Missional Buzz
My friend Eric Marsh of Long Beach pointed me to a piece called “Missional Buzz,” written by Tim Conder that is in the winter issue of Leadership. It deals with the word, “Missional.” I agree with him that it has reached the status of buzz word with many churches, parachurches, cell groups and home fellowships calling themselves missional.
He offers a few common commitments of missional churches:
- They align themselves holistically with God’s theme of redemption.
- Programming and finances are directed outward.
- They are discontent with spiritiual formation as primarily cognitive assent.
- Embrace ethnic and social diversities of local communities is becoming a moral expectation.
- They are passionate activists when they find the pathways and trajectories of God’s redemptive presence.
I like the list and agree with it in many places, yet I’ve noticed that everytime someone creates a list in an effort to define what “missional” is, it differ from others. Here is a brief list from a paper by Tim Keller entitled, “The Missional Church,” dated June 2001 and found in an older version of the Gospel and Heart course used by Redeemer at some point in their ministry.
- Discourse in the vernacular - the missional church avoids “tribal” language, stylized prayer language and pious “jargon.” The missional church avoids ever talking as if non-believering people are not present.
- Enter and re-tell the culture’s stories with the gospel - To engage is to show sympathy toward and deep acquaintance with the literature, music, theater, etc. of the existing culture’s hopes, dreams, ‘heroic’ narratives, fears. To re-tell means to show how the gospel engages that human drama offering freedom. (or something like that.)
- Theologically train lay people for public life and vocation - training lay people how to renew and transform the culture through all vocations (callings.)
- Create Christian Community that is counter-cultural and counter-intuitive - Christian fellowship must be more than just friendly supportive relationships, but must also embody a ‘counter-culture,’ showing the world how radically different a Christian society is with regard to issues like sex, money, and power.
- Practice Christian unity as much as possible on the local level - We should have a bias of cooperation in support of other congregations. In-fighting plays in to the common ‘defeater’ that Christians are all intolerant.
Other useful books include Darrell Guder’s, “Missional Church,” in which you won’t find a nice and tidy list defining missional. Ed Stetzer has a great book called, “Breaking the Missional Code.” It also avoids a neat list, but has tremendous insight on the shift of the church from our focus from Church Growth to Church Health, and now Missional Church. (found on p. 48-49 of his book.)
What can we conclude about what it means to be missional? Perhaps it is one of those things that is OK to leave in postmodern ambiguity. Maybe we should be talking about missional fuzziness. I’ve got my eyes looking for everyone elses definitions. I suspect over time I’ll get a clearer sense of all the many facets of what it means to be missional, but in the mean time, all of the above pieces work for me.If I’m pressed into a corner, I use the distinction I first picked up from Frost and Hirsh in “The Shaping of Things to Come.” There “missional” is held in contrast to “attractional” which was the standard paradigm the church employed during Christendom, but is no longer as useful in today’s context. Read the book.