What Actually Is a Missional Church?
Missional Basics #1
After a quarter century of theological foment, it’s still hard to say what a missional church is. Maybe you know it when you see it. Then again, maybe missionality is in the eye of the beholder.
For those of us who are convinced that missional theology is a vital part of the way forward for Western churches living through the demise of Christendom, finding an answer is not a matter of idle speculation. The question ultimately takes a personal, practical shape for local churches: are we a missional community? We’re searching for a way to assess our common life and become fuller participants in God’s mission.
On the way toward an answer, let’s consider why it remains so difficult to say what a missional church actually is.
Missional Talk
I’ve been a part of churches that use a lot of missional jargon (not least because of my involvement). Singing songs, praying prayers, preaching sermons, and teaching classes with missional sensibilities is a natural part of becoming a missional church. But they are not enough. We are more than capable of talking the talk without walking the walk.
Darrell Guder observed years ago that missional theology is a dispensable but necessary scaffolding.1 It’s dispensable because the church is already missional by nature. It is necessary because the church so often has forgotten this truth.
Missional talk serves an indispensable end. We have to remind ourselves of what we are. History defies the expectation that participation in God’s mission happens by virtue of being a church. Our need to be made conscious of the church’s nature is clear. We cannot dispense with theology. Missional talk is necessary.
Yet, there is a terrible gap between speaking and doing. Churches can talk about God’s mission without ever participating in it. Such theology is sterile. It bears no fruit.
Missional Walk
I’ve also been a part of communities that do a lot of missional stuff—or at least stuff meant to be missional. Practices like hospitality, service, and witness can dominate a church’s life. Productive as they may be, however, these good works do not make a church missional.
That probably sounds like a peculiar claim to many readers. I said that closing the gap between speaking and doing is necessary. So what else is there? If a church does what it’s supposed to do—say, love its neighbors, care for the poor, and protect the vulnerable—but it’s still not “missional,” then what use is being missional?
But such activity doesn’t necessarily close the gap between speaking and doing. It’s certainly possible, for example, to care for the poor with no theological commitments whatsoever. People, organizations, and governments do it all the time. And many of us grew up around Christians whose ecclesiology was warped by legalism, reductionism, and sectarianism (the list could go on) yet who acted mercifully toward the poor. Clearly, our doing needn’t manifest our theology.
Some readers will be quick to affirm the superiority of doing over the alternative. Mercy over sacrifice, right? I’m reminded of the conman Freddy Benson quoting his Gram-Gram in the comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels: “It is better to be truthful and good—than to not.” Sure, it is better to do missional stuff—than to not. But don’t be conned by a truism. We’re not asking about the relative merits of understanding and acting.
Our question is about what constitutes missional ecclesiology. Is my local community actually missional? If it’s not our talking or our doing that makes us missional, then what is it?! A more fundamental gap comes into view, between what we say and do and what we are.
Missional Life
The problem with talking about the order of being—apart from the fact that practically-minded folks tend to check out at this point—is that it too often brings to mind a fixed state. We think in binaries: is/is not. In the interest of brevity, let me offer a bald theological assertion to move us forward. Until the consummation of all things in Christ, the being of the church is a state of becoming.
In missional terms, the question isn’t simply what we’re saying or doing but what these dimensions of our life together have to do with what we’re becoming. We have to shake free of cheap measures of missionality. I would go so far as to say that the only thing worth “measuring”—let’s say, instead, prayerfully assessing—is our becoming fuller participants in God’s mission. Our speech and action are easily mistaken for measures of this transformation, but they are properly understood as means, not ends.
In other words, despite—or through!—our failures along the way, churches can move more deeply into God’s mission. We may speak wrongly. We may act foolishly. We fail. That is not how we know whether we are missional, because missional is not a binary descriptor. And that is why we use the word missional to describe sermons, programs, and the rest at our peril. Missional is properly a descriptor of the church’s being-in-becoming, our way of life together as faltering participants in God’s triune life broken open and poured out for the life of the world.
