In a lot of churches there’s a quiet tug-of-war that nobody names. The people who love Sunday morning worry that outreach is pulling volunteers and money away from the core. The people who love outreach worry that Sunday has become a comfortable club. Both sides mean well, and both sides are tired. What helped me stop seeing it as a tug-of-war was a pair of old, odd-sounding words: modality and sodality.
In the 1970s, missiologist Ralph D. Winter gave names to two structures that Christians have used for most of church history. Charlie Cotherman, Executive Director of the Center for Rural Ministry at Grove City College, reintroduced me to the framework, and it has shaped every ministry structure we’ve built at Living Faith.
The modality: the church that tends the found
The modality is the local church in its ordinary, ongoing form. It includes all ages, all stages of life, all levels of commitment. It gathers weekly for worship, administers the sacraments, cares for its members, teaches the faith, and gives every Christian a community to belong to.
Your Sunday service is a modality expression. So is the Wednesday night Bible study, the small group, the pastoral visit, the children’s ministry.
I like to think of the modality as the homestead. It tends the found. It forms disciples through the long, slow, ordinary work of preaching and prayer and fellowship and the Lord’s Supper. It isn’t mainly a sending structure. It’s a sustaining one.
The sodality: the structure that seeks the lost
The sodality is a task-focused mission structure that exists alongside the church. It’s organized around a specific purpose, usually asks for a commitment beyond ordinary membership, and tends to be more specialized, more mobile, and more outward-facing than the local congregation.
History is full of them: monastic orders, mission societies, campus ministries, Bible translation organizations. The Salvation Army, Wycliffe Bible Translators, and InterVarsity are all sodalities.
So is The Garage at Living Faith. It draws on our church’s people and resources, but it’s organized around one task: fixing cars for people in need and sharing the gospel through those relationships.
Why they need each other
Paul writes, “For the body does not consist of one member but of many” (1 Corinthians 12:14). The modality and the sodality aren’t rival visions of what the church should be. They are different organs in the same body.
Without the sodality, the church turns inward. It becomes a homestead with no frontier, perfecting its internal rhythms while the community around it goes unserved.
Without the modality, the mission structure has no roots. It serves the community but has no community of its own to offer. It produces no disciples who go deeper. And frontiers without homesteads eventually get abandoned.
That’s why I say in Turn the Key: “The modality tends the found. The sodality seeks the lost. The body needs both.”
What this looks like on a Tuesday night
Here’s the practical payoff. When you start an outreach ministry (a garage, a community dinner, a homework club), you are not draining the church’s core work. You are adding a sodality expression to a healthy modality, and the two should feed each other.
At Living Faith, the people who serve at the garage on Tuesday evenings bring that experience back into Sunday worship. Picture a volunteer who spent Tuesday evening with someone whose car was the only thing between them and losing a job. That person hears Sunday’s sermon on loving your neighbor with different ears. And the Sunday congregation supplies the prayer, the fellowship, and the theological grounding that keeps the Tuesday volunteers going when the work is hard.
Neither can fully thrive without the other.
Think of the shepherd in Jesus’ parable who leaves the ninety-nine to find the one lost sheep. He doesn’t abandon the ninety-nine to wolves. He leaves them safely tended while he goes. Both the going and the tending are acts of faithfulness.
Three ways to put this to work
If your church feels that tug-of-war, here are some steps that have helped us.
Name what you already have. Get your leadership team together and make two columns. In one, list every modality expression: worship, classes, groups, care. In the other, list every sodality expression, anything organized around a specific mission outside your walls. Many churches find the second column is short, or that it’s full of one-time events rather than ongoing work.
Stop funding them as competitors. If outreach and Sunday ministry are fighting over the same line in the budget, the structure itself is creating the conflict. Our garage gets only 5 to 10 percent of its budget from the church. The rest comes from customer contributions, individual donors, in-kind business partners, and community fundraising. A sodality can draw on the church without draining it if you design it that way from the start.
Build bridges between the two on purpose. Tell outreach stories on Sunday morning. Pray for the frontier by name from the pulpit. Invite outreach volunteers to share what they’re learning in small groups. And make sure the people on the frontier are still being fed by the Word and the table. Don’t let one become a subculture that never sees the other.
A question for your leadership team
The discussion questions in the back of the book include this one, and it’s a good place to start: Where do you see the modality and sodality competing in your church context? How might you reframe that competition as complementarity?
Don’t rush past the first half. Most churches have a real sore spot here, maybe a volunteer shortage, maybe a budget argument, maybe just a feeling that “the outreach people” and “the Sunday people” are two different churches. Name it honestly. Then ask what it would look like for each side to strengthen the other.
A church that chooses between tending and seeking is choosing to be incomplete. You don’t have to choose.
If you want to walk through this with your elders or ministry team, the free leader’s guide has every discussion question from the book arranged as a planning series. Chapter 2 is a good week to bring coffee and an honest list.