What Does It Mean to Be Missional?

What does it mean to be missional? This question is one that is increasingly on the minds of pastors and followers of Christ in general. Understood very simply, the emphasis that missional church or missional Christianity highlights an outward focus in our ministries and lives as followers of Jesus. We don’t follow Jesus out of the world but into the world. That shift alone, from in to out creates some difficulty for many people. But understanding the nature of the following into the world is where the real heart of the missional shift lies.
Among the strands of the tangled web of reasons why churches may hesitate or fail to engage missionally is the fact that the concept of missional engagement is not, presently, clearly understood apart from some very traditional understandings of the word “mission” as used in evangelical circles. The word mission, from which the concept of missional emerges, has a limited range of meanings in the life of the church. Wright (2006) has noted that the root of the word mission means “to send,” which for many people is the whole of what mission or any variation of the word means. People are sent by the church into the world both near and far (though primarily far) for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel. In the context of the Evangelical Congregational Church, the nature of the sending that is done is for the purpose of evangelism.
The problem is made more complex because evangelism, like mission, has a narrow expression in the context of many evangelical churches. The narrow expression of evangelism is the verbal proclamation of the gospel with the intention of converting an individual to faith in Jesus Christ. But there is a growing consensus among missional thinkers and a suspicion among some followers of Jesus that while evangelism as simple verbal proclamation is important and valuable, it is an insufficient expression of the mission of God.
Among those who hold that evangelism is a sufficient expression of the mission of God there is little argument that evangelism can and should have a component other than verbal proclamation. Therefore practices like feeding the hungry, building schools and hospitals, liberating the oppressed or serving one’s neighbors and countless other acts of service are simply evangelism with more depth and the new word for this is missional. However, this broadening of the understanding of the nature of evangelism still places verbal proclamation and individual decision to become a Christian as the only non-negotiable and truly significant component of the gospel and mission. To state it in other terms, all activity other than verbal proclamation only serves to enable more effective verbal proclamation.
But if what was just described is not missional what then is missional? Christopher Wright defines missional as “…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”(Wright, 2006, p. 23). This definition includes evangelism but is so much bigger than simply getting people saved to go to heaven. Missional is about the participation with God in the redeeming of the entire creation! If Wright is correct, then all of our activity as followers of Jesus has significance for the ushering in of the kingdom of God.
Walter Raushenbusch (1991) said it well, "No man is a follower of Jesus in the full sense who has not through him entered into the same life with God. But on the other hand no man shares his life with God whose religion does not flow out, naturally and without effort, into all relations of his life and reconstructs everything that it touches. Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus" (p. 48).

What say you?

In the next post we will talk about missional and its relation to what it means to be the church.

Rauschenbusch, W. (1991). Christianity and the Social Crisis. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.
Wright, C. (2006). The mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s grand narrative. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.