To become Missional, you must allow God to redefine, shape and guide your whole life to the purposes of God. Important lessons to learn …
- 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. - 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.
- 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:
- 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. - 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. - 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.
