Missional Church has been quite the buzz in the evangelical church world. As with any buzz, it has a polarizing effect. People often adopt or reject the concept before they have properly understood it. This creates a bandwagon effect, uncritical early adopters who adopt an idea, jump on the bandwagon, without depth of understanding of what they have committed themselves to. Alternatively, there are the hypercritical naysayers, who naysay missional church as a fading fad. Ironically, the hypercritical naysayers commit the same error as the uncritical early adopters. Both responses fail to adequately investigate just what “missional church” is. This three part series will address the dangers in transitioning to missional church, either as a new church plant or an existing church.

Clarifying Missional Church

The missional church is not a church with a mission. All churches have a mission. Stated or unstated, all churches practice some kind of mission. It may be keep to the immoral out, to keep sound doctrine in, to pray for revival, or to send missionaries to the nations. Each of these churches is an example of church with a mission. The missional church, however is church as mission. In the words of Darrell Guder, the challenge “is to move from a church with mission to a missional church.”[1]
In light of this important distinction, it is critical that transitioning churches understand the difference between church with a mission versus church as mission. To clarify the difference, consider the following chart:

Church WITH a Mission                                                Church AS a Mission

What You Do         (Task)	Who You Are       (Identity)
Optional                  (Elective)	Essential               (Core)
Extraordinary       (Elitist)	Ordinary               (Everyone)
Project Focus        (Event)	People Focus       (Disciple)

Traditional churches view the church as a church with a mission, at best. This mission may be sending missionaries to the nations, transforming the church neighborhood, or guarding and promoting sound doctrine. While all worthy missions, these are all examples of church with a mission. They focus on a task to be performed not and identity of the church. As a result, the mission of the church becomes optional not essential, creating a first and second tier Christianity comprised of ordinary and extraordinary Christians who do mission. At best, this accomplishes some mission but often remains very project focused not disciple-making driven.

What then is a missional church? Guder writes: “With the term missional we emphasize the essential vocation and nature of the church as God’s called and sent people.”[2] Missional churches are missional in nature and vocation. Missional is who they are, and as a result, mission is what they do. It is not simply a both/and. If mission as nature does not precede mission as vocation, mission-as-identity before mission-as-task, then churches that attempt to become or transition into missional church will either fail or fall into syncretistic missional ecclesiology. A depth of understanding that mission is what we are before it is what we do will be absolutely essential to planting or transitioning a missional church.

This post is adapted from my recent talk Why Missional Church Doesn’t Have a Shelf Life

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[1] Darrell Guder ed., The Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America, 6. This was a landmark book for the missional church movement in North America. Many missional leaders and organizations can trace their roots to Guder’s seminal influence on American ecclesiology.

[2] Guder, The Missional Church, 11.

Church planters often know the “latest book to read.” We reference pragmatic books constantly. But are we reading the right books?

Pastors and church planters can find it difficult to read the books we need to read. We are often overwhelmed with emergency reading—reading in areas of the church where we are deficient (e.g. children’s ministry, church discipline, missional church, counseling, best practices). We scour blogs and books for practical insight, inevitably digesting half-baked ideas and practices.

If we aren’t careful, we can get indigestion by consuming this stuff. Our diet devolves. We get bogged down in best practices instead of diving deeply into the Bible and our culture…As theologian-missionaries, we should all strive to cultivate and practice a theology that is missiologically oriented and a missiology that is theologically grounded. Not all missiologists follow this difficult, interdisciplinary path. Sometimes the integration of theology and missiology is up to us, the practitioners. We possess the high calling of shepherding the church in truth, wisdom, and love. Read the rest of this article to get a little help can go a long way.

Read the Rest of “Reading Good Missiology“

I can’t believe that the International Bulletin of Missionary Research (IMBR) is now free online. This is top flight missiology. I’ve been a subscriber for years. Several articles have had a profound impact on my missiology. I may add to that list from some of the articles in the most recent issue of IBMR on Partnership. Consider an excerpt from Jonathan Bonk’s (author of the very helpful Missions & Money) introductory editorial:

The deficiencies of the discourse of ecclesiastical partnership become apparent when applied to the organs of our own bodies. It would be bizarre to suggest that each of the thousands of parts that compose a healthy human being is in some kind of voluntary partnership with all of the others. Much more is at stake in the interconnections, interpenetrations, and interdependencies within us than the word “partnership” can be made to imply. A detached body part is dead. In the most profound and ultimate sense, as with the myriad parts of any living body, so all Christians are interconnected, utterly interdependent members of one body. As such, we dare not confine our practical thinking about how to fulfill the church’s mission to the restricted range of possibilities suggested or permitted by a contractual term, even one so potentially rich and intimate as “partnership.”

Read the Rest of “What About Partnership“

As church leaders it can be difficult to read the books we need to read. We are often overwhelmed with emergency reading—reading in areas of the church where we are deficient (e.g. children’s ministry, church discipline, missional church, counseling, best practices). We scour blogs and books for practical insight, inevitably digesting half-baked ideas and practices.

