In his soon-to-be-standard on a biblical theology of mission, The Mission of God, Chris Wright helpfully clears the fog surrounding kitsch missional terminology by providing some very clear definitions for mission, missional, missionary. Anyone remotely interested in being missional would benefit greatly by paying attention to Wright’s lucid distinctions.
My recent article on the missional movement attempts to deal with some of the thin-blooded and misconstrued conceptions of what mission, missional, and missionary mean. Wright pegs the meaning of these words with theological acumen and missiological precision with everyday language:
Mission: Our committed participation as God’s people, at God’s invitation and command, in God’s own mission within the history of God’s world for the redemption of God’s creation.
Missionary: referring to people who engage in mission, usually in a culture other than their own. It has even more of a flavor of “being sent” than the word mission itself…the term missionary still evokes images of white, Western expatriates among “natives”…[we] ought to know that already the majority of those engaged in crosscultural mission are not Western at all.
Missional: Missional is simply an adjective denoting something that is related to or characterized by mission…missional is to the word mission what covenantal is to covenant, or fictional to fiction. We might say that Israel had a missional role in the midst of the nations–implying that they had an identity and role connected to God’s ultimate intention of blessing the nations.