Someone recently asked me what I thought about “the missional church” (thanks to Jessica Friesen). “Missional” is a buzzword I have heard kicked around a little, but I had to do a little research to find out what it means. Believe me, it wasn’t easy. Like most buzzwords, many use it and few define it. But what I found out is valuable.

As I understand it, MHCC would become missional if we understood that we are now working in a culture that is foreign to Biblical Christianity, and we let that fact begin to shape everything we do. When the Pryors went to Papua New Guinea some thirty years ago, they understood that everything about the Gospel was foreign to the people around them. They even had to create a written form of the local language in order to give these people the Scriptures. The Pryors couldn’t assume (as we do) that the people had any previous knowledge of the Bible or its teachings on things like sin, salvation, atonement, sanctification, etc. Our situation isn’t as extreme, but increasingly this is the culture in which we live.

In contrast to the missional church is the evangelistic church, where teaching unbelievers about Christ is ONE of many church programs. An evangelistic church fits well in a community where many people are Christians, and where even the unbelievers have a basic understanding of the Gospel which they have (so far) rejected. When I was a kid, churches used to have evangelistic services where a preacher would come in from out-of-town and preach fire-and-brimstone messages. During the day, the visitor and the local preacher would visit the notorious sinners in town - often the hard-living husbands of church women, guys who had heard it all before - and try to convince them to come to the services and (hopefully) repent. Sometimes it worked.

But if the people we want to reach have almost no knowledge of God or His Word - if indeed they have accepted a very different world view - we have to approach the mission much differently. That’s when the church must become missional, considering itself an outpost of the Kingdom of God in a very foreign land.

More later…

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