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How Missional is Your Church? Keeping the Global in Missional

Jonathan Dodson
Jun 8, 2007
Series: International

Jonathan Dodson | Acts 29 Church Planter | Austin City Life | Austin, TX

Moving from the theological tower to the church planting trenches, more than my clothing changed. This transition exposed me to the broken-in look of various theological concepts, notably the concept of being missional. As an interdisciplinary academic discipline, missional theology is incredibly robust. On a more pedestrian plane, the concept and practice of missional is, at times, a bit thin-blooded. If being missional is hot and hip among young evangelicals, it's blazing and blown-up among church planters. And I guess I am hot and hip, if in using the word missional we are referring to participating in the trans-historical, multi-cultural, global missio Dei. However, among many churches and church planters, broken-in missional fashion faces the danger of loosening from its theological stitching and consequently declining in its universal appeal.

Ed Stetzer has made a point of focusing on the cultural dimensions of being missional. In his opening chapter of Planting Missional Churches he writes: "The first major message of this book is to understand missional. Establishing a missional church means that you plant a church that is part of the culture you're seeking to reach" (latter emphasis added).[1] In fact, Stetzer links the missio Dei with missional cultural savvy: "a church or church planter who is missional is focused on God's mission (missio Dei), being aware of what God is doing in the culture and joining him in his work."[2] So, according to Stetzer, missional church plants are a part and aware of their target cultures-a thoroughly biblical idea.

However, while I agree that being missional includes being culturally alert and active, church planters often appropriate this idea monoculturally. Our notion of being culturally aware is often radically ethnocentric, primarily restricted to American culture. As missional people, we can become so committed to reaching our own culture that the cultures and peoples of the rest of the world end up taking a backseat. As a result, "missional" becomes a codeword for Western, ethnocentric, monocultural church planting, which leads to churches that aren't fully missional. In turn, this missional short-sightedness produces churches and disciples of Jesus that are not shaped by the insights and challenges of the global church.

Missional Short-sightedness

Numerous examples of missional short-sightedness could be adduced; however, I will provide just one critique that cuts to the heart of the missional movement-our growth methodology. Contemporary methods of church growth have often focused on growth as the purpose of mission, attraction as the power of mission, and strategic planning as the plan of mission. Missional churches, unless they are stitched into the missio Dei, are just as easily lulled into such skewed notions of the purpose, plan and power of the church.

Although church planters are susceptible to measuring their affectivity based on the number of people who attend their church, they face another straying purpose for their existence-numbers of church plants or being a part of a church planting movement. If we are not deliberate, the purpose of mission can subtly degrade into planting more churches, instead of cultivating diverse, global worshippers of the triune God. To put a spin on a familiar phrase, church planting is not the ultimate purpose of the church. Worship is. Missional activity exists because worship doesn't.[3] Without worship as the ultimate purpose of missional activity, we will end up making quantifiable converts, not worshipping disciples.

Whenever we depart from the missional purpose of God, our missional plans become man-centered and narrow-minded. As a result, the unwavering plan of so-called missional churches is strapped into creating "missional communities," communities which often disregard the highly contextualized, attractional models of bigger churches that have succeeded at bringing thousands to Christ, from fire and tongues Pentecost to the Full Gospel church of Seoul, Korea. Whenever our primary concern becomes how many missional community churches we can plant and what forms of church we need-building, music, service, website design-we demonstrate a warped missional ecclesiology. Moreover, when the concept of missional is reduced to connecting with our culture in order to reflect its forms, from urban professional to rural cowboy, we reveal our missional short-sightedness. By obsessing over North American contextualization, we are in danger of neglecting the global mission of the church.

When narrowly conceived missional methodology takes priority over missional theology, the power of mission is reduced to pragmatics, abandoning the missio Dei and dishonoring the many-faceted, multi-cultural gospel of God. The power of mission is not strategic plans or missional communities; it is the gospel of the triune God which is not at odds with our desire for communion with the great Three-in-One. Singaporean theologian Simon Chan comments regarding the mission of the Trinity, "Communion is the end, not mission."[4] The gospel is that gracious power of God in Christ to draw us out of rebellion against God and into communion with the Trinity through the Holy Spirit, a communion that changes how we view everyone and participate in everything.

To be missional is to be universal in our appeal, as well as particular in our expression of the gospel. What we need is missional churches that are not short-sighted in their missional vision and activity, churches that redemptively engage the unchurched West and the reached, unreached, unevangelized peoples and cultures of the rest of the world. In short, North American versions of missional should not dictate the full-orbed expression of the church of Jesus Christ. Our missional purpose, plans, and power should be biblically obtained and globally oriented.

The Spirit-empowered gospel of God is for all ethnicities and cultures, which requires the whole church taking the whole gospel to the whole world. Each local church comprises part of the whole global church in reaching the whole world, especially if they claim a "missional" identity.

Missio ad Gentes

Being a "missionary" in North America is common parlance among church planters and missional advocates, and though center of gravity of global Christianity has certainly shifted to the South and East, I don't think that puts the West on an even mission field with many non-Western places. To be sure, we should all redemptively engage peoples and cultures with Pauline missionary passion, but more than passion is at play in planting missional churches.

In order to effectively mobilize and strategize for the global glory of God, it seems that the missional movement needs to hold missio Dei in one hand and missio ad Gentes in the other. Missio ad Gentes is a Latin phrase that can be translated as mission to the "pagans" "nations" or "non-Christians." The term is frequently used by Catholic missiologists and appears in various Vatican II documents. To engage in missio ad Gentes is to make a distinction between evangelism and mission, advancing the notion of priority in missions to peoples receiving a first proclamation of the gospel of Christ, similar to Ralph Winter's E 1, 2, 3 evangelism paradigms.[5]

Shockingly, 80% of deployed missionaries are sent to already evangelized areas. Roughly 30% of the global population is unevangelized and largely untargeted by so-called missional churches. This amounts to about 1.6 billion people not hearing the gospel in 38 different nations.[6] There are still at least 13,000 unreached people groups and millions of people who have not heard a first proclamation of the gospel. Add to that the incalculable cultural corruption in many nations that fosters poverty, disease, crime, sex trafficking and so on. The frontiers of missions must not be lost in the missional movement of the West. We need people and churches that will be missional both locally and globally, joining with the triune God in pursuit of his global glory. We need missio Dei in our hearts and missio ad Gentes in our hands.

Missio Dei

Missional churches get their missional moxie from their theological moorings. The strength of these theological moorings will set a trajectory for just how far our missional ships will sail. To revert to an earlier metaphor, our missional appeal depends on how well we are stitched into the missio Dei, in relying upon the triune God for the purpose, power, and plan of mission.

The missio Dei is another Latin phrase that has classically referred to as the mission of God-the Father sending the Son, and the Father and Son sending the Spirit. Karl Barth and a host of other theologians sought to expand the notion of missio Dei to include the Father, Son and Spirit sending the church into the world.[7] The result was actually to displace church from the center of mission and to return the purpose, power and plan of mission back to the Trinity, where it began. By recognizing and embracing the notion that mission success begins, exists, and ends with God, we will distance ourselves from missional short-sightedness (Rom 11.33-36). It is God's missional commitment to his glory among the nations that forms the bedrock of our missional activity.

In fact, Jonathan Edwards argued that the incomplete glory of God is completed by the global, historical participation of the church in the missio Dei. The glory of God is externally enlarged by a fully missional church. He writes:

God looks on the communication of himself, and the emanation of the infinite glory and good that are in himself to belong to the fullness and completeness of himself, as though he were not in his most complete and glorious state without it. Thus the church of Christ is called the fullness of Christ: as though he were not in his complete state without her...[8]

In other words, the full expression of God's glory is advanced by the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic expression of the gospel in and through peoples and cultures throughout time. The infinite glory of God hinges upon truly missional churches contextualizing of the gospel of Christ and people delighting in the Christ of the gospel, throughout the entire world. The head is not complete without a diverse, doxological body.[9]

A missional church takes the global worship of the triune God as its purpose, the Spirit-empowered gospel as its power, and Christ-imitating contextualization as its plan. A missional church is a church that anchors its purpose, power, and plan for mission in the missio Dei. In short, to be missional is to participate in the activity of the triune God to redeem all peoples, cultures, and creation for his glory and their good.

How missional is your church? Is it primarily a local, monocultural, expression of the gospel, or does your church learn from and minister to the majority, non-Western church? Consider reading non-Western theology. A great place to start is the systematic theology series from a global perspective by Veli-Matti Kärkkänien, published by Baker Academic.[10] As Ghanan missiologist, Lamin Sanneh has noted: "The West can encounter in the world Christian movement, the gospel as it is being embraced by societies that had not been shaped by the Enlightenment, and so gain an insight into the culture that shaped the origins of the NT church."[11] By engaging with other non-Enlightenment cultures, we can learn much about the foundations of our faith. Sanneh also points out the distinct contribution of the African Maasai Christians, who phrase their creeds with plural pronouns, e.g. "We believe" versus the Western creeds that begin with "I believe."[12] Other ways to learn from the nations include forming friendships with people from other cultures, as well as going on mission trips with a posture of learning. By stitching ourselves into missio Dei and tracing God's missional threads to the nations, we will encounter and promote the diversity and universality of the gospel of glory of God. As a result, our missional churches will not easily unravel and we will keep the global in missional.

[1] Ed Stetzer, Planting Missional Churches (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2006).

[2] Ibid, 20.

[3] "Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn't." John Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions 2^nd Ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 17.

[4] Simon Chan, "The Mission of the Trinity," an interview by Andy Crouch in Christianity Today, June 4, 2007. See also http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/june/11.48.html.

[5] Ralph Winter, "The New Macedonia: A Revolutionary New Era in Mission Begins," in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement 3^rd ed. (Pasadena: William Carey, 1999), 339-353.

[6] Statistical data taken from David Barrett & Todd Johnson, World Christian Trends: Global Diagram 34 (Pasadena: William Carey Library, 2001). See also: http://www.gordonconwell.edu/ockenga/globalchristianity/gd/gd34.pdf

[7] The concept of missio Dei was first advanced by Karl Barth in 1932 at the Brandenburg Missionary Conference, where Barth emphasized that mission is an activity of God himself, as opposed to a purely ecclesiastical task. For more on the history of missio Dei see Bosch, Transforming Mission (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1991), 389-93.

[8] Jonathan Edwards, The End for Which God Created the World, in Ethical Writings, vol.8 of the Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Paul Ramsey (New Haven: Yale Press, 1989), 439 cited by Gerald R. McDermott in "What If Paul Had Been from China?" in Max Stackhouse, ed. No Other Gods Before Me? (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001), 26.

[9] Andrew Walls, a missiologist who spent years in Africa, has advanced a similar idea which is Christological in focus. His interpretation of Ephesians emphasizes the variegated stature of the body of Christ: "All these cultures which they (all Christians) represent, all the nationalities belong alike to the fullness of Humanity described so graphically in the Epistle to the Ephesians. It is a delightful paradox that the more Christ is translated into the various thought forms and life systems which form our various national identities, the richer all of us will be in our common Christian identity. The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us-and we beheld his glory, full of grace and truth." Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1996), 54.

[10] E.g., Veli-Matti Kärkkänien, Christology: A Global Introduction (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003).

[11] Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity?: The Gospel beyond the West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 26.

[12] Ibid, 59-60.