The Word “Mission”
One can hardly say the word mission without bringing strongly to mind the Great Commission and globe trotting evangelists. This is not bad, its just so. The irony of the missional church movement is that it hopes to produce a new imagination around a word that has a fairly iron clad conceptual world surrounding it. Is it possible to rehabilitate a word that has such strong resonance among church members? This remains to be seen.
I am finding it fruitful to talk just a bit differently when describing what the missional church is up to. Instead of simply saying that a missional church defines itself in relation to the mission of God (Missio Dei), I am asking people to think of the church in relation to the ultimate purposes of God for all of Creation. When I ask church members to write down what they think of serving the mission of God, the range of responses is predictably narrow. The range of answers expands noticeably when the ultimate purposes of God for the sake of creation becomes the field of reflection. Admittedly, it is hard to say “ultimate purposes of God for all of creation” church. And for this reason among others, I think keeping the word missional in play is important. However, I think this points to the fact that leaders need to find multiple ways to talk about the shift that the missional church movement represents.
- Mark Love