lifeasmission

What is Missional?

June 23, 2008

This blog post is part of a SynchroBlog – below you will see the names of about 50 folks who are all posting today on the question, “What is Missional?” This is an effort launched by Rick Meigs to try and help people get a handle on where others are coming from when they try to answer that question. The hope, at least mine, is that we would be able to save the word “missional,” from the tragic fate of the word “awesome,” which has become so general and overused that it has virtually lost its meaning.

Type the word missional into Google and you’ll come up just shy of 1.5 million results (Rick’s at the top!). Bottom line, missional is an adjective being used by more and more people who are trying to communicate something specific about things like theology and the church (or maybe even furniture arrangements!).

It is imperative to begin by saying this. All things missional emerge from a certain understanding of the gospel and salvation. Missionally speaking, the gospel is not a message (much less a system of belief) to which we need to give intellectual assent to or decide for ourselves what to do with. Rather, it is the ongoing work of God in the world, the new reality inaugurated in Jesus, which addresses, by way of redemption, the whole of creation. It has everything to do with the Kingdom of God and spiritual formation (discipleship). This is a gospel which can never be known in abstraction but only by way of participation. Likewise, it is the good news that God invites us into his saving work – not as something we have (a characteristically American commodification), but as something we participate in.

With that being said, and without going into a lot of related and important issues such as history, authors, culture and context, etc. (though you may check out the links here and below and also check out my “missional” tag on this blog for more), here’s my best attempt to articulate what I have in mind when I talk about missional theology and missional church in particular.

Missional, when it is used to describe theology, indicates an understanding of all that relates to God through the lens (or hermeneutic) of the missio Dei, the mission of God in and to the world. Thus, as suggested in my masters thesis, “Restoring Hope to the Church in Western Culture,”missional theology innately has a more narrative, as opposed to systematic or simply biblical, bent to it. That is to say, missional theology refuses to capitulate to the dominant Platonic or dualistic way of thinking which would contend that we can know things about God apart from a discerning participation in a life of faith (aka life as mission!).

As Miroslav Volf has said,

At the heart of every good theology lies not simply a plausible intellectual vision but more importantly a compelling account of a way of life, and that theology is therefore best done from within the pursuit of this way of life.

In like fashion, missional, when it is used to describe the church, seeks to circumvent another modern dichotomy, that of orthodoxy (believing the right things – classic fundamentalim) and orthopraxis (living the right way – classic liberalism). I suppose we could call this third way, believing the right way (a notion our Anabaptist and Orthodox brothers and sisters could teach us much about). The sentiment here is that the church is called to be a certain kind of people and that this being entails a certain way of living and engagement with the world. Our being a certain kind of people means that we live a certain way and equally important, our living a certain way forms us into being a certain kind of people. One does not follow the other. Missional churches embrace the reality that it is in this fundamental relationship of being and living that God is most truly and fully known and made known.

The implications of all this are deep and far-reaching, not only for churches, but for centers of theological education as well. Being missional is no mere enhanced focus on reaching people, being relevant, or even focusing outside the “four walls of the church.” It is not the newest or coolest church model. It is probably not an overstatement to say that to embrace a missional identity is akin to a Copernican Revolution – little wonder then that so many who really get what missional is all about are labeled heretics.

As a final note, I might add that missional theology and missional churches are better received in postmodern/post-Christian contexts. That is because these are places in which a co-opted and sentimentalized version of Christianity have lost their place at the center of a culture. Thus, missional, as a more unadulterated version of theology and church (it is postmodern in the sense that much of postmodernity is a recovery of that which was lost or confused within modernity – and therefore perhaps better described as pre-modern), is quite fresh and compelling. In more modern/Christendom contexts (cough… Memphis… cough…), not so much. There, this way of understanding theology and the church, instead, serves to deconstruct the dominant notions of both – as well it should.

Now, go read what these folks have to say…

Alan Hirsch
Alan Knox
Andrew Jones
Barb Peters
Bill Kinnon
Brad Brisco
Brad Grinnen
Brad Sargent
Brother Maynard
Bryan Riley
Chad Brooks
Chris Wignall
Cobus Van Wyngaard
Dave DeVries
David Best
David Fitch
David Wierzbicki
DoSi
Doug Jones
Duncan McFadzean
Erika Haub
Grace
Jamie Arpin-Ricci
Jeff McQuilkin
John Smulo
Jonathan Brink
JR Rozko
Kathy Escobar
Len Hjalmarson
Makeesha Fisher
Malcolm Lanham
Mark Berry
Mark Petersen
Mark Priddy
Michael Crane
Michael Stewart
Nick Loyd
Patrick Oden
Peggy Brown
Phil Wyman
Richard Pool
Rick Meigs
Rob Robinson
Ron Cole
Scott Marshall
Sonja Andrews
Stephen Shields
Steve Hayes
Tim Thompson
Thom Turner

Posted in: christendom, church, community, culture, gospel, missional, spiritual formation, theology