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To become Missional, you must allow God to redefine, shape and guide your whole life to the purposes of God.  Important lessons to learn …
 
  1. Missional is about implication, not application.  The mission of God cannot be something you add or
    fit into your life.  Nor is it even something for which you simply
    sacrifice to make room for.  Rather, it is about examining the very
    real implications of what it would mean on every level of life if we
    were defined by God’s Divine Agenda.
  2. Missional cannot be understand apart from ecclesiology (or vice versa).  You don’t go to church.  You are the church.  Being the Church is much more than a place or Sunday gathering.
  3. Missional is incarnational.  As a people of God, we relate and engage the world
    after the way that God relates and engages the world.  This is
    expressed primarily in the person of Jesus. 
Being Missional has a few core principles, such as:
  1. Community: We called to be in genuine community, seeking to be many
    united as one.  We are not able to become gods in our unity, but
    rather, through the work of Jesus on the cross, we die to self and are
    resurrected into His Body, bound together in the Spirit.  Being “His Body” is more than an analogy, but a defining description
    of our nature as the Church.  Our commitment to unity and community does not
    require the irradication of the individual.  While we must resist the
    disintegrative force of individualism, true community always celebrates
    and nurtures healthy individuality.  In fact, it is only within the
    Chirst-community that individual identity can truly be realized.  This
    is perhaps the single greatest tension we face- the battle between
    rampant individualism and soulless uniformity.  I would go so far as to say that a person cannot be truly
    missional apart from community, because that very community is
    essential to mission and the Godhead that gives it form.
  2. Contextualization: Jesus, fully God, entered into our
    world as fully man, the ultimate contextualization.  He divested
    Himself of many things that were His right in order to make a way for
    God’s mission of love and redemption to happen.  In the same way, we
    must enter into the world around us in such a way that allows people to
    encounter Christ in ways that they understand.  It means that we must
    give up many things that we (may) have every right to, but that get in
    the way of representing Christ’s incarnational presence in our
    neighbourhoods, cultures and world. 
    The Apostle Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 9, that we are to “become all things to all men so that
    by all possible means” others will be saved.  So we do not simply
    contextualize, we contextualize as Christ in the culture.  It is important to note that, while
    we seek to “become all things to all men”, we cannot be all things at
    the same time.  This is why singular expressions and models copied
    elsewhere can undermine the effectiveness of being truly missional.
  3. Countercultural:  We are be an incarnational expression of Christ in culture, but not
    simply an adaptation (or compromise) with the culture in general. 
    Going back to my reference to “implication not application”, we must
    recognize that the incarnational presence we are called to represent is
    not compatible with all aspects of our world around us.  Be it
    individualism or consumerism (two of the most serious threats to the
    Church today), we cannot and must not attempt to accomodate aspects of
    culture that would undermine the mission of God, but rather live boldly
    apart and even against them.  We are called to be a peculiar people in
    that our radical obedience to Christ will set us apart, not simply
    through rejection and isolation, but by engaging the world as living
    alternatives.  At this point, we must be careful, for we can call all sorts of
    isolationism “counter-cultural”.   Further, we can even begin to gain an
    identity around those things which we reject (as many Christians seem
    to be defined by their anti-gay or anti-abortion stances, or more
    subtley and closer to home, by being anti-program or
    anti-institution).  We are to
    be countercultural, not in what we oppose, but through the living
    alternative we represent before a watching world.