Every time I type the word “missional” in my Microsoft Word it tells me that it is not a real word and gives me that red squiggly line at the bottom of it.
What is missional? Is it a real word or did missiologists create it to confuse the heck out of normal people?
So, what is missional and why do we want to see more missional communities planted?
The typical church that your mom and dad go to usually has structural foundations in the worship service. That is the BIG picture for them. The Church equals attendance in Sunday Service or whatever day they meet on and then other things follow behind the Worship Service, such as youth service, Bible study, missions and etc. etc.
Also, these things would all work to support the Sunday Worship Service. The staff, pastor and those in ministry would give most of their energy into the Sunday event as well.
A Missional Community would be where God’s missions would be the focus.
What mission you say?
The mission would be the crazy command that Jesus gave us to go into all nations and make disciples. If that is the heart of the MC then that means everything they do would be consciously focused on making disciples and expanding the Kingdom of God, so most of their energy if not all would go to the focus of their community living out this mission on a daily basis.
The typical church that your mom and dad go to would probably try to bring people “IN” the building to the Worship Service. Because that is one of the primary goals, the “Let’s-go-invite-people-to-our-service-mentality.” And Missions would be an overseas stuff and outreach would be held as special events.
A Missional Community would go “OUT” and be the church with a deeper understanding that they themselves are the church and are not confined by a specific building or a specific service and missions would be a lifestyle.
A missional community’s philosophy would rather be incarnational than attractional. (I’ll explain that more clearly in a later post)
A person in a typical church would ask the question, “How would the unsaved know that I am a Christian and therefore different than the people in the world?”
While a person with a missional understanding would not only have a different answer, but a different question to begin with.
Let me also make it clear that not all missional communities are “EMERGING”. And not all Emerging Communities are fully missional either. Emerging folks might get it better than others, but they still might have hard time with the praxis (living it out) of being fully missional.
That’s it for now, however I’ll cook up more stuff later on.
I wanted to write my own post telling the engagement story, however Kezia wrote one which I probably will not be able to compete with. So check out the 