What, then, are we to assess? Can you feel the mystery that our becoming presents? How are we to answer the question with more than a trite “It’s a journey. We’re all on the way”? I empathize with those who feel it’s far more practical to focus on saying and doing things that might lead us in the right direction. Out of confusion, frustration, or exhaustion, I’ve done the same.
I implore you, nonetheless, not to confuse means and ends. Missional theology is teleological at its core, and God’s telos is what orients us along the way.
What Is Being Missional For?
I said at the beginning that missional theology is a vital part of the way forward for Western churches living through the demise of Christendom. I should clarify that it is not the case that the telos of missional theology is the survival of the Western church. The post-Christendom context has given rise to missional theology, and it remains relevant, but survival is not the point, nor is success, fruitfulness, multiplication, or thriving. These sorts of terms are easily coopted by a vision of the church’s life that redefines participation in God’s mission according to metrics that have little to do with the church’s becoming missional.
So what is being missional for? What, in the end, are we assessing? How do we measure missional? What actually is a missional church?
On one level, missional churches are defined by an orientation toward God’s mission. They are journeying in the direction that the Spirit of Jesus is leading in their times and places. They are on the move. In this sense, we need a compass to assess our orientation and a map to track our movement. As missional theology would have it, God’s mission is the orienting concern. The church’s essence is its participation in that mission. Our speaking and acting are relevant to the question only to the extent that they contribute to our participation in what God is doing in the world around us to bring about God’s purposes.
A missional church is one whose life is a process of continual reorientation toward and movement into God’s work in the world.
On a deeper level, the issue is the church’s capacity to reorient toward and move into God’s mission.2 The church’s becoming missional is its becoming more capable of participation in God’s mission. Here, then, we have specific capacities to assess. It would be foolish to attempt a definitive statement of missional capacities, but I do warmly recommend three that seem fairly comprehensive: attentiveness, responsiveness, and cruciformity.
To state these capacities in the terms I’ve established, I ask the reader to allow me some awkwardness of phrasing. Let the syntactical strangeness of these statements force your mind out of the binary ruts that would carry us in the wrong direction. Capacity is not an on/off switch.
1. A missional church is becoming capable of careful attention to God’s mission in its local context.
How capable is your community of careful attention? Are you able to perceive what God is doing actively, presently among your neighbors?
Do your practices of interpretation, discernment, or imagination strengthen your capacity for attention? What specific, local manifestations of God’s mission have you identified in the last year? In the last five years? Have you grown more attentive? What would it look like for careful attention to God's mission to become integral to your community’s way of life?
2. A missional church is becoming capable of responding to what God is up to in its context.
How capable is your community of responding to its perceptions of God’s local work? Are you able to respond with faith, hope, and love? With wisdom?
Do your practices of generosity, service, or hospitality strengthen your capacity for response? How capable of responding to manifestations of God’s mission have you been in the last year? In the last five years? Have you grown more responsive? What would it look like for faithful responsiveness to become integral to your community’s way of life?
3. A missional church is becoming capable of sharing in the cross-shaped work of God in its context.
How capable is your community of sharing in the suffering of Christ by “conforming to his death” (Phil 3:10) for the sake of your neighbors? Are you able to embody the gospel in the congregation’s own flesh?
Do your practices of submission, solidarity, or sacrifice strengthen your capacity for cruciformity? How capable of “completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Col 1:24) have you been in the last year? In the last five years? Have you grown in conformity to the cross? What would it look like for cruciformity to become integral to your community’s way of life?
♱♱♱
What actually is a missional church? It is a community whose life together bears witness to the life of the triune God as it becomes capable of perceiving, responding to, and embodying God’s redemptive, reconciling, restorative work in the world.
He notes: “We would not need that scaffolding if our theological work were shaped by the missio Dei, if the entire doctrinal enterprise were, in diverse ways, truly focused upon the formation and equipping of the church for its apostolate. If mission were truly the mother of our theology, if our theological disciplines were intentionally conceived and developed as components of the formation of the church for its biblical vocation, we would never need to use the term ‘missional’” (Darrell L. Guder, Called to Witness, The Gospel and Our Culture Series [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015], 168).
I learned to think in terms of missional capacities from Mark Love.