The Forgotten Ways

The phrase ‘missional’ and ‘missional church’ originated in the work of a group of North America practitioners, missiologists and theorists, called the Gospel and Our Culture Network (GOCN) who came together to try and work out some of the implications of the work of that remarkable missionary thinker Lesslie Newbigin. It was Newbigin who, after returning from a lifetime of work in India as a missionary, saw how pagan Western civilization really was. He began to articulate the view that we need to see the Western world as a mission field, and that we as God’s people in this context, needed to adopt a missionary stance in relation to or culture. Just as we would in India for instance. His work captured the imagination of a church in crisis and decline and shaped the thinking of generations.

However, the word ‘missional’ has over the years has tended to become very fluid and as it was quickly co-opted by those wishing to find new and trendy tags for what they themselves were doing, be they missional or not. It is often used as a substitute it for seeker-sensitive, cell-group church, or other church growth concepts, thus obscuring its original meaning. So, do we dispose of it and come up with another term? I think we need to keep it, but reinvest it with deeper meaning. The word sums up precisely the emphasis of the radical Jesus-movements that we need to rediscover today. But more than that, in my opinion it goes to the heart of the very nature and purpose of the Church itself.

So a working definition of missional church is that it a community of God’s people that defines itself, and organizes its life around, its real purpose of being an agent of God’s mission to the world. In other words, the Church’s true and authentic organizing principle is mission. When the church is in mission, it is the true Church. The Church itself is not only a product of that mission, but is obligated and destined to extend it by whatever means possible. The mission of God flows directly through every believer and every community of faith that adheres to Jesus. To obstruct this is to block God’s purposes in and through his people.

If we can embed this inner meaning into our essential identity as God’s people, we will be well on our way to becoming an adaptive organization. This mission can express itself in the myriad ways in which the Kingdom of God expresses itself—highly varied and always redemptive.