Missional Challenge: What Is Missional and How Can We Live Missionally?

Missional Challenge
What is Missional and How Can We Live Missionally?
Elizabeth Chapin
MLDR510 08 • Missional Ecclesiology • Professor Jason Clark
George Fox Evangelical Seminary • Portland, OR • December 12, 2008
Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 1

Missional Challenge
What is Missional and How Can We Live Missionally?
FINAL PROJECT
Missional Motif
He was larger than the average man, intriguingly handsome, inspiring awe
and fear in his students year after year. You either adored or deplored Mr.
Carr, but one thing was for sure, his passion for teaching English made many
of his classes the most popular classes in High School. I adored Mr. Carr and
was definitely considered a “teacher’s pet” in his classes. I took classes on
Wagner, Tragic Vision and Comic Vision. We took many field trips to NY City
including a few visits to the Metropolitan Opera House. I still enjoy Wagner
opera music today and recognize most pieces that are used in movies with the
accompanying emotions they evoke from my first exposure to them in High
School. Mr. Carr made sure we left his classes understanding “motif” through
experiential learning as we laughed and lamented, raged and rallied with the
characters of the stories we studied. We felt the mood as we heard the re-
peated small elements characteristic of a musical composition, weaving a cer-
tain unity through the music of the operas. We noticed recurring structures,
contrasts, and literary devices that developed and informed the text’s major
themes. We learned to recognize motifs all around us. Perhaps this is why it
is not difficult for me to recognize a missional motif in my own life, as well as
in the Bible and the Church1 throughout history and around the world.
1 I use the term “Church” with a capital “C” to refer to the universal body of Christ
throughout history and in all the world.

I was greatly influenced by Campus Crusade for Christ as a young Christian,
and committed my life to participating in God’s mission for the world when I
was 18. I went through missionary training, yet never made it to a foreign
mission field. In all the training, I sensed God’s call to mission regardless of
my location finding the principles of mission apply to home contexts as much
as any foreign context, with some adaptation. After being on mission in
America for over 25 years, I have been surprised by the lack of understanding
of the need for being on mission with God here and now, as well as the rapid
departure of so many growing up in Christian homes who are not only leav-
ing the church but leaving the faith. The missional motif has somehow been
obscured in Western Christianity to the point that it has created a dissonance
with the story of God and discordance with the historic missional movement
of God through the Church. As America continues to become an increasingly
post-Christian nation, the challenge to revive this missional motif that is evi-
dent in Scripture as well as Church history is ever looming before us. Some
refer to this missional motif as Missio Dei. “Missio Dei is a Latin theological
term that can be translated as the ‘sending of God.’ Mission is understood as
being derived from the very nature of God. The missionary initiative comes
from God alone. Missio Dei as a term and concept became increasingly popu-
lar in the church from the second half of the 20th century and is a key con-
cept in missiology being used by theologians such as David Bosch, Andrew
Jones, Michael Frost and William Storrar.”2 But what is the mission? While
volumes of books have been written on the subject, and departments in semi-
naries devoted to the study of missiology, I will draw upon the work of the
U.S. Center for World Mission and their Perspectives™ on The World Chris-
tian Movement Course. Here are the core ideas presented in the course:
1. God initiates and advances work in history to accomplish His purpose.
2. God calls His people to join Him in fulfilling His purpose.
2 “Missio dei,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missio_dei (accessed December

11, 2008).

3. God's purpose is to bless all peoples so that Christ will be served and
glorified among all peoples.
4. God accomplishes His purpose by triumphing over evil in order to res-

cue and bless people and to establish His kingdom rule throughout the
earth.
5. The Bible is a unified story of God's purpose.
6. God's work in history has continuity and will come to an ultimate cul-
mination.
7. The Christian movement has brought about positive social transforma-

tion.
8. The mission task can and will be completed.
9. The world's population can be viewed in terms of people groups.
10. The progress of world evangelization can be assessed in terms of

church-planting movements within people groups.
11. Completing the mission task requires the initiation and growth of
church-planting movements that follow social avenues of influence.
12. Completing the task requires effective cross-cultural evangelism that

follows communication patterns within cultures.
13. Completing the task requires strategic holism in which community de-
velopment is integrated with church planting.
14. Completing the task requires collaborative efforts of churches and mis-
sion agencies from diverse cultures and traditions.
15. God calls His people to embrace strategic sacrifice and suffering with
Christ in order to accomplish His global purpose.
16. By participating in the world Christian movement, every believer can

find a way to live with vital, strategic significance in God's global pur-
pose.3
What happened in Western Christianity that caused this dissonance and dis-
cordance with the missional heart of God? If missio Dei is a unifying theme of
3 “Core Ideas of Perspectives,” Perspectives on the World Christian Movement,

http://www.perspectives.org/site/c.eqLLI0OFKrF/b.3448385/k.7491/Core_Ideas_of_Perspe
ctives.htm (accessed December 12, 2008).

Scripture, how have so many Western Christians missed it? If the Church
was created to participate in the missio Dei, how could we distort church to
be more like a vendor of religious goods and services or producer of weekly
religious entertainment? There are many factors that have militated against
the missional motif in the Western World and among the greatest of these
are Christendom and consumerism. While Christendom is losing it’s influ-
ence on society and largely crumbling before our eyes as the great cathedrals
in Europe attract more people for tours than those who come to worship, con-
sumerism is alive and well and growing in influence across the globe to the
point that an economic crisis in the West has far reaching ramifications
around the world. But will economic crises loosen the grip of consumerism on
society? While some may question their consumer lifestyle during times of
crises, we saw even in the midst of the monumental crisis in 2008 that con-
sumerism is king as 2008’s “Black Friday showed a three percent increase in
retail sales and a death toll of three.”4
Before I continue, I must confess I am persuaded that God’s mission on earth

does not go on unopposed. The sources of opposition and their nature are be-
yond the scope of this work, but generally this opposition comes from the
world systems (1 John 2:15-17), the sinful nature (Romans 8), and spiritual
forces of wickedness (Ephesians 6:12). As we consider this missional motif we
must remember the militating factors are complex and often mystifying. And
we must not forget the old adage, all that glitters is not gold. For centuries we
have heralded the conversion of Constantine and the triumphant establish-
ment of Christendom as ordained by God and part of his missional plan, but
what appears to us as a good thing may not look so good to God, for man
looks at the outward appearance but God looks at the heart. (1 Samuel 16:7)
More recently, we have become beholden to the mega-church model in Amer-
ica looking to churches like Willow Creek and Saddleback to show us the way
4 Jon Stewart, “December 1, 2008: Black Friday Deaths,” The Daily Show,
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=210919&title=black-friday-
deaths (accessed December 1, 2008).

to engage in God’s mission in the midst of our predominant consumer culture.
But are we building with wood, hay and straw instead of gold, silver, precious
stones? (1 Corinthians 3:2-13)
Christendom – Blessed Crescendo or Beleaguered Cacophony?
When looking at the influence of Christendom, “persistent voices throughout

previous centuries queried whether Christendom was as Christian as was
generally believed and suggested its Christianity was little more than a ve-
neer.”5 Murray presses this issue in his book, Post-Christendom and hails the
end of Christendom. I join Murray in saying “the end of Christendom and the
distorting influence of power, wealth and status on the Christian story”6 is
worth celebrating. But rather than seeing Christendom as “little more than a
veneer” I propose it has acted more like a vaccination, inoculating entire cul-
tures against epidemic infection by the life changing gospel of Christ. While I
prefer not to think of the gospel in the negative terms of disease, I think this
metaphor is useful as we critically evaluate shifts into Post-Christendom.
Like a vaccination that infects a person with a minute dose of an actual dis-
ease, resulting in an immune response to ward off the devastating effects of
that disease, the nominal Christianity that characterized much of Christen-
dom served to prevent the full reception of the gospel into the hearts and
lives of those exposed so that those who were fully infected were unable to
pass the gospel on to those around them because they had become immune to
it’s influence.
We saw the birth of Christendom as Constantine converted and proclaimed

Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. While this shift was
significant and radical, it did not occur overnight as “Constantine introduced
measures designed gradually to replace paganism with Christianity as the
imperial religion.”7 Was this a good thing? Constantine’s adoption of Christi-
5 Stuart Murray, Post-Christendom, (Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press, 2004), 9.

6 Ibid., 21.
7 Ibid., 25.

anity as the imperial religion was viewed by many as God’s will. “Very few
church leaders objected to Constantine’s championing of the church and the
favours he bestowed on it. Not all were as uncritically effusive about
Constantine as Eusibius, but almost all assumed this was God’s doing and
represented the triumph of the gospel over the Empire after centuries of
marginality, struggle and opposition. If adjustments were necessary, these
were a small price to pay for the opportunities that the church now had.”8 Af-
ter the adoption of Christianity as the imperial religion, Christendom defined
the church. Distinctions between church and nation were blurred. “In an
edict of 380, [Theodosius I] defined the church as those ‘in communion with
the bishops of Rome and Alexandria’: unity within church and Empire was
secured by legislation penalizing Christian groups unwilling to accept this
definition.”9 Within Christendom, becoming a Christian was no longer op-
tional, it was expected and at times required. “It was assumed landowners
would require workers on their estates to become Christians and that heads
of households would insist the household share a common faith.”10 The com-
ing of Christendom was largely achieved by the end of the fourth century,
though not fully formed into what we know of as Christendom today. “Few
expressed concern about the missionary methods used or the increasingly
nominal Christianity within the churches. The Christendom shift took place
largely unopposed.”11 Was Constantine’s adoption of Christianity God’s inten-
tion for the church? Or was it permitted, like Israel begging for a King and
having their desire permitted by God? (1 Samuel 8) Regardless of our conclu-
sion on this matter, Christendom endured but is now coming to an end. Un-
derstanding this shift to Christendom and it’s effect on our shared history
will help guide us into the future.
8 Ibid., 38.
9 Ibid., 40.
10 Ibid., 43.
11 Ibid., 44.

One of my greatest concerns with the expansion of Christendom including the
coercive methods of conversion used during the crusades is the possibility
that many became culturally Christians but were devoid of the life of Christ
within them. When being a Christian is something you do or you die, or
something you are born into it no longer requires the committed choice Jesus
heralds as he calls people to take up their cross and follow him. (Mark 8:34)
Rather than a do or die proposition or a matter of birthright, Christianity is a
do AND die – die to self – proposition and a “you must be born again” experi-
ence. (John 3) While many today wonder at the logic and efficacy of the cru-
sades, we cannot escape their influence on Christendom. “During the twelfth
century, the ideology of crusade became popular, directed towards both the
re-conquest for Christendom of the Holy Land and the full evangelisation of
Europe.”12 But, I wonder, if Christianity is forced upon a person, a family, a
culture, or a nation, how authentic is the embracing of it? As Murray states,
“The fundamental question arising from this story is whether, and in what
sense, Christendom was Christian.”13 Murray concludes that “what we know
about Christian leaders between the fourth and fourteenth centuries suggests
a colourful mixture of devout saints and thoroughly obnoxious characters led
Christendom. Believing and behaving were not always connected: some who
struggled hardest to preserve what they regarded as orthodox doctrine were
very unattractive personalities. Nor did strength of belonging safeguard be-
haviour: often the spiritual and moral qualities of church leaders fell well
short of their parishioners. And methods used to strengthen the church’s grip
on society and extend Christendom leave much to be desired.”14 I wonder, is
it possible that through Christendom Christianity gained the world but lost
it’s soul? (Mark 8:36) Was the rise of Christendom a blessed crescendo of
God’s missional motif or merely a beleaguered cacophony that has led to in-
creased dissonance with the Missio dei over time?
12 Ibid., 62.
13 Ibid., 63.
14 Ibid., 71.

One of the marks of the rise of Christendom was “the adoption of Christianity
as the official religion of city, state or Empire”15 and though Christendom
spread throughout Europe in the first millennium after Christ, Europe is now
entering a period of Post-Christendom. During this shift to Christendom the-
ologies were developed to justify this shift, but there were also those who
raised objections. Was this marriage of empire and faith what God intended
as many at that time assumed? Unfortunately, we cannot fully judge such
things, but the Christendom shift was quite possibly not the intention of God
for his church, but rather allowed as “most acknowledge there was a price to
pay for the Christendom shift. If there were gains, there were also costs.
Some were unintended and have often been ignored…”16 Was Constantine’s
adoption of Christianity as the state religion God’s intention for the church?
Or was it permitted, like Israel begging for a King and having their desire
permitted by God? (1 Samuel 8) While we may never know the answer to that
question, I am thankful that with the end of Christendom “for the first time
in many centuries, Christians in Western culture will be able to tell the
Christian story to people for whom it is entirely unknown – a challenging
scenario but full of opportunities we have not had for generations.”17 Without
the artificial immunity built up through centuries of minimal exposure to the
life-changing message of the gospel, I hope that in this generation many will
taste and see that the Lord is good (Psalm 34:8) and be blessed as they hun-
ger and thirst for righteousness. (Matthew 5:6)
While we have seen the rapid decline of Christendom influence in Europe,

Christendom has had an incredible impact on America, but the government
of the United States and the establishment of the church in America are in
part the result of rebellion against Christendom. “The first amendment [to
the Constitution] states that government will not create a national religion
however government officials have the right to practice any religious ideas
15 Ibid., 83.
16 Ibid., 107.
17 Ibid., 2.

that they want.”18 Some have called America a Christian Nation, and for dec-
ades this may have been somewhat true, but in a democratic system where
the government is by the people and for the people, the degree of Christian
influence upon the governing of the nation and the establishment of social in-
stitutions is directly dependent on the number of individuals who are Chris-
tians and participate in the government of the nation. This participation can
be as little as showing up to vote, to as much as running for office and repre-
senting a constituency. Over the last two hundred years we have seen a de-
cline in the number of Christians in America19, and so have seen the waning
influence of Christian values in government and society. Some may choose to
associate America with Christendom in the sense that American society has
been “shaped by the Christian Story and [many of it’s] institutions … have
been developed to express Christian convictions.”20 But this influence of
Christian values on the government and institutions in America was not
forced upon the nation, but rather agreed upon by the majority of people
within the nation.
Unfortunately, many negative practices, values and beliefs of Christendom

have influenced American Christianity and we are reaping the consequences.
We do not have centuries old Cathedrals that welcome more tourists than
worshipers, but we do have many a church building that has been trans-
formed into a community center, other faith center, or even a medical center.
We have generations of people who grew up in the church because they were
baptized in as babies, not by choice as informed adolescents or adults. We
have people who believe that being a Christian means adhering to a code of
morals and a particular political point of view. These and other practices and
18 “Separation of Church and State,” Wikipedia,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state (accessed September 20,
2007).
19 See Wicker, Christine. The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the
Church, Harper One, 2008.
20 Murray, Post-Christendom, 19.

beliefs have resulted in the death of many Churches who are based on a cul-
tural Christianity instead of built upon the solid rock of life giving faith in
Jesus Christ.
For centuries we have held up Western versions of Christianity as the stan-

dard and Western churches were the sending churches, sending missionaries
to regions of the world that had not yet fallen under the influence of Chris-
tendom. But what were we exporting to foreign countries? Were we expecting
foreigners to embrace our culture in order to embrace Christ? Hudson Taylor,
one of my early heroes of the faith resisted “Westernizing” Chinese Chris-
tians and was a pioneer in what can be called incarnational mission. Perhaps
as a direct result of Hudson Taylor and other’s work, the church in China has
grown tremendously since the expulsion of Western missionaries from China.
Today, Christians living in China ask us in the West not to pray for their
government to make Christianity the official religion of China, for they have
seen the negative impact of Christendom and believe they will be far more
effective in reaching the world for Christ as an underground movement com-
pletely dependent on the power of Christ to work in and through them.21
Consumerism – The Curse of Capitalism?
While Christendom was built upon the marriage of empire and faith, we have
seen a different distorting influence arise in the West, especially in America.
If Christendom cathedrals were shaped by Roman government metaphors,
the mega-church in America has been shaped by consumerism and church as
business metaphors. This distortion has created a discordance with the mis-
sional heart of God that causes many outside the church to say things like, “I
like Jesus, but not the church,”22 “I’m fine with God, it’s Christians I can’t
21 See Hattaway, Paul. Back to Jerusalem: Three Chinese House Church Leaders Share
Their Vision to Complete the Great Commission. Authentic Media, 2003
22 See Kimball, Dan. They Like Jesus but Not The Church: Insights from Emerging Genera-
tions. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007

stand”23 and label our behavior and attitudes as very “unChristian.” 24 For
decades America may have been characterized by Christian ethics and Chris-
tian values leading many to call America a Christian Nation. As the influence
of the Christian story began to wane, some responded in Christendom modes
seeking to restore Christian values through legislation, but others argue that
the quest for political power is killing the church25 and like Christendom,
militates against the missional heart of God. But as we see both the influence
of the Christian story waning along with Christendom modes of trying to
maintain influence over society proving ineffective, we are faced with other
challenges to the church participating in God’s mission for the world. In
many places where Christianity has declined it was in direct response to the
increase of an alternative faith system like Islam. Some would argue the al-
ternative faith system challenging Christianity in the West is consumerism
as people continue to be “deeply religious, with spiritual formation practices
of a consumer religion, that in itself is capable of consuming and using the
best missional efforts of the church.”26 How has consumerism shaped and in-
fluenced expressions of church in the West? Has the church in America re-
placed pursuing God’s mission with pursuing the American Dream? If we
look to the suburbs, we wouldn’t have to look far to find the possibility the
American Dream has militated against God’s Kingdom and purposes for the
Church.
23 See Bickel, Bruce and Jantz, Stan. I’m Fine with God, It’s Christians I Can’t Stand: Get-
ting Past the Religious Garbage in the Search for Spiritual Truth. Harvest House, 2008.
24 See Kinnaman, David and Lyons, Gabe. unChristian: What a New Generation Really
Thinks about Christianity... and Why It Matters. Baker Books, 2007.
25 See Boyd, Gregory. The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for
Political Power Is Destroying the Church. Zondervan, 2007.
26 Jason Clark, “Consumerism as Religion,” Jason Clark's Blog,
http://jasonclark.ws/2006/09/07/consumerism-as-religion/#more-1160 (accessed De-
cember 12, 2008).

We see the challenges of consumer culture as we see signs of “consumption’s
sway over suburban Christians.”27 Have we been overcome by the power of
branding and invitation into an alternative story so that “instead of yearning
for God or heaven, instead of entering into the Christian story, we lay claim
to the stories of corporate advertisers”?28 Have we sought to find our vitality
and purpose in pursing the American Dream as our “consumer culture has
claimed material goods to be the ultimate goods”?29 Consumption and capital-
ism in and of themselves are not the problem, these systems are not inher-
ently evil. But this culture of consumerism has become so powerful that it
acts as an alternative religion calling for our personal devotion and sacrifice
at the altar of greed. Many in our culture have become slaves to debt, slaves
to fashion, and slaves to fleshly desires and passions. As we continue to over-
consume, we are at risk of being consumed and I am concerned that many in
suburbia and much of the Western world have chosen their God and it is not
the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob but the god of this world who holds
them captive to a life of individualism, consumerism and materialism.
What is Missional?
While there are many forces militating against the missional heart of God,
there are also those who are seeking to inspire the church in the West to re-
store a missional focus. But what exactly is “missional”? Is it merely the ad-
jectival form of mission or is it something more? I took a class from Leonard
Sweet called, “Global Mission of the Church.” In the first few minutes of our
class time, Sweet refuted the title of the class saying it should be, “The Global
Mission of God.” In the ensuing hours we touched on the concept of Missio
Dei, and learned that Sweet’s vision for the church includes the church being
missional, relational, and incarnational - an MRI church. This term “mis-
27 Albert Y. Hsu, The Suburban Christian – Finding Spiritual Vitality in the Land of Plenty, (IVP
Books, 2006), 74.
28 Ibid., 107.
29 Ibid., 94.

sional” has been growing in popularity over the last few years in the church
in the West, especially in relation to emerging church. If “missional” is the
shape of the future30 then we would do well to understand the origins and
implications of this term. Some believe “the controversial hypothesis that the
language available to humans defines our thoughts.”31 If this is the case, then
how we define “missional” will not only affect how we think, but if we take
Proverbs 23:7 out of context, we can argue that how we think affects who we
are.
In March of 2007, I attended a conference called "Inside the Missional Ma-

trix" put on by Off the Map. Scot McKnight, Todd Hunter, and Rose Swetman
did an excellent job engaging those in attendance. One question that was
raised particularly intrigued me. The question raised was something like
this, "Some people use the term incarnational and some missional - what's
the difference and are these terms interchangeable?" I am especially in-
trigued by questions like these because it reminds me of how much time we
spend on language. At one time it was all about discipleship, then it was all
about mentoring, now it’s all about spiritual formation - but the reality is
that those who are effective at any of these are probably doing about the
same thing - passing on what they have learned to another person. Some
people are so committed to "The Word" that if a word isn't in "The Word" (for
instance "mentoring") then it is not acceptable. Why do we get so caught up
in what things are called? Why do we care so much about terminology? After
all, what IS the difference between missional and incarnational? As a profes-
sional communicator and technical writer these things have mattered much
more to me in the past, and even though they matter less to me today - they
still matter, why? Because, in the beginning God spoke...
30 Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission For
the 21st-Century Church (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 2003).
31 Celeste Biever, “Language may shape human thought,” NewScientist,
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6303-language-may-shape-human-thought.html
(accessed November 5, 2008).

God spoke. God chooses to use language to create and to communicate with
His creation. It only makes sense that we too must use language to communi-
cate with one another. But one of the inherent problems with language is
that it is not absolute, it varies from culture to culture, from time to time,
and is interpreted differently based upon your worldview, upbringing, and
societal bias. How then can we make sense of "The Word" when all these
variations are possible? How can we know what "The Word" is really saying
when we can't even agree on whether we need to be missional or incarna-
tional?
I would like to propose that words are very important, sometimes more im-
portant than we even give them credit. The proverbs say that life and death
are in the power of the tongue and I don't think it is referring to getting
licked to death. What we speak impacts us in many realms. We speak of the
different levels of communication in language - the verbal, the nonverbal, the
cultural, the meta-messages, etc. But what we are really saying is that lan-
guage and communication are complex. What we hear affects what we be-
lieve, what we believe affects what we say and do. What we do is who we
really are. One of the greatest dissonances we experience is when we say one
thing and do another. Or when someone else says one thing and does an-
other. Jesus calls this hypocrisy. Unfortunately, hypocrisy is as much of a
problem in communities of faith today as it was when Jesus walked the
earth. So, when I hear people talking about a missional community or incar-
national living - my first thought is that I hope that person does it more than
they talk about it.
Missional Firsts
My first encounter with the term missional was through, Dan Kimball, as he
launched one of the first alternative church gatherings of the emerging
church movement. The tagline for Dan Kimball’s Graceland gathering was,
“A Worshiping Community of Missional Theologians.” I have known Dan for
over 20 years and when Dan uses the term missional, I am confident that he

is living it as much as he is talking about it. As a result of Dan’s faithful wit-
ness, he has been one of the leading voices in the emerging church movement
and continues to offer a credible example of a missional church. Graceland
has since become Vintage Faith Church who holds missional as one of their
distinctives and defines missional as:
Being "missional" simply means being outward and others-focused, with the
goal of expressing and sharing the love of Jesus. Jesus told His followers not
to remove themselves from the world and create an isolated Christian sub-
culture. Rather, He taught His followers to be engaged in the world with peo-
ple (John 17:15). The church was not created for itself, but was created to wor-
ship God and to spread His love to others. We each were created for a mis-
sional purpose. Therefore, we won't have a specific "missions department" be-
cause the whole church itself is a mission. Jesus clearly told the church to "go
and make disciples" (Matthew 28:18-20). For us today, this command is not
exclusive to overseas missions alone (which we support wholeheartedly since
global missions is extremely important) but is foremost to be lived out in our
own communities, families, and day to day lives (Colossians 4:5-6).
When entering “missional” as my search term in google, I was offered about

1,470,000 results which is a great deal more than the 3,350 results from
2001. Some are saying “missional” is the buzz word of the church today, and I
would have to agree. Top on the google search list is wikipedia, one of my fa-
vorite online sources. Here’s what wikipedia has to say:
"Missional living" is a Christian term that describes a missionary lifestyle;

adopting the posture, thinking, behaviors, and practices of a missionary in or-
der to engage others with the gospel message. The use of this term has gained
recent popularity due to the Emerging church movement to contrast the con-
cept of a select group of "professional" missionaries, with the understanding
that all Christians should be involved in the Great Commission of Jesus
Christ.
Friend of Missional is also at the top of the google search, sometimes showing
up above wikipedia, depending on the day. Rick Meigs produces the Friend of
Missional website and offers an etymology of the word:
Etymology of Missional
Definition: "Relating to or connected with a religious mission; missionary."

Part of Speech: Adjective. An adjective modifies a noun or a pronoun by de-
scribing, identifying, or quantifying words. An adjective usually precedes the
noun or the pronoun which it modifies.
Etymology: From the word missionalism which is a noun meaning, "mission-
ary work or activity."
First Usage: 1907 in W. G. HOLMES' Age Justinian & Theodora II. Page 687.
Quote: "Several prelates, whose missional activities brought over whole dis-
tricts and even nationalities to their creed" (emphasis added). (Reference: Ox-
ford English Dictionary)
It should be noted that Andrew Jones has found it used as early as 1883.
Modern Usage: The first missiologist using the term "missional" in its modern
understanding was Francis DuBose in his book, "God Who Sends" (Broadman
Press, 1983). By the 1990's the term began to appear more and more in such
books as "Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North
America" (Edited by Darrell L. Guder) and the works of Lesslie Newbigin. 32
Rick also gives a short answer to the question “What is Missional?”:
Jesus told us to go into all the world and be his ambassadors, but many
churches today have inadvertently changed the "go and be" command to a
"come and see" appeal. We have grown attached to buildings, programs, staff
and a wide variety of goods and services designed to attract and entertain
people.
Missional is a helpful term used to describe what happens when you and I re-
place the "come to us" invitations with a "go to them" life. A life where "the
way of Jesus" informs and radically transforms our existence to one wholly fo-
cused on sacrificially living for him and others and where we adopt a mis-
sionary stance in relation to our culture. It speaks of the very nature of the Je-
sus follower. 33
Rick invites others to be a catalyst for missional and offers a “Friend of Mis-
sional” graphic for others to use on their blog linking to his site. As of August,
he has 157 sites using the graphic and linking to his site. Rick offers the fol-
lowing lists: Missional is a Shift in Thinking, Description of A Missional
Church, What a Missional Church is Not, and What a Missional Church
Looks Like.
32 Rick Meigs, Friend of Missional, http://www.friendofmissional.org/ (accessed November

6, 2008).
33 Ibid.

In the section, Missional is a Shift in Thinking, Rick notes, this shift in
thinking is expressed by Ed Stetzer and David Putman in their book, Break-
ing the Missional Code (Broadman & Holman, 2006) like this:
• From programs to processes

• From demographics to discernment
• From models to missions
• From attractional to incarnational
• From uniformity to diversity
• From professional to passionate
• From seating to sending
• From decisions to disciples
• From additional to exponential
• From monuments to movements
And Rick adds a couple more to Ed's list:
• From services to service

• From ordained to the ordinary
• From organizations to organisms34
Rick notes that making this shift in thinking can be especially difficult for
Evangelical Christians, while I concur I would also propose this shift is espe-
cially difficult in our consumer culture where Christianity is a private life-
style choice and the church becomes therapy to find our consumer self,35 as
Rick notes, “a missional church is not a dispenser of religious goods and serv-
ices or a place where people come for their weekly spiritual fix.”36 Rick offers
great descriptions of missional church including the idea of a gathered church
“for the purpose of worship, encouragement, supplemental teaching, training,
34 Ibid.
35 Jason Clark, “Consumerism & Church,” Missional Ecclesiology Face to Face Session 6,
October 2008.
36 Meigs, Friend of Missional.

and to seek God's presence and to be realigned with God's missionary pur-
pose.”37
JR Woodward, who posted “A Primer on Today’s Missional Church” on his

blog offers this definition from an older post of his:
THE MISSIONAL CHURCH IS… the people of God living with the conviction
that we are a sent people (by our Triune God) - called to be a faithful sign,
foretaste and herald of the kingdom of God. We are a people who engage in the
task of bilingual theological reflection (recognizing the grammar of the domi-
nant culture as well as the grammar of God) so that we can embody the good
news in the context in which we find ourselves and join God in the renewal of
all things. 38
I like Woodward’s ideas on being sent people as well as bilingual theologians.

There is much that could be unpacked in this definition as Woodward artfully
combines the concepts of trinity, kingdom, theology, embodied gospel, and re-
newal in his definition, which is one worth pondering. JR Woodward also of-
fers a link to a Missional Synchroblog that happened in June 2008 where
Rick Meigs at The Blind Beggar organized bloggers to address the concern
that the term missional has become overused or wrongly used. On June 23rd,
50 bloggers joined together to address this topic. Here’s some highlights:
Anti-Missional and Missional Confusions
Kathy Escobar writes, “i honestly do not use the word for one primary rea-
son–the people i know who are really truly “missional” don’t talk about it too
much & the people who are trying to catch the latest church-trend use it a
lot.”39 Kathy understands my concern over hypocrisy, and is a good example
37 Ibid.
38 JR Woodward, “A Primer on Today's Missional Church,” JR Woodward: Dream Awak-
ener, http://jrwoodward.net/2008/11/a-primer-on-todays-missional-church/ (accessed
November 6, 2008).
39 Kathy Escobar, “upside down, inside out and against everything business school
teaches,” the carnival in my head, http://kathyescobar.com/2008/06/22/upside-down-
inside-out/ (accessed October 21, 2008).

of resisting such hypocrisy as she intentionally lives missionally instead of
spending too much time talking about it. She goes on to say:
to me, missional–individually & corporately–is:

o a way of living. it is a way of the heart, and is something that is better
left unsaid in words and promotional materials and said loudly in
humble, simple, natural actions that actually don’t get any press.
o the upside down inside out and beautifully uncomfortable ways of the
kingdom that are completely counter-intuitive to the worldly principles
of business school that have infiltrated our church culture.
o messy, chaotic, situational, and in many ways utterly unmeasurable.
o embracing not only in action but in the core DNA of our hearts the val-
ues of the beatitudes in matthew 5 (spiritual poverty, the ability to
mourn & feel, humility & gentleness, advocacy & social justice, mercy &
compassion, and sacrifice at great costs)40
I visited Kathy’s faith community when I was in the Denver area last month
and discovered the missional beauty of her community is not found on her
website, or verbalized in any creeds but is exemplified in the lives of the peo-
ple involved with The Refuge, many who would not feel comfortable or ac-
cepted in traditional churches and would definitely not fit into the corporate
leadership structure many mainline churches adhere to. But they have found
a safe place to be the people God has created them to be and are making a
difference in their community offering hope and help to marginalized people
who are being neglected by most local churches. Kathy is passionate about
what missional is not, saying:
missional is much more than some cool service projects and short term mis-
sion trips here and there while everything else structurally, programmatically,
you name it, is exactly the same that it’s always been–focused on serving the
people in the pews (or in the newest and most comfortable chairs) and making
sure they are happy, bringing people “to us”, and not having to really engage
in sacrificial life-on-life in real, authentic ways that get under our skin, make
us feel uncomfortable, and change our hearts forever. 41
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.

I viewed an interesting video produced by LifeWay with Ed Stetzer. Ed Stet-
zer wrote, “Breaking the Missional Code” in 2006. The video is entitled, “Ed
Stetzer vs. AL” and is a play on the popularity of the word missionAL. Ed
thinks it points out just how confused the missional conversation has become.
Seems like everyone wants to be missional but when they say "missional" they
really mean "edgy," "innovative," or "contemporary."42 While I found the video
a bit cheesy for my taste (and by the way, I am allergic to cheese ;-) it does
attempt to dialog about the mission aspect of missional with humor and
points out the reality of the confusion surrounding the term which is illus-
trated much less humorously in a long “talk” session on wikipedia where con-
tributors discuss the evolution of the wikipedia entry.43 (That reading seemed
like 100 pages on it’s own ;-) Ed notes the extent of this confusion over the
term saying:
Practitioners, theoreticians, fans and foes are defining, defending, and dissect-
ing it. Its blurred meaning has brought it to the point that even some of its
earliest and ardent users of the term are becoming reticent to use it themselves
for fear of their audience misconstruing their message. 44
After reviewing Ed’s articles on The Meanings of Missional, one conclusion I

have come to is that in order to understand missional we not only need to un-
derstand how this new adjective is being used today, but we need to under-
stand the concepts of mission upon which missional is founded. Ed is an ex-
pert missiologist and has done great work in researching the history and the-
ology of mission, missions, missio dei and what it means to be missional. If I
were to do a PhD on the subject, I’m sure I would read more of his work. But
for now, I’d like to look some more at the common usage and application of
the word today.
42 Ed Stetzer, “Friday is for Friends and One (Self-Centered) Former Friend Named Al,” Ed-
Stetzer.com, http://blogs.lifeway.com/blog/edstetzer/2008/11/friday-is-for-friends-and-
al.html (accessed November 7, 2008).
43 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Missional_living
44 Ed Stetzer, “The Meanings of Missional,” EdStetzer.com,
http://blogs.lifeway.com/blog/edstetzer/the-meanings-of-missional.html (accessed No-
vember 7, 2008).

Another blogger, Brother Maynard, has concerns about the term as well, say-
ing:
In October 2007 at Seabeck, I confided to some that there was at that time
(and is now) a “battle” going on for the word “missional.” Indeed, some within
the missional conversation are already wanting to abandon the word in favour
of “mission-shaped” or any other term which is less in dispute. As it stands,
the word is in danger of being lost. Some would want to co-opt the term and
apply it to existing attractional evangelistic programs, robbing the word of its
subversive power.
Brother Maynard (a pseudonym) is an avid blogger concerning this terminol-

ogy as well as a consistent contributor to missional conversations. In his con-
tribution to the synchroblog this June, he noted that missional is at the core
of the church’s reason for being. He says:
As I have defined the term based on the theological history of the conversation
and its usage within that context, to be missional requires the adoption of two
central tenets.
1. The church’s purpose is to be mission-shaped, meaning that all that it
is and does reflects upon and is born out of its single mission, the Mis-
sio Dei (”God’s mission”).
2. The church’s ministry is to be incarnational, not only corporately but
individually as well.
Remove either of these aspects, and missional has been robbed of its theologi-
cal impact.
Brother Maynard agrees with others that missional is not just the latest cool
term that can be slapped onto existing programs, but requires a shift in
thinking recovering what has been lost in many churches over time. Brother
Maynard is a self-professed post-Charismatic and adds value to the conversa-
tion from this perspective.
I also found a definition of missional on the Acts 29 website. Acts 29 is a net-

work of pastors who are first Christians, second Evangelicals, third Mis-
sional, and fourth Reformed.45 They define missional as an adjective describ-
ing all of the activities of the church body as they are brought under the mis-
45 Scott Thomas, “Doctrine,” Acts 29, http://www.acts29network.org/about/doctrine/


sion of God (missio dei) to proclaim the good news of salvation through His
Son Jesus Christ. They go on to define what a missional church is then list
several characteristics of a missional church:
A missional church is a theologically-formed, Gospel-centered, Spirit-led fel-

lowship who seeks to faithfully incarnate the purposes of Christ. The mission
of the church is found in the mission of God who is calling the church to pas-
sionately participate in God's redemptive mission in the world (Matt. 28:18-
20; Acts 1:8) - a world that has radically changed in North American in the
last 50 years.46
Among the list of characteristics they include the centrality of the gospel and
the infallibility of God’s Word. Acts 29 acknowledges changes in the culture
in America and being missional is one of their responses to this cultural shift.
I interviewed another missional practitioner whom I respect, right here in my

own back yard, Rose Swetman, one of the co-pastors of Shoreline Vineyard
Community Church in Shoreline, WA. On their website47 they describe them-
selves as:
Incarnational Missional Community

