How can we describe a missional church? In a missional church, there is a basic understanding that the family church exists to be sent on a mission by God. We are called out of the world to worship God so that we may be sent into the world to invite others to worship God. The meaning of the word “mission” is “sent.” Caring for church members is essential and displays the nature of God’s coming reign, but it is not enough.
The Church is not simply a cheap form of psychotherapy. The missional Church is more than a chapel distributing religious goods and services to its members. It exists not just for you but to be sent into the world. The mission is not a church program like all other programs. It’s not like the educational program or music program, or church building. These are important for a missional church, but you can “do programs” without ever “being sent.” We can do a lot of good for church members and anyone else who wanders down the street to visit or to become a member, but that doesn’t make us a missional church.
A missional church reads the Bible as a missionary document. The Bible tells us that the Father sends the Son, the Father, and the Son sends the Spirit: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Trinity) send the Church into the world. The mission is not primarily a church activity but an attribute of God. It is not our mission but God’s mission (Missio Dei). Our God is a missionary God. The mission is a movement of God to the world, and the Church is an instrument God has chosen to be a movement. This movement announces the coming kingdom of God. The missional Church is sent into the world to inform how God wants it to be. The world is God’s, and he intends to have his government established.
The Missional Church understands that it is encountering a pagan culture, not a secular or otherwise neutral culture, but a pagan culture that resists the Second Coming of Christ. This does not mean that they despise the world and confront the world. No, we serve a God who loves the world and created its magnificent diversity of cultures. Instead of being against the world, we stand as a foil community for the values of this world. We are not a counterculture. We are for the world as the Creator is for the world. As people sent from God, we are to live as a sign, symbol, and foretaste of God’s coming reign. We must be the interpretation or illustration of how God wants the world to be.
So if “missional church” is just a slogan or another fancy way of saying nothing, then it’s useless. But sometimes, common words get so worn out and familiar that we need to find a way to give them a new voice, so they’re heard in a new way. There’s nothing new about the concept of a “missional church” that hasn’t been heard before. Still, now that Christianity has radically lost its focus, this can be a helpful way to recapture something ancient. A church that is not “missional” is not really a “church.”
As Emil Brunner (1931, p.108) puts it: “The church exists for mission as fire exists to burn…” If your Church does not see itself as a community of believers sent out into the world, then you are no more, by definition, a church. It has also been mentioned that if you are not doing missions, you will soon become a “mission field.” Going out into the world as witnesses of Jesus Christ is essential to being a church. Does this mean that mission is the only important thing the Church does? No, Brunner’s words can also be applied to worship. Indeed, worship is an essential characteristic of a church.
John Piper (2001) suggests that the purpose of the Church is worship and that mission is what we do until “…every knee will bow…and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord…” (Philippians 2:10). A final comment (discussed in more detail elsewhere) … this emphasis on the “Gospel and our culture” does not exempt us from engaging in overseas mission. Jesus told his disciples that they would be his “…witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8). So all the earth is God’s domain and the place to which his people are sent.