If we aren’t careful, we can get indigestion by consuming this stuff. Our diet devolves. We get bogged down in best practices instead of diving deeply into the Bible and our culture. What we need is good theology and missiology.

Read the rest at the GCM Collective Blog

Okay, so maybe American missions work is driven by the same kind of pragmatism that characterizes so many American churches. Is that really such a big deal? Well, stop and consider the differences between planting pragmatically-driven churches in America versus planting them in most Majority World contexts. Such churches in America have the luxury of building themselves upon the foundations of a culture imbued with several hundred years of Christian influence and ethical norms. Fill a room with nominal Christians, as pragmatically-driven churches do, and you still have a dame that looks half way decent. She’ll dress up alright.

There’s some good thinking in this issue of 9 Marks, though I don’t agree with all of it.

Okay, here are my thoughts on the so-called Missional Tree (I surprised no one has commented on this). The idea of a missional tree is pretty cool and potentially helpful; however, this tree is an incomplete, second generation tree. I realize that these books are practitioner oriented, with the exception of Guder, but there’s not one biblical theology of mission listed. What about Chris Wright’s landmark The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative or Stetzer and Hesselgrave’s forthcoming Mission: God’s Initiative in the World?

All the books listed here were published within the past ten years (and we need fresh publications like these). Missional theology has been in existence much longer. Look no further than Ed Stetzer’s fine historical work on the Meanings of Missional to uncover some of the missional greats. But before there was Stetzer and Guder there was Bosch, Walls, Hiebert, Kraft, Van Engen, etc. These missional redwoods tower over many of the books features in the missional tree, both in history and content. Consider this rich description of the missional church from Andrew Walls first published 20 years ago:

Christian faith is missionary both in its essence and in its history. At the heart of the Christian fiath lie assumptions about the Lord and the Ground of the uinverse and the common nature of humanity and affirmations about Jesus Christ that forbid its appropriation to any person, group or community as a private possession. The conviction that Jesus is Lord and the testimony that Christ is risen cannot mean that much unless they are to be shared. But both the faith of Christians and the nature of the church are missionary in a much deeper sense, more closely related to the “sending” idea from which the word “missionary” came…The mission of the church is not simply to add to itself but to bear witness that by his cross and resurrection Christ brought back the whole creation and defeated the powers that spoil it. In this sense all Christian life is missionary, as is the work of Christians and their commerce and habits of life, their art and music and every activity that demands choice.

If that isn’t deep and wide missiology, then I don’t know what is! Walls has influenced many missiologists. His first-hand experience in Africa outpaces the missional wisdom of many popular missional authors. We do well to get under the shade of such missional redwoods, to think their thoughts after them, and plant churches that sink strong missional roots into the soil of our cities, towns, and churches.

Alan Hirsch advocates that Missiology should shape Ecclesiology.

Christology ? Missiology ? Ecclesiology

Ed Stetzer advocates that Ecclesiology should precede Missiology.

Christology ? Ecclesiology ? Missiology

Which do you support and why?

Being a “missionary” in North America is common parlance among church planters and missional advocates, and though center of gravity of global Christianity has certainly shifted to the South and East, I don’t think that puts the West on an even mission field with many non-Western places. To be sure, we should all redemptively engage peoples and cultures with Pauline missionary passion, but more than passion is at play in planting missional churches.

In order to effectively mobilize and strategize for the global glory of God, it seems that the missional movement needs to hold missio Dei in one hand and missio ad Gentes in the other.

Read the rest here…

I am posting some notes and reflections from the Total Church conference here.

Ed Stetzer lists at least 10 Elements to Christian Movements:

1. Prayer Prayer must be a conviction that establishes its priority. Before we see movemental Christianity, we will have to be praying, asking God to change us.
2. Intentionality: We will also need to show the intention of being movemental (see the next 8 elements). As of now, I believe our focus is primarily defensive and incremental, not intentional and exponential.
3. Sacrifice: Change will not come without giving something up.
4. Reproducibility: Movements do not occur through large things (big budgets, big plans, big teams). They occur through small units that are readily reproducible.
5. Theological Integrity: Churches wanting to be involved in transformative, movemental Christianity hold firm and passionate positions on biblical views.
6. Incarnation: Movemental Christianity recognizes that the gospel is unchanging, but the expressions and results of the gospel will vary from culture to culture.
7. Empowerment: Movements only occur when the disempowered are given the freedom, and then take up the responsibility, to lead.
8. Charitability: A movement of God cannot be contained in a single movement or theological tradition. Therefore, movemental Christianity requires charity to maintain our firmly held convictions while rejoicing for and speaking well about those with whom we differ but are being greatly blessed by God.
9. Scalability: When God begins to move, and believers allow movement Christianity to begin to grow, structures must be able to rapidly re-size to not stifle such movements.
10. Wholism: Movemental Christianity will practice wholistic ministry much in the way of Jesus.

Read the whole post here.