Chapter 1 THE SEARCH FOR THE MISSIONAL CHURCH

The word missional first became popular after the 1998 publication of the book titled Missional Church, and in the years since, it has been adopted and used widely.¹ Many are asking, “How can we really be missional?” An entire generation of younger evangelical leaders has grown up searching for the true missional church as if for the Holy Grail. Seemingly a dozen books come out each year with the word missional in their title, but a survey of these books reveals that the word has significantly different meanings and is used in different ways by different authors, organizations, and churches — leading to much confusion about what, exactly, the term missional means.

Before the term missional exploded throughout the Christian world, it was primarily used in mainline Protestant and ecumenical circles in a manner closely associated with the Latin phrase missio Dei. The phrase was originally coined to convey the teaching of Karl Barth about the action of God in the world. According to Lesslie Newbigin, the term missio Dei became prominent after the 1952 world mission conference in Willingen, Germany. It was a way of referring to the idea that God is active in the world, working to redeem the entire creation, and that the church’s task is to participate in this mission.²

In his influential 1991 book Transforming Mission, David Bosch explained that the term missio Dei was firmly grounded in Trinitarian theology. Bosch noted that in the past, mission was largely viewed as a category of soteriology (as a way to save souls) or as a category of ecclesiology (as a way to expand the church). In contrast, the concept of missio Dei implied that mission should be “understood as being derived from the very nature of God . . . put in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity, not of ecclesiology or soteriology.”³ The Trinity is, by nature, “sending.” The Father sends the Son into the world to save it, and the Father and the Son send the Spirit into the world. And now, said Bosch, the Spirit is sending the church. In short, God does not merely send the church in mission. God already is in mission, and the church must join him. This also means, then, that the church does not simply have a missions department; it should wholly exist to be a mission.

At first glance, this seemed to be a strong and sound theology of mission. As time went on, however, it meant the church actually came to be seen as less relevant. Lesslie Newbigin wrote these words in the late 1970s: “If God is indeed the true missionary, it was said, our business is to not promote the mission of the church, but to get out into the world, find out ‘what God is doing in the world,’ and join forces with him. And ‘what God is doing’ was generally thought to be in the secular rather than in the religious sectors of human life. The effect, of course, was to look for what seemed to be the rising powers and to identify Christians’ missionary responsibility with support for a range of political and cultural developments.”⁴

Harvey Cox of Harvard Divinity School wrote, “What God is doing in the world is politics . . . Theology today must [therefore] be that reflection-in-action by which the church finds out what this politician-God is up to and moves in to work along with him.”⁵ In many mainline and ecumenical circles, mission came to mean working with secular human rights movements or rising left-wing political organizations. The results, Newbigin wrote, were “sometimes bizarre indeed. Even Chairman Mao’s ‘little red book’ became almost a new Bible.”⁶ Newbigin, who was one of the key people involved in the forming of the World Council of Churches, became increasingly concerned that the concept of the missio Dei left little need for the church. The church could not meet human needs as well as social service agencies could, nor could it change society as well as political parties and organizations could. So in this view, the church became inconsequential.

In The Open Secret, Newbigin criticized what he called the “secularization” of mission. He argued that conversions, the growth of the church, and the quality of Christian community were all critical and central to mission. Newbigin looked with favor on the theories of missiologist Donald McGavran, who taught that the purpose of mission was “church growth” in quality and quantity.⁷ Nevertheless, Newbigin retained the term missio Dei and its original theological concept of a missionary God. He insisted that the church needed to grow through evangelism yet be involved in service and in the struggle for justice in the world as well. Newbigin sought to uphold the basic idea of the missio Dei, but he tried to save it from the excesses and distortions of the ecumenical movement.

The Newbigin-Bosch Rescue

Lesslie Newbigin had been a British missionary in India for several decades. When he returned to England in the mid-1970s, he saw the massive decline of the church and Christian influence that had occurred in his absence. At the time he left England, Western society’s main cultural institutions still Christianized people, and the churches were easily gathering those who came to their doors through social expectation and custom. Churches in the West had always supported “missions” in overseas non-Christian cultures (such as India). There on the “mission field,” churches functioned in a different way than they did in Europe and North America. Churches in India did not merely support missions or even do missions — they were missional in every aspect. They could not simply process Christianized people as churches did in the West. Rather, every aspect of their church life — worship, preaching, community life, and discipleship — had to be a form of mission.