Followers of Jesus are known for their generosity, kindness and service to oth-
ers.
Jesus moved and traveled from place to place revealing the nature of the
Kingdom of God to and with people. His infrastructure was his life and his
passion was to give it away to all who had ears to hear and eyes to see.
Jesus did not come to earth in the Incarnation to "hang out", he was on a mis-
sion. His mission was then and still is now a passionate pursuit of all of his
missing children to draw them back into a real relationship with himself.
In the Garden of Eden, after the Fall of man, this movement began. Genesis
3:9 frames this movement with this question, "Adam, where are you?" This is a
question of relational longing. God misses us. All of salvation history is the
story of God passionately pursuing us with his reckless love. This was the mis-
sion of Jesus then and he has passed on this mission to his Church.
46 Scott Thomas, “What is a Missional Church,” Acts 29,

http://www.acts29network.org/acts-29-blog/what-is-a-missional-church/ (accessed No-
vember 7, 2008).
47 “About Us,” Vineyard Community Church, http://vineyard-cc.org/about.html (ac-
cessed December 12, 2008).

We exist to make ordinary attempts (OA’s) to communicate an extraordinary
love. Vineyard Community Church is about mission because people matter.
Eugene Peterson puts it remarkably in the Message
John 1:14
The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood. We saw
the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out, true from start to finish.
Rose goes on to define missional as “the people of God joining with God in the
continued redemptive purposes of putting all things right, the biblical concept
would be bringing the ‘shalom’ of God.” I asked Rose to describe a few things
that make her faith community missional. She offered, “One of our highest
values is recognizing where the above is happening in individuals and as a
corporate community. We do this by honoring the missional activity among
us in three realms, the personal, the local (the host community of where our
facility is located) and the global. We celebrate “real” stories by bringing
those stories out, we create opportunities in response to our host community’s
needs (we belong to the city’s Community Resource Team which is a place
where the city, the school district, social service agencies and others come to
the table to discuss what needs are in the city and where the resources are to
meet those needs), we have also become an incubator for “mission groups”
these are groups that form out of people’s passions in response to some area
of need for God’s redemptive work in this world. We (VCC) come alongside
and support them to incubate a group that could potentially end up being its
own non-profit. We use our building to serve our community by letting social
service agencies and community groups use the building for a very minimal
cost.”
Missional Hope
Much has been written about the post-Christian, post-Christendom, post-

Modern cultural shift and some think this missional focus is a reaction to this
shift. In some senses this is a good thing, if our culture was at one time con-
sidered primarily Christian then there would have been no need for mission,
but the problem with this assumption is that it assumes there was a time

when the church did not need to be missional. From what many are saying
about the theology of mission, the rooting of the term in the mission of God,
and the nature of the church as sent people, I can’t imagine a time either in
history or in the future that the church should not be missional. Missional
seems to be coming into vogue in many streams of the Christian church, more
than I could cover in this brief overview, and may well be discovered as one of
the common Christian traditions rooted in the early centuries of the Church
that unifies the body of Christ today and characterizes what some have come
to call Deep Church.48
While many are concerned that missional is a confusing term, or may get hi-
jacked by those who really don’t buy into missional theology, or that it may
get overused and lose it’s distinctiveness, I continue to hold onto the term and
hope for a shift in thinking in the West and a renewal to participate in the
mission of God as a constitutive practice of those who choose to follow Christ
and call themselves Christians.
Missional Church
In the midst of rapid cultural change, the Western church is experiencing a

re-shaping and a re-thinking of what it means to be church and do mission in
the 21st century. According to Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch in The Shaping
of Things to Come, “a missional church is the hope of the post-Christendom
era.”49 But what exactly is “missional church”? Is it merely a reaction to
Christendom or is “missional” God’s intention for church in the first place?
Rather than focus on the Christendom mode that we are emerging out of and
thinking about what missional is not, I’d like to focus on what missional is
and how we see this developing in our context here in America. Here are
some highlights from The Shaping of Things to Come defining missional
church:
48 http://deepchurch.org.uk/about/
49 Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission For
the 21st-Century Church (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 2003), 17.

• The missional church thinks long-term, with the past, present and fu-
ture in view rather than looking for a quick fix.50
• The missional church desires to be used by the Spirit to transform in-
dividuals and cultures for Christ’s sake, recognizing how God is al-
ready at work in any given context.51
• The missional church takes context seriously, but does not conform to
the context merely to blend in but rather recognizes the power of the
biblical narrative within a particular context.52
Frost and Hirsch have come up with three overarching principles that give
energy and direction to the missional church. They are:53
1. The missional church is incarnational disassembling itself and seeping

into the cracks and crevices of society in order to be Christ to those
who don’t yet know him.
2. The missional church is messianic in its spirituality seeing the world
and God’s place in it as more holistic and integrated than divided be-
tween sacred and secular.
3. The missional church adopts an apostolic mode of leadership embrac-
ing a biblical, flat-leadership community that unleashes and values the
gifts of evangelism, apostleship, and prophecy along with pastoral and
teaching gifts.
While missional church may in some ways be a reaction against Christendom

and it’s “distorting influence of power, wealth and status on the Christian
story”54 we must be careful not to react too far in opposition to Christendom
forms that we lose the shape and form of church all together. While Chris-
tendom may have had a distorting influence on church in the Western world
50 Ibid., 11.
51 Ibid., 24.
52 Ibid., 27.
53 Ibid., 12.
54 Murray, Post-Christendom, 21.

to the point that they have lost their sense of mission, the Church at large
has remained missional in many senses and we can find missional tendencies
running beneath the surface of what some call “Deep Church” even here in
the West. As I’ve been reading about the emerging church and missional
church recently I have noticed that much of what is being said is similar to
what has been taught for years as missionary training. Some propose that
sociopolitically we have experienced this post-Christendom shift for over 250
years,55 and this has been my experience in America. Everyday America be-
comes a less Christian nation. The Evangelical version of Christianity has
dropped from 42% of the population in 1900 to 15% today. Twelve hundred
evangelicals leave the faith each day; overall 6,000 leave the faith each day.56
The church in the West seems to be blind to this shift and has not shifted out
of a Christendom mode, but like the proverbial ostrich, has their head stuck
in the sand - and as a result, many churches are dying. But there is hope:
emerging church leaders in the West are recognizing the need for mission and
are creating new forms of church, while older church leaders just take their
heads out of the sand long enough to criticize emerging church leaders and
their missional mode.
The reality remains before us - we live in a largely post-Christian, post-

Christendom context and to reach this culture some say, “the church should
abandon it’s role as a static institution and embrace it’s initial calling to be a
missionary movement.”57 We must learn to meaningfully engage with culture
without being beguiled by it. “This is the classic task of the cross-cultural
missionary: to engage culture without compromising the gospel.”58 If this
shift requires missionary thinking and missionary methodology, why use a
new term like “missional” to describe it all? While much of what we see hap-
55 Frost & Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come, 9.

56 Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the
Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008)
58 Ibid., 16.

pening in the missional church can be likened to missionary work, it differs
in respect to the location of mission. When most people think “missionary”
they think foreign field. Missional speaks to not only the global mission of
God, but also the local mission of God for the church in it’s home context. In
America we have many local “mission” organizations that have kept mission
alive, but “the separation between the missioning and the worshiping com-
munities within the church has been one of the tragedies of Christianity. ...
When the worshiping community of the church delegated the responsibility
for mission to parachurch organizations and the missionary societies, it killed
part of the church. Worship and mission and the development of Christian
community must inform each other closely and regularly.”59 The need for
missional church is evident, but what will this missional church look like?
Unfortunately, some Christians have become so disillusioned with Christen-

dom mode churches that they are abandoning church altogether, venturing
into postmodern culture as subversive agents of the kingdom. While this
strategy sounds romantic and reminiscent of James Bond-like covert opera-
tions, this strategy is dangerous and clearly compromises the gospel embod-
ied within the church. “The very shape of the church in the form of its ordi-
nary practices and patterns of social process constitute its witness in the
world by providing a visible and material foretaste of God’s rule.”60 (Evangel-
ism after Christendom, 313) Without this visible form, missional work lacks a
community into which new followers of Christ can be formed into citizens of
God’s kingdom. While, “Don’t think church, think mission!”61 is a good slogan
to help people transition from outdated modes of church, thinking mission
without church is foolish. Jason Clark proposes that we need a missional ec-
clesiology for the church that “enables the release and development of good
practice, whilst remaining suspicious of itself, without falling into the naivety
59 Ibid., 78.
60 Bryan P. Stone, Evangelism After Christendom: The Theology and Practice of Christian
Witness (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2007), 313.

of post-intuitional thinking.”62 In the emerging church world, many are
tempted to leave behind “church” in search for something else, which is lead-
ing to our current dilemma that while “modern church lost it’s soul now it’s
losing it’s body.”63
Missional church is a healthy alternative to abandoning church and calls

rather for a re-shaping of church to a form that is aware of the dangers of in-
stitutionalization remembering that “the church connects with Jesus through
mission, not through getting church right!”64 Missional churches place Jesus
at the center instead of a set of core beliefs. “Our aim in mission is to fully
present Jesus and to facilitate connection.”65 Todd Hunter wonders that
maybe Jesus didn’t intend to start a world religion centered around a core set
of beliefs. In his new book Christianity Beyond Belief, coming out in early
2009, Todd Hunter says we need to become “cooperative friends of Jesus liv-
ing consistent lives of creative goodness for the sake of others through the
power of the Holy Spirit inviting others to live a new way.” Todd is starting a
missional movement called Three is Enough (TiE) that will hopefully develop
into new missional churches formed with Jesus, not a set of beliefs, at the
center.
While the culture around us is increasingly moving away from traditional ex-
pressions of Church, God is still moving in our culture and we would do well
to join in on this movement of God as cooperative friends who embody a spiri-
tuality for the sake of others. In The Shaping of Things to Come, Hirsch and
Frost define a movement as “a group of people organized for, ideologically
motivated by, and committed to a purpose that implements some form of per-
62 Jason Clark, “The Loss of the Church as Public,” Deep Church, entry posted April 18,
2008, http://deepchurch.org.uk/2008/04/18/the-loss-of-church-as-public/ (accessed Oc-
tober 29, 2008).
63 Jason Clark, “Christian Identity,” Missional Ecclesiology Face to Face Session 11, Octo-
ber 10, 2008.
65 Ibid., 208.

sonal or social change; who are actively engaged in the recruitment of others;
and whose influence is spreading in opposition to the established order
within which it originated.”66 They also note that movements are character-
ized by “face-to-face recruitment by committed individuals using their own
preexisting, significant social relationships. Friendships and organic relation-
ships are the primary means of recruiting people to the cause” and “a re-
newal movement seeks to change people’s behavior and work in a nonelitist
fashion with the masses who live on the fringe of society.”67
Through a TiE group people can participate in this movement of God by form-
ing these groups focused around “preexisting, significant social relation-
ships.” As we look at Hirsch and Frost’s definitions, one question we might
ask is how do TiE groups define the cause? If God is moving and we are in-
vited to join in what God is doing as cooperative friends, what is God moving
people towards? As mentioned in other TiE articles,68 spiritual transforma-
tion is the goal - but what is the cause that motivates people to recruit others
to join into this process of spiritual transformation? One way to think of the
cause is “renewal.” We see the theme of renewal repeatedly in the scriptures:
new covenant (Matt. 26:24), new creation (1 Cor. 5:17) and we look forward to
the day when the Lord will make all things new (Rev. 21:5). Through TiE
groups we hope to participate in this renewal movement of God.
TiE groups help locate the mission of God, this renewal movement, in the
everyday reality of our lives. TiE groups can be effective agents of change
simply because of the size and locale of the group since “smaller missional
units are more organically responsive to host communities in different sub-
cultures.”69 We are living in a subculture rich world, and the subculture that
a person belongs to - in their world of work, the place they live, the people
66 Ibid., 204.
67 Ibid., 205.
68 Todd Hunter, “Additional Goals for TiE Groups,” Three is Enough,
http://www.3isenough.org/parallel-goals-for-tie-groups/ (accessed October 17, 2008).

they hang with when having fun - is exactly where God wants us to be in-
volved in joining the mission of renewal. But rather than asking those in our
circle of influence to step out and join some foreign Christian subculture,
Christ wants to come alive through us in the midst of your “preexisting, sig-
nificant social relationships.” TiE groups are a great alternative to traditional
church in the West, but what of the existing churches? Will they survive this
cultural shift?
One of my personal concerns is whether mega-churches will survive in this

post-Christian context and whether they can become missional churches.
Frost and Hirsch would argue against the probability of mega-churches being
missional largely due to their size and structure. Missional church is de-
scribed as organic, meaning “simply that the church in all its expressions re-
mains true to its essential nature as a dynamic, living organism as opposed to
a mechanistic-style structure. It also refers to the way community is struc-
tured with a view to the interconnectivity and interrelationship between all
aspects of its life, purpose and function. And it implies an innate responsive-
ness to its environment.”70 We find an organic level of interconnectedness and
community is only hinted at in larger churches. Most mega-churches have
grown large through excellent programming but at what cost? I would agree
with Frost and Hirsch, the cost is the loss of genuine community and long-
term, organic health. Missional churches focus less on numerical growth
within the church and more on growth by multiplication of churches. Frost
and Hirsch propose that the shaping of things to come includes missional
churches that are organic, reproducible and sustainable. With few exceptions,
we are finding the mega-church is simply not sustainable in a post-Christian,
post-Christendom, postmodern world.
So, is missional church the hope for this post-manythings world? While I
agree that missional church as defined and described by Frost and Hirsch of-
fers a much more hopeful future than the predominant form of church in the
70 Ibid., 210.

West, I will continue to fix my hope completely on grace revealed through Je-
sus, the author and perfecter of faith and as long as missional church keeps
its focus fixed solely on Jesus, we will do well together. This shift to a mis-
sional mode of church will take time, and as it is with evangelism so it is with
mission: “Evangelism takes time. But for a people of hope, it is precisely time
that we have been given. That is why hope is subversive in a world that is
cynical and stoic about the way things are. That is also why an evangelism
formed by hope will always stand fundamentally counter to an evangelism
formed by that great impostor of hope, despair.”71 We must not despair as the
church moves from the center of society to the margins72 in the midst of this
rapid cultural change. We must have hope.
While we must have hope in Christ and God’s global mission, I often wonder
if there is any real hope for the church in the West – will we see God moving
and people responding and choosing to follow him more than we are now? If
we just change in the right ways, will God then show up and move in power?
Or is God is already moving in the West and inviting us to join his mission,
inspiring us to change and align ourselves with his purposes, his mission in
the world by being missional in the local spaces and places we inhabit on a
daily basis. I have been on mission in America for 25 years now with the last
15 years spent in the most un-churched, un-reached region of our nation –
the Pacific Northwest. I have struggled for years as a mission-minded person,
committed to discipleship, and devoted to following Christ as authentically as
I know how. Yet, in my church culture I have felt alone.
But as I meet people like Alan Hirsch and read his books, I find I am not
alone. In The Forgotten Ways, Hirsch offers a working definition of missional
church as “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 mis-
71 Stone, Evangelism After Christendom, 294.

72 Murray, Post-Christendom.

sion. 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.”73 (Hirsch 2006, 82)
Some are concerned that with a missional focus for the church, somehow the
church, the formed and gathered body of Christ, will collapse into mission. As
Hirsch uses the term, I don’t see this happening but rather I see the church
being strengthened and built up to be the people God intended them to be or-
ganized around and committed to his mission to the world. Hirsch affirms
that there has been much misunderstanding of the term missional and that
some have misused it or misunderstood it. But rather than give up on termi-
nology that is appropriate for this situation, he has chosen to clarify and dis-
tinguish the term and uses it as the core of Apostolic Genius in mDNA –
where m = missional.
Survival of the Fittest and Selective Breeding
Hirsch chooses the metaphor of DNA for the elements of Apostolic Genius be-
cause it conveys the ideas of inherence, coherence, reproducibility and trans-
ferability. The m- of mDNA distinguishes it from the biological construct the
metaphor is derived from and stands for missional. mDNA is the structure
for Apostolic Genius and illustrated beautifully in two visuals worth a thou-
sand words:
73 Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church. (Grand Rapids,
Mich.: Brazos Press, 2006), 82.

So, there you have it, now you don’t need to read The Forgotten Ways. Just
study these visuals and somehow absorb them into your spirit and allow
them to re-place your existing xDNA constructs - where x stands for anything
other than m. If only it were that easy. Just as we have seen that best-selling
books don’t change the world for Jesus, so too, merely reading about, under-
standing and agreeing with “The Forgotten Ways” will not change a de-
formed, deactivated, degenerating, declining church in the West. The sub-
title for the book is “reactivating the missional church” and is the key aim. It
will not help us to merely understand how important disciple making is and
how best to do it in our changing cultural context, we must be doing it. Our
missional-incarnational impulse will not create a movement unless we are
moving in missional-incarnational ways.
I am very excited for the new and emerging churches that are starting with
an understanding of Apostolic Genius, or are forced to find it like the Chinese
underground church. I am thrilled by the many missional church leaders who
are trying new things and appear to be making a difference and seeing people
respond to the life-changing gospel embodied through their missional
churches. The biggest challenge I see for the church in the West is for the ex-
isting churches to reactivate this mDNA and recover the Apostolic Genius
that has been long forgotten, or maybe even mutated for many of them.
Hirsch offers an online assessment of missional fitness and I believe we are
seeing the survival of the fittest and for the church in the West to be mission-
ally reactivated, they must become missionally fit.
Hisrch is very careful in his introduction as well as in every chapter detailing

the elements of mDNA to emphasize that while all of the individual elements
are great, and probably many are represented in existing churches, it is the
combination of all of them together, centered around the lordship of Christ,
that makes up the Apostolic Genius that has the power to change the world.
Hirsch describes each of the elements artfully, inspiring the imagination with
the hopes of activating the church. Hirsch’s use of the metaphor of mDNA in-
cludes the ideas of replication and healthy reproduction. He uses the idea of

the gospel spreading as an ideavirus (Seth Godin) and while the implications
of such a spread are positive, the verbal imagery of virus leaves me wanting.
I’ve been thinking hard to find an alternative image, but have not found one
that communicates the communicability of the gospel as does the viral image.
But then, Hirsch switches images and writes, “Let’s Talk about Sex” as he
discusses the issue of reproduction and reproducibility. This is where I see
the Church in the West has failed. If we are in such rapid decline, we are in
decline because we have failed to reproduce healthy, reproducing Christians.
I think there are four main factors contributing to this failure:
• Neglect – we have neglected to activate mDNA in our offspring, both

physical and spiritual.
• Cloning – we try to reproduce through copy-catism - replication not re-
production.
• Inbreeding – we stagnate the gene pool by cloistering in our Christian
bubbles74 and ultimately end up with unhealthy mutations.
• Hybridization – we have allowed breeding with different species, mar-
rying empire with faith, church with politics and as in biology, “Hy-
brids are usually, but not always, sterile.”75
Failure to Thrive, Unconscionable Copies, and Barren Mutants
The failure to make disciples is one of the most critical failures of the church
in the West. While our churches are replete with discipleship programs, the
dearth of fully devoted followers of Christ in America is evidence that these
programs are not working. Just as we need the full complement of elements
inherent in Apostolic Genius to change things, we cannot attribute the fall of
Christianity in America or the West to one factor alone. But, failure to make
disciples is at the top of my list. Hirsch believes that one of the greatest ene-
74 See Kimball, Dan. They Like Jesus but Not The Church: Insights from Emerging Genera-
tions. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007.
75 “Crossbreed,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_breeding#Hybrid_animals

mies of the church in the West is consumerism. Our discipleship programs
have become yet another service the church offers as it has become a dis-
penser of religious goods and services. “Ninety percent or more of the people
who attend church services are passive. In other words they are consump-
tive.”76 Instead of following the model of Jesus who spotted the Twelve,
prayed about whether to call them to discipleship, and then pursued them
and invited them to join him in his life and ministry, we have offered disci-
pleship services for a price to anyone who will come at no real significant per-
sonal cost without interfacing with their everyday life as our mega-churches
with food courts and fitness centers create a sort of “parallel universe.”(Hsu
2006, 162) The “church world” can be a powerful conforming influence lulling
us into a false sense of security thinking we are being conformed to the image
of Christ when we are really being pressed into the mold of Christendom and
consumer Christianity. (Romans 12:2) Rather than making fully devoted fol-
lowers of Christ we are producing weakling Christians suffering from spiri-
tual neglect resulting in a failure to thrive.
One of my favorite Arnold Schwarzenegger movies (yes, I am a big fan) is

“The 6th Day” and in this movie they have developed the ability to transfer
the consciousness of a person being cloned. This has not happened in real life.
Clones are merely a vacant copy, or in the case of identical twins, an identical
physical representation with a life of it’s own. Recently, I have been discour-
aged by the number of churches who see another church having great success
and using the logic that they don’t want to reinvent the wheel, they attempt
to copy that other church – especially if that church has experienced tremen-
dous growth or popularity. So, we’re all Willow Creek Wannabes, and Pur-
pose Driven Proselytes when God wants us to be Missional-Incarnational
Masterpieces representing him in distinct ways in our unique contexts. The
reproductive capacities of the church are directly linked to the missional-
incarnational impulse (Hirsch 2006, 139) and when we are copying how
Christ chose to send a group of people and reveal himself through them in a
76 Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, 110.

specific context, we are being neither missional nor incarnational and we are
certainly not reproducing organically. “If we put up this [Saddleback or Wil-
low Creek] as the sole model of effective church, the net effect will be to mar-
ginalize most people from ministry and church planting, and it will effectively
put a contraceptive on the reproductive mechanism of the church.”77 Rather
than reproducing effective ministries with the power to change the world, we
are creating unconscionable copies void of the creative power needed to make
a difference at all.
You’ve probably heard all those bad jokes about inbreeding associated with
certain regions of our country, but I wonder what those jokes would sound
like if we put them in the context of some of our churches. Some have noticed
that in America we have a tendency to create a Christian sub-culture and
then cocoon ourselves within that sub-culture. As a result, we experience in-
breeding. “We all know what happens in a closed genetic pool. Serious de-
formities and weaknesses result from inbreeding. Healthy reproduction
therefore draws upon a much larger gene pool and thereby invigorates the
living system [in this case, the church] by giving rise to more possibilities in
the genetic makeup.”78 I believe that some of the criticisms of the church of-
fered in recent books like Kimball’s are the result of years of inbreeding. But
along with inbreeding, I believe the church has suffered from hybridization
through the marriage of empire and faith through Christendom as well as
the quest for political power through the marriage of church and politics. The
resulting mutations of both inbreeding and hybridization have left the church
barren, to the point of near extinction in Europe and rapid decline in Amer-
ica.
As usual, I often return to one of the lingering questions in my life and my

church world – can the mega-church become missional? Will the mega-church
survive, and should it? Willow Creek, considered one of the most successful
77 Ibid., 215.
78 Ibid., 213.

churches in America after which thousands of churches have patterned
themselves recently revealed their own sense of failure, “Some of the stuff
that we have put millions of dollars into thinking it would really help our
people grow and develop spiritually, when the data actually came back, it
wasn’t helping people that much. Other things that we didn’t put that much
money into and didn’t put much staff against is stuff our people are crying
out for.”79 Neither Willow Creek nor 40 Days of Purpose seem to be the an-
swer to the dilemma of the church in the West, and I don’t think a book like
“The Forgotten Ways” with all it’s great ideas and inspiration to rethink and
reactivate Apostolic Genius is the answer either. I think a movement of peo-
ple who are the least, the forgotten, the voiceless ones, the people leaving
their traditional church contexts looking for a change – this will be the
change, for “the organic approach says that real change, especially lasting
change, comes from the bottom up and that it is the task of leadership to cre-
ate the conditions that foster imagination, initiative, and creativity.”80
Hirsch offers a “note of warning for those leading in established churches:

what Western Christianity desperately needs at the moment is adaptive
leadership – people who can help us transition to a different, more agile,
mode of church. Such leaders don’t necessarily have to be highly creative in-
novators themselves, but rather be people who can move the church into
adaptive modes – people who can disturb the stifling equilibrium and create
the conditions for change and innovation. By and large, many leaders in
church organizations, particularly those with strong caring and teaching
gifts, can exhibit a tendency to avoid conflict and too easily soothe tensions.
Left unchecked, this can be lethal, because it caters to equilibrium and there-
fore ultimately to death.”81 I’m not looking for the latest, greatest vehicle to
79 Url Scaramanga, “Willow Creek Repents?” Out of Ur,

http://blog.christianitytoday.com/outofur/archives/2007/10/willow_creek_re.html (ac-
cessed November 20, 2008).
81 Ibid., 257.

drive as I embark on some mission driven life, I am looking for a group of
people who are willing to think different about church and mission, adapt to
the challenges of changing culture, and allow people to develop a sense of Ap-
ostolic Genius and reactivate the missional church to follow the movement of
God as he continues to send people to be a blessing to the whole world.
Does Missional = Organic?
While this missional challenge applies to new churches that are forming in
today’s culture and existing churches alike, the specific challenges will differ
for house churches, rural denominational churches, suburban mega-churches,
urban multi-site churches and all the other variations we see on the land-
scape of Christianity in the West. But some are arguing that for a church to
be missional it must be smaller and more organic than many of our current
church models. Frank Viola is one of the leading voices in the house church
movement in America and he believes that many churches have shifted away
from God’s original intent for the church. While his arguments for house
churches are convincing, I do not believe missional must necessarily be con-
fined to any one form of gathering as the body of Christ. Others wonder,
“Small, indigenous churches are getting lots of attention, but where's the
fruit?”82 Many in the missional movement are reticent to measure “fruit” and
resist trying to quantify and clarify missional effectiveness according to
church growth standards, but to propose that any mode of church is inher-
ently more missional than others loses sight of the complexities of the issues
at hand. Dan Kimball notes, “We all agree with the theory of being a commu-
nity of God that defines and organizes itself around the purpose of being an
agent of God's mission in the world. But the missional conversation often
goes a step further by dismissing the ‘attractional’ model of church as ineffec-
tive. Some say that creating better programs, preaching, and worship serv-
82 Dan Kimball, “Dan Kimball's Missional Misgivings,” Out of Ur,

http://blog.christianitytoday.com/outofur/archives/2008/12/dan_kimballs_mi.html (ac-
cessed December 12, 2008).

