What does “Missional” mean?

*Mike Brantley has also posted on this topic, with a complimentary angle. Click here to read his thoughts and challenge – it’s refreshing, and classically Mike!

**Alan Hirsch, Deborah “Debs” Hirsch, and Michael “Frosty” Frost are just three people out there who wrestle and practice this stuff, and then write books about it. They are good friends of ours, and Communitas actually lives the things they live themselves, and then write about. They came for a visit to our community right before Catapult Conference last weekend, and were stoked to see us actually practicing this stuff. It was pretty fun to have them with us. I could say more, but suffice it to say they’re kindred spirits. To explain what “Missional” means, I am drawing out of their lectures and books, and some conversations we had with them.

“Missional” is one of those new vibey words being thrown around these days by a lot of Christians. It’s become a buzzword, and like many buzzwords, the depth and intent of the word is being lost. So I’d like to spend a few paragraphs laying out what “missional” looks like in real, practical ways.

“Missional” is a posture. It is all-encompassing for the Jesus follower, and for the faith community (church). It is not an idea that can be surgically or selectively applied. Many people and churches have glommed to this word, but haven’t undergone the necessary posture change to embody it.

To be missional, you cannot merely be attractional. One of the traps of selective application that faith communities and individual Jesus followers fall into is to simply revamp their website or programs. Often, they will tone down the Jesus aspect of the Gospel, and simply engage in community. Or they add candles and subtract ceiling lights. Or they add an event or program to try to attract more people to their services.

When we tone down the Jesus aspect of the Gospel (which, by the way, is the CORE of the Gospel) we lose the very thing we are trying to communicate to a lost world. Jesus MUST remain the central figure in everything that we as individuals and faith communities value, believe, and practice.

To be missional requires a complete and total re-orientation of structure and focus. It means shifting the catalyzing agent of a faith community. Mike Frost puts it this way: “The mission of the church is to alert people to the universal reign of God through Jesus by proclamation and demonstration.”

Every healthy faith community practices four things that reflect Jesus at the center. He is the reason we practice our faith, right? These four things are: Worship, Discipleship, Community, and Mission.

Most faith communities in our culture – and, for that matter, most individual Jesus followers – orient, inform, and catalyze the other three practices from Worship. By this, I mean that everything points to Sunday: the worship gathering, or service. We even define the word “church” through this practice of Worship. We “go to church” when, in reality, we are going to a gathering for the purpose of worshipping Jesus together.

Worship is the catalyst for the other three practices. It is “at worship” that we open the Scriptures to learn as a community. It is “at worship” that we practice discipleship, learning from our elders and pastors how to follow Jesus. It is the worship gathering to which we invite people who don’t know Jesus, hoping that they will encounter and meet Him there.

What if, instead of worship – and by that, I mean a local faith community’s time to gather as a body for the purpose of worship – we let Mission inform, orient, and catalyze our other three practices as healthy faith communities of Jesus followers? What effect would that have on the other three practices?

If our Mission is “to alert people to the universal reign of God through Jesus by proclamation and demonstration”, then our participation in discipleship, catalyzed by our practice of mission, would imply that mission is a community activity. We go together to share the good news. And it’s not just “information transfer”. If mission is more than sharing the theology of sin and redemption, more than just convincing someone about the truth of the Gospel through argument or presentation, what is it?

Mission ought to be imaginative, creative, and redemptive. At Catapult, Mike Frost told the story of a young man in Cambodia who was called by God to be the pastor of a slum, where no other pastor was willing to go. As he moved into this slum, he saw that the people slogged through mud to go anywhere. He said, “In Jesus’ kingdom, nobody has to walk through mud.” And he led his people in digging out the mud to create clean paths through the slum.

This young pastor continued to look around, and saw people suffering from easily treatable health issues. He said, “In Jesus’ kingdom, people should have access to medical care.” So he made appointments with several doctors, and lobbied them to come care for his people in the slum. They responded, and the general health of his neighbors and community improved greatly.

The government gave notice that they were going to move the slum to make way for more profitable uses of land. They were going to force the residents to evacuate further away from the city, and to a much less hospitable place. When the pastor heard of this, he said, “In Jesus’ kingdom, nobody is evicted.” He went to the military’s command office, and told the officer in charge of the relocation that they could come and move his people, but they would have to drive over his body to get to them.

Frosty met this pastor, and was invited to visit the slum. As he walked through it, people were coming out of their shacks everywhere, and talking to him. His translator told him that they were all testifying of their hope in Christ. This young pastor thought imaginatively and creatively about what Mission looks like, and he manifested the Kingdom of Jesus where he was called, inviting the slum community to participate in it with him. They built the roads together, they took care of each other’s needs, and they stood up for each other.

This practice of mission became a community posture, informing their discipleship, strengthening their community, and leading them to worship.

If local faith communities participated in lifestyles of mission in the places they live, work, and play – loving their neighbors like Jesus – imaginatively, creatively, imagine what our worship would look like! When we gather to worship, we’d be sharing the stories of how we were able to be Jesus to our neighbors! Our worship would cease to be a comsumeristic, “you make me feel good” – and become an adoration of a King whose reign we see manifesting itself – a reign we have been proclaiming by engaging in creative, imaginative, redemptive mission…

If local faith communities participated in lifestyles of mission, our discipleship would deepen. As we practice the values of Jesus, the natural result is that our flawed and bent values and passions come to light, and we begin to shift in them. As we live like Jesus, reading and engaging Scripture becomes more practicable and more engaging. Practice informs preference. As we practice mission together, we naturally sharpen each other. There is an intentionality to discipleship in the context of mission that is more holistic and pervasive than discipleship for the sake of discipleship.

If mission informed our practice of Community, we would truly look like a body. Our interdependence on each other, and appreciation for each other would deepen. The church is the protagonist in an epic story – a story of redemption, a story of sacrifice, a story of mission to save the world.

In every epic story, the protagonist undergoes a process that looks like this:

Context, Liminality, Communitas, Re-context

In the midst of this process, he or she often partners with another character (or several) in the liminal circumstances of the story. They form a bond called Communitas, and who they become through the circumstances of Liminality changes them, often for the better (unless its an Aussie movie).

For me to define Communitas & Liminality would take several paragraphs, and if you’d like to read how Alan Hirsch explains it, click here. In brief:

Communitas: The type of community that develops in the context of danger, an ordeal, or an overwhelming task (think Band of Brothers or Lord of the Rings).

Liminality: The transition process accompanying a fundamental change of state or social position, applying to the situation where people find themselves in an in-between, marginal state in relation to the surrounding society, a place that could involve significant danger and disorientation, but not necessarily so.

If we are a people who creatively live an epic story of redemption – alerting people to the universal reign of God through Jesus by proclamation and demonstration – and we live this mission as one people – a community – we will find ourselves often in liminal circumstances. This liminality of finding ourselves at odds (not in a fighting, proud, arrogant manner, but a humble, loving manner) with our surrounding culture, will form a bond of Communitas among us that is much more powerful than the fellowship opportunity between services at the building we may gather in to worship on Sunday morning.

So, what does missional mean? It is the transformation of a faith community from the private or attractional proclamation and demonstration of God’s reign through Jesus in a worship service to an imaginative, creative, redemptive proclamation and demonstration that incarnates our faith into flesh as the body of Christ loving our neighbors.