For example, on the mission field, visitors to a worship service could not be expected to have any familiarity with Christianity. Therefore the worship and preaching had to address them in ways both comprehensible and challenging. On the mission field, believers lived in a society with radically different values from those they were taught in church. This made “life in the world” very complicated for Christians. Discipleship and training had to equip believers to answer many hostile questions from their neighbors. It also had to spell out Christian personal and corporate behavior patterns that distinguished them and showed society what the kingdom of God was all about. In other words, away from the West, churches did not simply have a missions department; Christians were “in mission” in every aspect of their public and private lives.

When he returned to England, Newbigin discovered that the ground had shifted. The cultural institutions of society were now indifferent or overtly hostile to Christian faith, and the number of people who went to church had plummeted. Western culture was fast becoming a non-Christian society — a “mission field” — but the churches were making little adjustment. While many Christian leaders were bemoaning the cultural changes, Western churches continued to minister as before — creating an environment in which only traditional and conservative people would feel comfortable. They continued to disciple people by focusing on individual skills for their private lives (Bible study and prayer) but failed to train them to live distinctively Christian lives in a secular world — in the public arenas of politics, art, and business. All they preached and practiced assumed they were still in the Christian West, but the Christian West was vanishing.

This was a disastrous tactic. Western churches, Newbigin argued, had to put the same kind of thought and effort into reaching their alien, non-Christian culture as the churches in India, China, and the rest of the world did. Over the last twenty-four years of his life, Newbigin argued tirelessly and trenchantly that the church had to come to grips with the fact that it was no longer functioning in “Christendom.” Rejecting the common view that the West was becoming a secular society without God, Newbigin viewed it as a pagan society filled with idols and false gods.⁸ He especially criticized the ideology of the European Enlightenment and its idolatrous commitment to the autonomy of human reason that had led to the illusion of neutral, value-free, objective knowledge. This commitment to reason had seduced Western cultural leaders into believing we did not need God or any particular religious faith in order to have a well-ordered, just, and moral society. Critical to the church’s mission in the West, he said, was the unmasking of this false god by showing the futility of the “Enlightenment project” — the fruitless effort to find consensus on morality, right and wrong, justice, and human flourishing on the basis of secular reason.

In his books The Open Secret, Foolishness to the Greeks, and The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Newbigin fleshed out what mission to Western society could look like.⁹ It included a public apologetic against the autonomy of human reason that was overtly indebted to Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Polanyi but that incorporated the approach of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck as well. It also emphasized equipping believers to integrate their faith and work, changing society as they moved out into their vocations in the world, as well as emphasizing the importance of the Christian church as a “hermeneutic of the gospel.” Newbigin believed that the love, justice, and peace that ought to characterize the Christian counterculture were primary ways of bearing witness to God in a pluralistic society. With these last two emphases — the renewal of society and the church as a “contrast” community — Newbigin combines several of the cultural approaches we looked at earlier.

Most important, Newbigin proposed something of a middle way (though he never used that term) with the missio Dei. In his critical review of Konrad Raiser’s book defending the approach of the World Council of Churches (Ecumenism in Transition: A Paradigm Shift for the Ecumenical Movement?), Newbigin wrote the following:

Raiser, of course, is absolutely right to protest against an ecclesiocentric concept of mission, as though the church were the author and the goal of mission. But this whole vision is too much shaped by the ideology of the 1960s with its faith in the secular, and in human power to solve problems. The thesis is heavily marked by a model . . . that interprets all situations in terms of the oppressor and the oppressed and that tends to interpret the struggles of the oppressed as the instrument of redemption. This model owed not a little to Marxist thought, and the collapse of Marxism as a world power has created a new situation with which the WCC has to come to terms.¹⁰

Newbigin rejected the direct identification of God’s redemption with any movement that improves socioeconomic well-being. He rightly said that the idea of defining mission as “what God is doing out in history” too closely draws its origins from the Marxist ideas of class struggle as the meaning of history. But then Newbigin sought to strike a note of balance:

The (literally) crucial matter is the centrality of Jesus and his atoning work on the cross, that work by which he has won lordship over the church and the world . . .

