Re-Centering Mission in the Compassion of Jesus

What is the Passional Church Movement?

"When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd."
Matthew 9:36

The Passional Church is a movement anchored in the passionate love of Jesus for the world.

Our purpose is to connect, empower, support, and resource 21st Century Christians to embody the compassion of Christ in the every days spaces and rhythms of life.

We believe in recentering the Missio Dei in the Passio Dei.

Missio Dei (Latin for “mission of God”) understands mission as an attribute and activity of God, and furthermore that the church is missionary by its very nature.

Passio Dei (Latin for "passion of God") is grounded primarily in the incarnation, suffering, crucifixion, and death (passion) of Jesus.

God’s nature is the self-emptying (kenotic), other-oriented, and sacrificial love fully displayed in the crucifixion. The passion of Christ expresses God’s inhabitation of human vulnerability and suffering.

The passional church movement offers a corrective to the ways the missional church conversation has gone astray.

Missional describes what God does, passional describes how God goes about it.

We get to participate in the mission of God, but we must do so in the way of Jesus.

Mission has at times become disconnected from the compassion of Christ.

The great commandment (love God and neighbor) comes before the great commission (go make disciples). We wonder if at times the church has gotten this backwards.

Overemphasis on orthodoxy (“right opinion/belief”) or orthopraxy (“right practice”), or orthokardia ("right heart") while disregarding orthopathy (“right pathos/suffering” i.e., experience of God), can and has caused harm.

We cannot rightly emphasize sanctification (humanity re-conformed to the imago Dei, image of God) as the ultimate completion of the missio Dei (the mission of God) unless we embrace the kenotic way of Jesus, passio Dei (passion of God).

Pathos includes thinking, feeling, and behavior, but grounds it in compassionate being with. It's about normalizing the experience of Jesus’ passion in our own missional approach.

We want to remind the church that mission flows from the loving heart of God. Its origin is the compassion of God.

We are calling for a theological paradigm shift.

We are empowering a revolution in the practice of ministry and the formation of leaders.

The Passional Movement is about:

• Reawakening a theology of compassion.

• Rediscovering the praxis of Jesus.

• Re-forming emotionally healthy Jesus-like leaders.

• Refounding congregations in the compassion of Christ.

In the words of John Wesley, founder of Methodism, we are seeking to rekindle a “religion of the heart.”