here are a few of the most significant ones that continue to be unaddressed.

1. Cultural Intelligence – The Lack of

Cultural Intelligence is a measure of the ability to understand the times and the churning kaleidoscope of church-alien, now increasingly hostile, socio-spiritual cultural universes that Australian society has now become. Arguably, the greatest roadblock to effective mission is an entrenched low level of Cultural Intelligence in Church leaderships, i.e. a ubiquitous inability to critically examine and truly understand the mosaic of ever morphing cultures comprising 21^st century Australia.

The reality is that the Christendom society, in which and for which our church ‘model’ developed, is long gone and importantly, increasing numbers of Australians are from cultures that were NEVER IN IT! So a decreasing proportion of the population has any affinity with or knowledge of Church culture.

Churches, particularly their leaders, have failed to grasp, tragically sometimes wilfully, the cultural gap between an increasingly alien ‘church’ culture and the tectonic and rapidly increasing earthquake in the cultures comprising 21^st century society.

A result of this lack of Cultural Intelligence is a failure to understand the futility of persisting with ‘inviting people’ to come into the alien environment of church services. Such, usually ‘Event’ based, invitational strategies place a major roadblock on the road of missional effectiveness.

• Idolatry of Church form

This roadblock is what I call an ‘idolatry of church form’. At its simplest it is a bondage to church as it is, to set liturgies (written or not), to fixed times and places and to (what-we-like) styles of meetings. But its deeper manifestation is a bondage that makes the ‘form’ of church more important than the gospel imperative. While many church members are happy for ‘outreach’ activities to be organised it is on the basis that they themselves are not required to change the way they ‘do church’.

This creates a roadblock because it strangles any willingness to Re-imagine what a missionally effective church should look like in the ‘live, work and play’ cultural universes where non- Christians dwell.

• Silence of to the Lambs

The Bible makes it very clear that the Church, the body of Christ is at war. (Ephesians 6:10-18). This war is with spiritual powers (vv. 11,12). We have an enemy, the Dragon (Satan) who is making war against the ‘saints. That is why Timothy (and so we) is urged to wage the “good warfare” (1 Timothy 1:18).

However, in the church it seems to have become a case of ‘Don’t Mention the War!’, for while the Church is indeed engaged in a cosmic war, and in Australia losing badly; attend most church services and you would never know! On this vital topic, preachers when speaking to their flock are largely silent, what might be called a Silence to the Lambs.

In general, the Church promotes a comfortable variety of Christianity with no hint of the need to go onto a war footing. As the former Bishop to the Australian Defence forces, Tom Frame has commented-

“The culturally compliant strain of Christianity promoted in Australia does not oblige (people) to embrace lifestyle choices that might involve discomfort.”

The resulting impotent apathy in congregations is a major roadblock on the road to heaven for the lost.

• St Lukewarms/Christianity-Lite

In Revelation 3:14-22, Jesus paints a picture of St Lukewarms, aka the church in Laodicea.

My own observations from experience of leading churches, is that there is a general mission-blocking lukewarmness, and lack of real passion for mission to the Australian community among the vast majority of congregational members. This concern is given weight by the fact that, according to the 2016 NCLS, less than 1 in 5 Church members are willing to talk intentionally about their faith. This is equivalent to an army where only 20% of soldiers are willing to fight! The idea that such an army can win the war is surely little more than wishful thinking.

This missionally deadening apathy is a very prevalent, large roadblock on the road of effective mission.

• A Plague of Square Wheels

2025 marks ten years since I first used the term ‘Square Wheel’ as a description for most of the missional strategies churches continue to use to reach their local communities. Tragically, nothing has changed.

As I wrote in the original article on this topic (See Here), I borrowed the term from a very old comedy movie which featured a caveman who had come up an invention, namely the bicycle. However, his design had square wheels, and of course he discovered it didn’t work very well! Surprise, surprise!

Of course, it’s ok to invent something and then find it doesn’t work, we all do that, but we need to learn from the design that didn’t work before and try something different that might potentially be more beneficial. This is equally applicable to the area of local mission.

To keep on reinventing Square Wheel missional strategies, would seem to have at least a whiff of Einstein’s definition of insanity about it, which is-

“To repeat the same thing over and over again and expect different results”!

However, it seems that we in the church are extremely expert at doing just that and in fact seem to have a love affair with missional ‘Square Wheels’, of which there are far too many examples to list here but here are a few that are still regularly given a run. These are are often high resource-consuming investments, the fruit of which rarely even remotely meets the rapid multiplication of Christian fellowships requirement of the missional challenge.

1. The ‘Classic’ Church Plant. These are far too slow to be multiplied at anywhere near the rate required.

3. The Outreach Playgroup. To attract non-Christian families into the church building, where relationships can be built and then those families can be invited into normal services. But again, this is a high resource’ low fruit activity that fails to meet the rapid multiplication required.

4. The Kids Holiday Club. An example of a high resource long failing ‘Event-evangelism’ strategy that an honest analysis will show results in few attendees ending up joining the church.

5. Breakfasts, Dinners, Gingerbread House Afternoons. More examples of ‘Event Evangelism’ strategies. Very few of the non-Christians present ever become part of a Christian fellowship.

6. The Outreach Carol Service. Many non-Christians still like singing Christmas carols so they will come along. A high-resource church favourite, but in the 21^st century new attendees are a very rare result.

7. The Festival of ‘Square Wheels’. Arguably, this is the most depressing ‘Square Wheel’ of all. Usually known as a ‘Mission’ it is organized by numbers of individual churches across an area to be involved in a special missional effort over a certain period of time.

Such ‘Festivals’ are generally a collection of many ‘Square Wheel’ events which are carried out in parallel. Such ‘Missions’ require a very large expenditure of resources (both human and financial) yet still produce a very low return in terms missional fruit, certainly nothing like the multiplication required.

* Spot the Missionary

Most church leaders are good, godly, faithful, hard-working people who want to see much more missional fruit. However, this, ‘Elephant’ in the missional operations room, is a major missional roadblock, for very few are missionaries. To paraphrase WW2 Air Chief Marshall Dowding who was talking about pilots-

‘What we need is more missionaries. Without more missionaries, we will lose’.  

***

The Road to Heaven is Strewn with Missional Roadblocks. Churches could decide to remove these embedded systemic constraints in order to see much increased missional effectiveness. To do so will be difficult, very painful and and even more costly, but would be obedient to Christ, the Son, and also follow Paul’s example of being –

‘ All things to all people that by ALL POSSIBLE means (we) might save some’

However, with a very few wonderful exceptions, there is little sign of it happening, and the Church’s Sun continues to sink in the West! Hence the reason for despond.

When I wonder, will we wake up?