It is one of the most pressing tasks for the immediate future to rediscover a doctrine of redemption that sees the cross not as the banner of the oppressed against the oppressor but as the action of God that brings both judgment and redemption for all who will accept it, yet does not subvert the proper struggle for the measure of justice that is possible in a world of sinful human beings.¹¹

Here Newbigin takes the struggle for justice in the world out from the center of the meaning of redemption. Redemption is first of all the action of God in Christ, and this action calls for a decision. It must be accepted, not rejected.¹² And yet there is still a place for us to struggle for the “measure of justice” in this world.

In Transforming Mission, David Bosch further develops Newbigin’s idea of the missio Dei. In Bosch’s examination of Luke’s theology of mission, he sees a charge to proclaim Christ and the call for conversion, as well as to show God’s concern for justice for the poor. In his Believing in the Future, Bosch goes further in spelling out a vision for mission in a post-Christian West. He restates the core idea of the missio Dei— that God’s mission is to restore creation, and the church is called to participate in this mission. Bosch says that mission is not just “recruitment to our brand of religion; it is alerting people to the universal reign of God.”¹³ Then he suggests how this may be done. First, he says, we must avoid two opposing errors: (1) trying to re-create a Christian society (the mistake of medieval Christendom) and (2) withdrawal from society into the “spiritual realm” (the mistake of modernity).¹⁴ Second, we must learn how to publicly and prophetically challenge the idol of autonomous reason and its results.¹⁵ Third, we must take pains to make our churches into contrast societies, countercultures that show society what human life looks like free from the idols of race, wealth, sex, power, and individual autonomy.¹⁶ So we contextualize our message in ways that avoid syncretism on the one extreme and irrelevance on the other; we better equip the laity for their public callings; and we cultivate vital, life-shaping worship as the dynamic heart of mission. These steps show the world a countercultural model of society and shape people so that the gospel influences how they live in the world.¹⁷ Finally, we must model to the world as much unity between churches as is practically possible.

An insight animating all of this work is the idea of the cultural captivity of the church in the West. Bosch, like Newbigin, is especially critical of Enlightenment rationalism and its various effects in Western culture — materialism, consumerism, individualism, and the breakdown of community. He maintains that the church is too deeply shaped by the spirit of the age, in both its conservative and liberal forms. In its liberal form, it has bought uncritically into a secular account of things, de-supernaturalizing the gospel so that the Spirit’s work is seen mainly in secular movements of liberation, thus turning the liberal mainline churches into little more than social service centers where the language of secular rights activists reigns. In its conservative form, it has bought uncritically into the idea of religion as the fulfillment of individual consumer needs, thus turning the conservative church into something like felt-need shopping centers where the language of modern therapy and marketing reigns. People see Christ as a way to self-fulfillment and prosperity, not as a model for radical service to others. Both wings of the Christian church are, then, captive to the reigning idols of Western culture.¹⁸ They are failing to challenge these idols in their preaching and practice.

Because of the influential writings of Newbigin and Bosch, a new, more fully realized understanding of the missio Dei was developing by the mid-1990s. It sought to avoid the secularization of mission found in the liberal churches. The overarching narrative was still that God is in mission to renew the whole creation, but the new view stressed the public proclamation of Christ as Lord and Hope of the world and therefore the necessity of both conversion and the growth of the church. This new, rehabilitated view of the missio Dei began to capture the attention of many Christians outside of the liberal mainline who were struggling with the question of how to relate to an increasingly post-Christian culture.

