Missional Church

One of the buzz words in the RCA is also a buzz word in many church circles these days. It's been around awhile, but seems to have caught a trend lately with a wider audience. It's the word "Missional". In fact, the word missional shows up a lot around the RCA these days with Reggie McNeal talking about it at One Thing, and then again with the Synod of the Great Lakes (videos of One thing are available here, and I think the others are available, too) at General Synod, and as a link now on the left side of the RCA website that says "Reformed and Missional." If you'd like, there's a video and discussion guide on the website you can find by clicking here.  Those of you who have been connected to the GOCN network and the work of George Hunsberger have been close to this discussion for awhile now.  

Missional is one of the values of the RCA Discipleship Team, and we hope to put some more flesh on what that means as we continue to think and live more missionally as a denomination, but also as we seek to be on the Missio Dei as individual Christians and churches seeking to .  

If you don't get Leadership Journal from Christianity Today, it's a good journal worth reading regularly. The articles are insightful, they're written mostly by practitioners with real life tales of ministry, and yet they work to engage theologically, biblically, and of course in terms of leadership.  The most recent edition has a special section with some good articles on the missional church.  I'm personally a big fan of Alan Hirsch's article (which isn't available on the web, yet, but you can find similar thoughts on his blog here) because he raises one of my questions about what missional really means - for instance, is it merely programmatic and strategic, or are we talking about a missional ecclesiology.  Those are quite different things that have quite different impacts on our churches.  The same discussion is at the heart of some questions David Fitch has been asking (cf. Can the Mega-Church be Missional, On Not Forskaing Denominations: Can Established Traditions Birth Emerging Churches/ Missional Communities?)  about being missional in mega-churches and in denominations, something we're working hard at in my own context at Fair Haven Ministries in Michigan. 

Interestingly, when you check out the word missional on Google Trends, here's the graph you get showing on the top, the number of searches each year for the word "missional" and below the number of news articles published: