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Series recap: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

When there are “megashifts” in a culture, there tends to be a reconceptualization of the church. The more intense the cultural swing, the more comprehensive is the alteration in the church’s perception of itself. What is emerging from the disarray of the present social-historical shift to the postmodern is likely to be a second reformation as the church rediscovers itself as a missional movement.

In recognizing the impetus of the missional wave and the predicaments caused by modernity, what would a missional church look like in the 21st century? What are the characteristics of a missional church that will help it resist modernity’s malady?

Over the next few posts, we will look at the emerging ‘shape’ of the missional church, particularly in the West. Today we look at prominent missional leaders/thinkers Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost’s thoughts on the subject.

In their influential book, The Shaping of Things to Come, Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost rightly react against the values of an exclusively attractional and hierarchal church by describing what a church missional mode looks like. According to Hirsch and Frost, rather than being attractional, the missional church leaves its own religious sectors and lives at ease with non-church goers, trickling into the host mores like salt and light. [1]

Frost and Hirsch state:

If the attractional mode sees the world as divided into two zones, the ‘in’ and the ‘out,’ the incarnational model sees it more as a web, a series of intersecting lines symbolizing the networks of relationships…of which church members are a part. [2]

In this new age, the missional church places a lofty worth on communal life, embraces open leadership structures, and welcomes the involvement of all the people of God. Further, a church on mission gathers for sensual-experiential-participatory worship and is intensely concerned for matters of” justice-seeking and mercy-bringing.” [3]

Tomorrow we look at the missional framework of Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. Stay tuned…
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1) Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost, The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st Century Church (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2003), 30.

2) Ibid, 44.

3) Ibid. 22.

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Series recap: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

In the last post, we looked at the first stream that was propelling a new ecclesiological-centered missional movement within evangelicalism in the 80′s and 90′s: its key early thinkers in Francis Dubose, Charles Van Engan, and Darrell Guder and their works. Today we look at the second stream: the “megatrends” or better, the crises of in North America in the late 20th century, necessitating a need for the ecclesiological-missional discussion, and subsequently, the surfacing of a missional church.

MEGATRENDS

Dr. David Dunbar, president of Biblical Seminary, has elucidated three developments that influence ecclesiologal-missional thinking in the latter part of the 20th century. First, Dunbar noted that we are seeing the evaporation of a “churched” society. [1] Particularly, that Christianity in North America has moved away from its place of supremacy as it has encountered the loss of not only numbers but of sway within society. [2] Second is the existence of a post-Christian context. This involves first, the loss of Christian memory and secondly, people who don’t know about the Christian faith presuppose that they do. [3] Third, the Western church is laboring under a conception of mission(s) as an movement that takes place “over there and far away”; as the activity of a smattering of the church specially “called” to this charge. [4]

Guder continues with this logic in Missional Church, by also outlining the postmodern threshold that many feel we have penetrated. Elements rising from within the emerging postmodern milieu include: loss of collective experiences, ephemeral relationships, personal spirituality without organized religion, relative truth, a decentered self, and a pluralist society. [5]

Also in Missional Church, Guder delineated yet another ailment of the late 20th century. One section in particular, entitled “A People or a Place?” in the chapter, “Missional Vocation: Called and Sent to Represent the Reign of God.” He illustrated that the syntax regularly used to refer to or inquire about the church still carries the weighty baggage of being a “place where certain things happen” [6] and in turn, where other things do not. Guder points out that even when not referring to a material building, Christians tend to associate “church” to a “meeting or activity, a set of programs, or an organizational structure.” [7] So over time, this thought narrowed the church’s definition of itself toward a “place where” idea, not so much expressed but presumed. Guder says, “This perception of the church gives little attention to the communal entity or presence, and it stresses even less the community’s role as the bearer of missional responsibility throughout the world, both near and far away.” [8]

Finally, the last crisis of the late 20th century was the malady of the modern “seeker-sensitive” worship service and the postmodern’s apathy towards it. According to David Fitch, chair of Evangelical Theology at Northern Seminary, he says that the postmodern, “seeks community over anonymity and is overdosed on consumer appeals to felt needs.” [9]
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1) David Dunbar, “Getting a Handle on Missional,” Missional Journal, Vol. 1, No. 2 (March 2007); available from http://www.biblical.edu/images/belong/PDFs/vol1no1.pdf; Internet: accessed 12 May 2008.

2) Darrell Guder, ed., Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998), 1.

3) Dunbar, “Getting a Handle on Mission,” Missional Journal; Internet: accessed 12 May 2008.

4) Ibid.

5) Guder, Missional Church, 40-43.

6) Ibid., 83.

7) Ibid., 83-84.

8) Ibid., 80.

9) David Fitch, The Great Giveaway: Reclaiming the Mission of the Church from Big Business, Parachurch Organizations, Psychotherapy, Consumer Capitalism, and Other Modern Maladies (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2005), 55.

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the “sent” church 3

Series recap: Part 1 | Part 2

MISSIO DEI INTRODUCED

In 1934, Karl Hartenstein, a German missiologist, first expressed the notion of Missio Dei. The Missio Dei notion surfaced way before this time, but it emerged in a specific way in 1938 when the International Missionary Council (IMC) gathered at Tambaram (Madras) in India to have one of its most theologically alert conferences.