The Missional Church Movement Today

When Missional Church (edited by Darrell Guder) first appeared in 1998, it built on this new understanding of missio Dei that had been previously developed by Lesslie Newbigin and David Bosch. The book laid out the same dilemma: the culture was no longer Christianized and now the church was “on the mission field to the modern world,” yet the church was captive to the culture of modernity and thus had no real alternative to offer. The church must therefore reform itself and discover new ways to engage culture. But how was this to be done? Again, the answers sounded many of the same themes as Newbigin and Bosch: the church as a contrast community, contextualization of the message, concern not only for church growth but also for justice. The book’s theological commitments were firmly based on the concept of the mission as participation in the purpose of the triune God to redeem creation.¹⁹

The time for these ideas was ripe, and the term missional church became popular in evangelical circles. The evangelical church as a whole was becoming aware of the cultural shift happening around them and the growing ineffectiveness of much of the traditional ministry approach. Some in the mainline church were becoming disenchanted with the emptiness of ecumenical theology, but they were either unable to or not interested in joining the evangelical movement. Many of these church leaders picked up the basic vision for the missional church in Western culture found in Guder’s book.

But many people picked up the ideas of the missio Dei and the missional church and supplemented them with other theological and cultural content, which has led to a dizzying variety of different and sometimes contradictory definitions of the term missional. Craig Van Gelder has written an entire volume just trying to categorize the different approaches and definitions around the idea. He and his colleague Dwight Zscheile have discerned four broad, overlapping “streams” of the missional conversation:

1. Being missional is being evangelistic. Some churches (and authors) have simply adopted missional as a synonym for being highly committed to evangelism and foreign missions. Like all expressions of being missional, the starting point is how our culture has changed, how outreach requires more ingenuity and diligence than ever, and the assertion that every Christian is a missionary. Those in this category also usually embrace a somewhat more holistic approach to outreach, encouraging various forms of community service. However, the underlying theology is quite traditional. Mission is largely conceived as bringing people into individual salvation through the church. The distinctive ideas of the missio Dei — the work of God’s Spirit in the world to restore all creation and the cultural captivity of the Western church — are missing.²⁰

2. Being missional is being incarnational. Another set of voices criticizes the Christendom model of church as “attractional.” The attractional model is based on non-Christians coming or being invited into the programs and ministries of the church. They come in to hear the preaching, to participate in programs that minister to their felt needs, or to attend baptisms, weddings, and funerals. This, it is said, is now an obsolete model (though it still works in more traditional parts of the West and with the shrinking body of “Christianized” non-Christians).

In place of the attractional model, they recommend an incarnational model, where Christians live geographically close to each other, create a thick and rich community among themselves, and then become deeply involved in the civic and corporate life of their neighborhood or city. Church planting in this paradigm does not need to begin with a full-time minister, a core group, and a worship service. Instead, a few Christian families move into a neighborhood and fully participate in its life, discover the needs of the citizens, and begin to meet them in Christ’s name. Christian community grows organically, gradually coming to include many of the nonbelievers who labor for peace and justice in the neighborhood. In general, the adoption of this view leads to the proliferation of informal house churches.²¹

3. Being missional is being contextual. Some thinkers put more emphasis on the shifts in late-modern and postmodern culture, the cultural captivity of the church, and therefore the need to contextualize every part of the church’s ministry so it engages this post-Christendom reality. This approach includes aspects of the first two views, as thinkers in this category emphasize being ingeniously evangelistic and incarnational in the community — but they go further. In this view it is possible to deepen Christian community and be involved in community service and yet still be a subculture that does not really engage post-Christian Western society. To be a truly missional church involves deep reflection on culture and discovering creative ways of communication and church practice that both adapt to culture and challenge it. Those who fall into this category appreciate the incarnational house church model but see it as one good and possible ministry form among many others.

Van Gelder and Zscheile list authors who advance this view, and many of them seem to assume a more traditional evangelical theology than those in the final category.²² Still, they all accept that the basic measures proposed by Newbigin for a “missionary encounter with Western culture” — a new apologetic, the church as contrast community, holistic outreach, engaging culture through vocations — are correct. In their own works, they seek to flesh out what Newbigin’s measures might look like.