ices so people ‘come to us’ isn't going to cut it anymore. But here's my di-
lemma—I see no evidence to verify this claim.”83 It seems that some mega-
churches can be missionally effective in reaching certain people groups, while
smaller house churches can be effective at reaching others. We must be care-
ful not to limit the creativity and ingenuity of the Spirit of God in shaping
and forming the body of Christ to be missional. We must also not forget the
powerful forces militating against the formation of a people who accurately
reflect Christ to the world and radically make a difference restoring this
world to God.
Missional Reprise
The missional motif remains strong in my personal life, and I hear the
sounds of this motif ringing louder in the West as the missional conversation
continues and many Christians are awakening to the call of God to join the
Missio dei for the sake of others. The challenge remains not only before estab-
lished churches and newly planted churches, but also before every follower of
Christ who seeks to be fully devoted to Christ. We must face this challenge
with grace and discernment, with love for our brothers and sisters in Christ
who see things a little differently than we do, and with hope for the future. I
am looking forward to the future, knowing that God’s intention to bring all
things to completion will happen in time.
Hirsch and others are convinced that while God may want us to do something
new, the essence of what it means to be a follower of Christ is not something
new, but something that has been forgotten and as the proponents of Deep
Church say it, we need to be “Remembering Our Future.” So, what exactly is
it that we have forgotten? What do we need to remember? Is it the five-fold
ministry outlined in Ephesians 4? Is it the common tradition of the one
Church? Or is it something else? And when did we forget these things? What
lead to such a forgetfulness? What have we learned that needs to be forgotten
in order for us to restore what needs to be remembered? It is certain that
83 Ibid.

there are competing ways that have been developed over the centuries that
we would do well to leave behind us as we seek to recover God’s missional
motif. While it is challenging to discern what it is we need to leave behind, it
is equally challenging to change our thinking in new ways.
What we need today is “a new paradigm – a new vision of reality: a funda-

mental change in our thoughts, perceptions, and values, especially as they
relate to our view of the church and mission.”84 We need to change and adopt
a missionary stance in relation to our cultural contexts or face increasing de-
cline and possible extinction.85 But is fundamental change possible? Accord-
ing to Alan Deutschman, author of “Change or Die”, odds are against such
fundamental change within organizations. Thankfully, Jesus reminds us that
often when things are impossible for us, they are not impossible for God. If
anyone has the power to change things, it is the God of the universe who cre-
ates all things, holds all things together, is in all things, and makes things
new. While on the surface things may look bleak in my world as the church
continues to decline, I hear God calling – calling me to participate in his mis-
sion here and now. Music speaks to my soul, as the words of this song by Iona
prophetically spoke to me when I first heard them:
It started with a dream, and I could see it all

I had a vision and I heard you call me
Now the dream is over, but the voice remains
I am part of something that is going
To change things for the better
To change things for the better
And I hear you call

And I see you dancing, dancing on the wall
The writing's on the paper, the names upon the page

85 Ibid., 50.

The past part of the present, and this coming of age
I see a revolution I never thought would dawn
I am part of something that's going to go on
And on for the better
To go on and on for the better
And I hear you call

It started with a dream, and I still recall

I see a bridge where there once was a wall of stone
Now the dream is over, and the picture will fade
But I am part of something
That is going to sway things for the better
Going to sway things for the better
And I hear you call

And I hear you call
I believe I am part of something that is going to change things for the better.
I am part of the great family of God in Christ that has changed things for
centuries. I am part of the movement of God in this day and age that is con-
tinuing to change things. I am choosing to join my voice with others who are
calling for change – for a new way of thinking about church and mission in
the West. Another voice spoke to me from Jeremiah 15:19:
Therefore this is what the LORD says:

"If you repent, I will restore you
that you may serve me;
if you utter worthy, not worthless, words,
you will be my spokesman.
Let this people turn to you,
but you must not turn to them.”

I truly hope and pray for a reactivation of the missional church, for a restora-
tion of the people of God on mission with God, and believe that the many
voices singing the missional motif will help us to reframe our concept of
church, rethink our mission, and reorganize ourselves around the mission of
God so that we can be restored to a life full of hope for a world in need.

Bibliography:
Bickel, Bruce and Jantz, Stan. I’m Fine with God, It’s Christians I Can’t
Stand: Getting Past the Religious Garbage in the Search for Spiritual Truth.
Harvest House, 2008.
Boyd, Gregory. The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political
Power Is Destroying the Church. Zondervan, 2007.
Clark, Jason. Missional Ecclesiology Face to Face. George Fox Seminary,
2008.
Hattaway, Paul. Back to Jerusalem: Three Chinese House Church Leaders
Share Their Vision to Complete the Great Commission. Authentic Media,
2003.
Hirsch, Alan. The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church. Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2006.
Hsu, Al. The Suburban Christian: Finding Spiritual Vitality in the Land of
Plenty. InterVarsity Press, 2006.
Jenkins, Philip. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.
rev. and ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Kimball, Dan. They Like Jesus but Not The Church: Insights from Emerging
Generations. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007
Kinnaman, David and Lyons, Gabe. unChristian: What a New Generation
Really Thinks about Christianity... and Why It Matters. Baker Books, 2007.
Warren, Rick. The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 2007
Viola, Frank. Reimagining Church: Pursuing the Dream of Organic Christi-
anity. David C. Cook, 2008.
Wicker, Christine. The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis
Inside the Church. Harper One, 2008.
Remembering Our Future: Explorations in Deep Church. Edited by Andrew
Walker and Luke Bretherton. London: Authentic Media, 2007.

Missional Challenge: What Is Missional and How Can We Live Missionally?

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Missional Challenge

What is Missional and How Can We Live Missionally?

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 1

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 2

1. God initiates and advances work in history to accomplish His purpose.

2. God calls His people to join Him in fulfilling His purpose.

2 “Missio dei,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missio_dei (accessed December

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 3

4. God accomplishes His purpose by triumphing over evil in order to res-

5. The Bible is a unified story of God's purpose.

7. The Christian movement has brought about positive social transforma-

8. The mission task can and will be completed.

9. The world's population can be viewed in terms of people groups.

10. The progress of world evangelization can be assessed in terms of

12. Completing the task requires effective cross-cultural evangelism that

16. By participating in the world Christian movement, every believer can

3 “Core Ideas of Perspectives,” Perspectives on the World Christian Movement,

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 4

Before I continue, I must confess I am persuaded that God’s mission on earth

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 5

Christendom – Blessed Crescendo or Beleaguered Cacophony?

When looking at the influence of Christendom, “persistent voices throughout

We saw the birth of Christendom as Constantine converted and proclaimed

5 Stuart Murray, Post-Christendom, (Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press, 2004), 9.

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 6

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 7

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 8

While we have seen the rapid decline of Christendom influence in Europe,

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 9

Unfortunately, many negative practices, values and beliefs of Christendom

18 “Separation of Church and State,” Wikipedia,

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 10

For centuries we have held up Western versions of Christianity as the stan-

Consumerism – The Curse of Capitalism?

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 11

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 12

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 13

In March of 2007, I attended a conference called "Inside the Missional Ma-

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 14

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 15

When entering “missional” as my search term in google, I was offered about

"Missional living" is a Christian term that describes a missionary lifestyle;

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 16

Rick also gives a short answer to the question “What is Missional?”:

32 Rick Meigs, Friend of Missional, http://www.friendofmissional.org/ (accessed November

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 17

• From programs to processes

And Rick adds a couple more to Ed's list:

• From services to service

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 18

JR Woodward, who posted “A Primer on Today’s Missional Church” on his

I like Woodward’s ideas on being sent people as well as bilingual theologians.

Anti-Missional and Missional Confusions

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 19

to me, missional–individually & corporately–is:

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 20

After reviewing Ed’s articles on The Meanings of Missional, one conclusion I

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 21

Brother Maynard (a pseudonym) is an avid blogger concerning this terminol-

I also found a definition of missional on the Acts 29 website. Acts 29 is a net-

45 Scott Thomas, “Doctrine,” Acts 29, http://www.acts29network.org/about/doctrine/

Elizabeth Chapin •Missional Ecclesiology • George Fox Evangelical Seminary 22