One of the chief outcomes of the Tambaram conference was the suggestion that “church and mission are one.” And by “mission,” they concentrated on the “sentness” of the church. In his book, Edinburgh to Salvador: Twentieth Century Ecumenical Missiology, T.V. Philip, a church historian and a former professor at the United Theological College in Bangalore, India, explained, “The main conclusion of the Madras Conference was that church and mission are inseparable… It is the church that is God’s missionary to the world.” (1)

THE MISSIOLOGICAL DEBATE: PAST AND PRESENT

According to Ed Stetzer, director of Lifeway Research and Lifeway’s Missiologist in Residence, the dispute about “church and mission” was probably the essential missiological debate of the first 60 years of the last century. (2) The fundamental concern of theses debates has commonly been over the nature of mission. (3) From the late 1800’s, however, the ascent of theological liberalism, the early world mission conferences – i.e. Tamambram and Willengen – and the consequential ecumenical movement began to dilute the Missio Dei beyond Philip’s aforementioned stance that church and missions are inextricable. (4)

Missio Dei is a term still used today in evangelical circles, though not as broadly as in ecumenical conversation and without the loss in focus on the church as the method God has established for His missionary work. (5) But in today’s dialogue, the evangelical rendition of Missio Dei is typically replaced with the word “missional.”

For the remainder of this series, when the term Missio Dei or “missional” is used, it highlights the elemental nature and calling of the church as God’s called and sent people. Charles Van Engen, Professor of Biblical Theology of Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary says it this way:

The genesis of my view of Missio Dei and of “missional” is the Bible…and the “traditional view of mission” that assumes…the nature of the church as being most fundamentally God’s instrument to call the nations to reconciliation with God in Jesus Christ by the work of the Holy Spirit… (6)

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1) T.V. Phillip, Edinburgh to Salvador: Twentieth Century Ecumenical Missiology [book on-line] (Delhi: CSS& ISPCK, 1999; accessed 10 May 2008); available from http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=1573&C=1519; Internet.

2) Ed Stetzer, “Meanings of Missional – Part 1,” EdStetzer.com – A Lifeway Research Blog, 14 August 2007, available from http://blogs.lifeway.com/blog/edstetzer/2007/08/meanings_of_missional_part_1_1.html; Internet; accessed 10 May 2008.

3) Walter Elwell, ed., Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, Second Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001), 782.

4) Phillip, Edinburgh to Salvador; Internet; accessed 10 May 2008.

5) Elwell, Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, 782.

6) Charles Van Engen, “Meanings of Missional Part 5,” interview by Ed Stetzer, EdStetzer.com – A Lifeway Research Blog, 2 October 2007, available from http://blogs.lifeway.com/blog/edstetzer/2007/10/meanings_of_missional_part_5_1.html; Internet: accessed 10 May 2008.

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Series recap: Part 1

Southern Baptists have become recurrent users of the word. The Assemblies of God Department of U.S. Missions contains this word as one of their four values. The Evangelical Free Church organized a summit built on this word for their leaders in 2007 and they have renamed their church planting leadership to mirror this word. The Nazarene Church’s denomination has embraced this word as their denominational objective. (1)

The word? Missional.

Many individuals within evangelicalism are attempting to classify and analyze this word. Its unclear connotation has brought it to the point that even some of its first and fervent users of the term are becoming restrained to use it themselves for concern of their audience misunderstanding their meaning. But the advocates of the idiom, “missional,” see it as a term set apart from other similar words like “missionary,” “mission,” and “Missio Dei.”

If the patois of the missional church is to become a beneficial way of structuring communities of God’s people in a postmodern culture, then we have to expend the time to comprehend what is at stake in the speech we are using. And if Christian fellowships are truly rediscovering that they must view themselves as a “sent” community, they must fully understand what it at stake so as to better chart a course for the future of evangelicalism.
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1) Ed Stetzer, “Meanings of Missional – Part 1,” EdStetzer.com – A Lifeway Research Blog, 14 August 2007, available from http://blogs.lifeway.com/blog/edstetzer/2007/08/meanings_of_missional_part_1_1.html; Internet; accessed 10 May 2008.

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Over the next couple of weeks, I am going to walk through some of my thoughts regarding the missional church. I am no expert on the subject – compared to the likes of Ed Stetzer, Alan Roxburgh, Alan Hirsch, et al – but I have been reading like a fiend on the subject for the past two years and feel like I am getting a grasp on what I resonate with. And what I don’t.

So to get the ball rolling, my premise:

Due to the modern church’s ineffectiveness in penetrating culture with the Gospel, many Christian fellowships are rediscovering that they must view themselves as a “sent” community; existing not primarily for themselves but rather for the greater purpose of mission. Because these “missional” fellowships are responding to the crisis by revisiting the full Biblical and historical implications of the Missio Dei and redefining their philosophies of ministry to reflect “missional” practice, they are more successfully charting a way forward for postmodern evangelicalism than their immediate predecessors.

Please join in on the conversation. Expand the conversation. Clarify the conversation. The more the merrier…
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the 7

1. Very cool to see young pastors putting their ministry philosophy on paper – literally – for other young pastors to see. See the different incarnations of The Pulpit, The Table, and The Square: Joe Thorn, Steve McCoy, and Kevin Larson.

2. I found this very interesting. It comes via Alan Hirsch. It is a map from the World Values Survey that shows the levels of traditional and secular values in the major countries of the world. America isn’t as traditional as you might think. We better get ‘missional’ real quick…

3. Andy Farmer, pastor of discipleship and counseling at Covenant Fellowship Church, has put together a great document expressing important values to be affirmed by Christian artists. This would be a great framework for a covenant for a church’s worship ministry…

4. I’m a closet geek when it comes to the Internet, especially Web 2.0 stuff. I found this article intriguing regarding IP addresses – particularly the IPv4′s – and their “exhaustion.”

5. My love for the Christian year was peaked by this from T-Wax. I think you know what my answer would be…

6. Can a Christian sing the blues? I-Monk unpacks a very biblical concept that is resurfacing in the language of Christians.

7. This is almost three years old, but the Tall Skinny one linked to it recently and I thought it was an insightful blog entry on the debate about attractional/incarnational ministry.


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