4. Being missional is being reciprocal and communal. This group of thinkers applauds the emphases of the other three. They are glad to affirm that every Christian is in mission. They support the idea of the church as far more incarnationally involved in the life of its community, and they believe firmly in the importance of contextualization and cultural engagement. They do not, however, believe the others have taken the implications of the missio Dei far enough. They believe missio Dei calls us to a careful reworking of both our theology and practice.

Those who adopt this approach have arrived at two conclusions. First, if God already has a mission, then a church should not do mission by designing methods to draw people into their services. It must be responsive to what God is already doing in the world. Alan Roxburgh, one of the original essayists in Missional Church, writes that the one question missional churches ask over and over is this: “What is God up to in this neighborhood?” The missional church listens to people in the community and “becomes open to being surprised by God’s purposes.”²³ Rather than simply announcing to the world what it needs to know, the church listens and learns what God is doing and then gets involved.

Second, in order to overcome the Enlightenment’s individualism, the church must redefine sin, mission, and salvation in corporate and communal terms. Rather than speaking of sin primarily as an offense against a holy God, sin is seen, in horizontal terms, as the violation of God’s shalom in the world through selfishness, violence, injustice, and pride.²⁴ Rather than speaking of the cross as primarily the place where Jesus satisfied the wrath of God on our sin, Jesus’ death is seen as the occasion when the powers of this world fell on Jesus and were defeated.²⁵ Mission, then, is ultimately not about getting individuals right with God but about incorporating them into a new community that partners with God in redeeming social structures and healing the world.²⁶

What Do These Approaches Have in Common?

Many conservative evangelicals reject the term missional because of its association with emerging church thinkers such as Brian McLaren, because of its connection to the ecumenical movement and the theology of Karl Barth, or simply because it is such a hard word to define.²⁷

I sympathize. But the fact remains that a large number of Christian believers today are on an earnest search for the missional church, regardless of whether or not they use the term. Those who hold to conservative doctrines often inhabit the first category — “missional as evangelistic” — and are now beginning to populate the second and third categories — “missional as incarnational” and “missional as contextual.” Those with liberal and mainline church beliefs are also found in the second and third categories but are especially attracted to the fourth category (“missional as reciprocal and communal”).²⁸

Despite very real and important differences among these four missional streams, I believe they have important things in common. In the remainder of the chapter, I’ll summarize the primary areas of consensus and strength in the missional conversation.

The Post-Christendom Age

First, we have entered a post-Christian or post-Christendom age. For centuries in the Western world, the Christian church had a privileged place, but this is no longer true. Rather than being a force at the center of culture, Christianity has moved to the margins. There is broad recognition that the church had allowed cultural institutions to do a lot of its heavy lifting, infusing people with a broadly Christian way of thinking about things — respect for the Bible, allegiance to the Ten Commandments, commitment to the ethical teachings of the Gospels; belief in a personal God, an afterlife, a judgment day, and moral absolutes. But no longer can we expect people who already have these basic beliefs to simply come to church through social pressure and out of custom. The times have changed.

Cultural Captivity of the Church

Second, those in the incarnational, contextual, and communal/reciprocal streams further recognize the cultural captivity of the church and the need to contextualize the gospel message so it is both comprehensible and challenging for those in a pluralistic, late-modern society. Many call for a gospel that escapes cultural captivity by challenging the Enlightenment individualism of both secular people and certain members of evangelical churches. Alan Roxburgh and Scott Boren write, “Modernity replaces mission with self-actualization of the expressive, autonomous individual,”²⁹ and it is this individualism that must be challenged and confronted. Newbigin argues that the church must also unmask the autonomy of human reason. Remember that contextualization means showing how only in Christ can the baseline narratives of a culture be resolved. To the self-absorbed culture we say, “You must lose yourself — in service to Christ and others — to truly find yourself.” To the rationalistic culture we say, “You cannot have the things you want — meaning, dignity, hope, character, shared values, and community — without faith.”

Sent Out to Be a Blessing

Third, all those pursuing the missional church also believe that Christian mission is more than just a department of the church, more than just the work of trained professionals. The biblical God is by nature a sending God, a missionary God.³⁰ The Father sends the Son; the Son sends the Spirit and his disciples into the world. Therefore the whole church is in mission; every Christian is in mission. God never calls you in to bless you without also sending you out to be a blessing (Gen 12:1 – 3; cf. 1 Pet 2:9). So a Christian is not a spiritual consumer, coming in to get his or her emotional needs met and then going home. A missional church, then, is one that trains and encourages its people to be in mission as individuals and as a body. All of the voices in the missional conversation agree that the church must not be only attractional; it also must equip and send the laity into the world to minister.

One implication of this view is that missional churches must equip laypeople both for evangelistic witness and for public life and vocation. In Christendom, you could afford to train people solely in prayer, Bible study, and evangelism — skills for their private lives — because they were not facing radically non-Christian values in their public lives. In a missional church, all people need theological education to “think Christianly” about everything and to act with Christian distinctiveness. They need to know which cultural practices reflect common grace and should be embraced, which are antithetical to the gospel and must be rejected, and which practices can be adapted or revised.³¹

A Contrast Community

Finally, most missional thinkers agree that in our Western culture, we must be a contrast community, a counterculture. The quality, distinctiveness, and beauty of our communal life must be a major part of our witness and mission to the world. Jesus stated that the quality and visibility of Christians’ love for each other will show the world that the Father sent him (John 17:20 – 21). In other words, our mission cannot go forward without Christians being involved not only in calling people to conversion but also in service to the community and in doing justice.³² This is part of the balance Newbigin struck. While many in the liberal church redefine evangelism as seeking a more just society and many conservative churches see Christians’ work in the world as strictly proclamation and conversion, most missional thinkers agree that the witness of Christians must be in both word and deed.

Part of being this kind of counterculture involves loving the city — its culture and people. Often, churches gather around them people who do not like the city or who do not expect to stay there. This inclination can occur among conservative churches that despise the secular, immoral society around them or with churches comprised largely of expatriates or immigrants from other countries. Such churches are often indifferent or hostile to their own locale, and as a result, most of the long-term residents of the community will feel unwelcome in these churches. A missional church enjoys, cares for, and prays for its city.

Another aspect of this contrast community is unity across church communities and denominations. In Christendom, when “everyone was a Christian,” it was perhaps useful for a church to define itself primarily in contrast with other churches. Today, however, it is much more illuminating and helpful for a church to define itself in relationship to the values of the secular culture. If we spend our time bashing and criticizing other kinds of churches, we simply play into the common defeater that all Christians are intolerant. While it is right to align ourselves with denominations that share many of our distinctives, at the local level we should cooperate with, reach out to, and support the other congregations and ministries in our local area. To do so will raise many thorny issues, of course, but our bent should be in the direction of cooperation.

I believe these points of common ground in the missional conversation are sound and generally consistent with a Center Church theological vision. I would use the term missional church less cautiously and more expansively if these were indeed understood to be the key aspects of the definition.

Still, as fruitful as the search for the missional church has been, it has not always taken the church into friendly or helpful territory. Significant and important differences exist among various groupings in the missional conversation. In the next chapter, I’ll look at key dangers and imbalances induced by some of the thinkers and practitioners in the missional conversation and suggest some course corrections.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Keller writes, “The word [missional] has significantly different meanings and is used in different ways by different authors, organizations, and churches — leading to much confusion about what, exactly, the term missional means.” How have you used or defined missional? How has this chapter changed or contributed to your understanding of this term?

2. The concept of missio Dei suggests that “God does not merely send the church in mission. God already is in mission, and the church must join him.” What do you believe is the mission of God and what role does the church have in that mission? How would you distinguish between the mission of God and the mission of the church?

3. Of the four understandings of “missional” presented in this chapter, which most closely aligns with your own? What is it about the other understandings that you find objectionable?

4. Four common emphases characterize those who embrace the idea of being missional:

• acknowledging that we have entered a post-Christian age in the West

• recognizing the cultural captivity of the church and the need to contextualize the gospel for a pluralistic society

• affirming that mission is the job of every Christian

• calling the church to be a contrast community

What are some of the unique elements of each emphasis that are discussed in this chapter? Which of these resonated most with you as you read about them? Which is the most difficult to persuade others of within your community?