What this clip and learn from the simplicity of how it communicates. The medium is the message.

But if you want to see a disciple making, church multiplication movement, you’re going to have to see beyond the picture it paints of the missional church. What’s missing?

HT: Epoch

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Romeo and Juliet

“Missional” has now replaced “emerging” as THE word to use to describe your ministry, book, or conference.

Search for the keyword “missional” on Amazon and you’ll find 393 books.

Search for the word “Missional” in book titles and you’ll find 127 books.

I’m pretty indifferent to the term. The English words “missionary”, “mission”, “missional” derive from the Latin missio (“sending”) and mittere (“to send”). The New Testament Greek verb is apostellein (“to send”) from which we get our English word “apostle”.

Missionary, missions, mission, missional—you can take your pick.

What matters is not the form of the word but the substance of what it means to be “sent” and how that reality is worked in everyday life and ministry.

Unfortunately, I am now convinced that the term “missional” is often used to conceal a lack of clarity about what it is we are meant to be doing, and what faithfulness and fruitfulness really looks like.

Brian’s new kind of Christianity is quite old. And the problem is that it’s not old enough.

Scott McKnight

McKnight does an outstanding job of reviewing Brian McLaren’s ‘A New Kind of Christianity’ and explains why he thinks McLaren has drifted from both evangelicalism and orthodoxy and wandered wandered down the path of 19th Century theology.

Perhaps you have joined Brian McLaren in his wanderings, hoping that somehow this ‘fresh perspective’ will give birth to a ‘missional church’. It won’t. It can’t. It never has been anything more than the symptom of a faith that has lost its way.

The part of the book that most concerned me was their understanding of the gospel. The authors claim the gospel isn’t the answer of Jesus to the sin-problem of men and women. Rather, it’s “[God's] love and acceptance and vision for every human being… God’s love for his created humanity.”

That description of the gospel too easily marginalizes the passion, crucifixion, and substitutionary death of Jesus. In fact, if the gospel is merely about God’s love and acceptance of every human being, then why would Jesus have to die? They go on to claim that the gospel isn’t just about God’s love, it’s about love in general – people adopting children, having block parties, and planting trees… “it’s all Kingdom, and it’s all good news.”

While Christians are called to love others, that’s not the gospel – that’s an outworking of the gospel. The good news in the New Testament isn’t a message about us, it’s a message about Jesus. The authors go on to claim, we should look for ways to “Witness to this gospel by bringing tangible slices of heaven down to life on Earth, and continue to do this until those we’re reaching out to acknowledge that our ways are `good news’.”

The gospel is not a message about me. It’s a message about Jesus, who is more than sufficient for a person has the same problem a non-Christian does. It’s called sin, and Jesus provides an incredible answer to it – His life. His good news is about Him, not about me trying to be Him.

“The Tangible Kingdom: Creating Incarnational Community (Jossey-Bass Leadership Network Series)” (Hugh Halter, Matt Smay)

Ed Stetzer wonders why so many “missional” churches are uninterested in doing global missions. Others have wondered why the emerging/missional church doesn’t do evangelism.

Dan Kimball agrees that something is wrong: “For the past few years, I have been observing, listening, and asking questions about the missional movement. I have a suspicion that the missional model has not yet proven itself beyond the level of theory.”

Andrew Jones looks back on 2009 and observes,

I can think of 5 or 6 countries where some of the top “emerging church” leaders have been brought on staff to more traditional churches or denominations or mission agencies where it is hoped they will bring new perspective to the traditional streams of Christianity. There are now Bible colleges that offer a degree in the emerging church.

Not a good sign for the emerging/missional church if it has any intention of being truly missional/missionary.

Four years ago, Gibbs and Bolger’s study of the emerging church left me deeply disturbed for its future.

Their two year study revealed: a loss of confidence in the gospel; a blurring of the distinction between the church and world; a redefining of mission away from evangelism towards social and political agendas.

In contrast, this is what I would expect to see in the few emerging/missional groups that will become genuinely missional movements.

1. Missionaries without borders

Has anyone read the Matt 28:18-20 lately? You’re not a movement if you’re only interested in reaching your tribe.

2. Making disciples

Missionary movements teach the newest believers to follow Jesus in obedience. It begins with simple commands of Jesus like: repent and believe, be baptized, love one another, be generous, make disciples, celebrate the Lord’s supper. True discipleship always leads to church formation.

3. Paying their own way

Where’s the money coming from? Some denominations have millions of dollars to splash around for “missional initiatives” that are not sustainable. Missionary movements take responsibility to generate their own funds rather than remaining dependent on mom and dad.

4. Gospel faithfulness

Movements are not known for the vagueness when it comes to their message and mission. Putting a “missional” label on it may just be a smokescreen for the reality that we not sure anymore about what we really believe. Movements return to the heart of the gospel and at the same time find relevant and effective ways to make the gospel known in new contexts.

5. Vision validated by action

Movements turn dissatisfaction into vision, and vision into action. There was a time for critique and vision casting. That time is over. The emerging/missional groups that have a future are already implementing a positive agenda for making disciples.

6. Children and grandchildren. Everywhere

This is everything. This is the end of the bigger vs smaller debate. You can be five or five thousand. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you have descendants. Produce some great great grandchildren, and we might even call you a movement.

7. Out on the fringe

The breakthroughs always occur on the fringe. I’m not expecting to find leaders of dynamic movements in denominational bureaucracies, or theological seminaries, or on Christian television.

Look for the leaders who follow the example of Jesus and Paul, and all the great movement leaders through the ages. They are close to the action. They hang out with people: preaching, teaching, healing, confronting, mobilizing, and pioneering.

Look for leaders like that in the emerging/missional church of today, and you’ll find founders of movements that will change the world.

Ed Stetzer wonders why some missional churches don’t do global missions.

It appears to me that many missional churches are missing the Great Commission in the name of being missional. That makes zero sense.

I was recently told by a pastor who called himself “missional” that his church needed to pull back on their global mission support to help their people “be missionaries right here.”

All this provokes me to ask, “Why are so many missional Christians uninvolved in God’s global mission?” As the missional conversation continues and deepens, what has occurred that has led to our blindness to the lost world around us?

Five reasons why Ed thinks this has happened:

1. In rediscovering God’s mission, many have only discovered its personal dimensions.

2. In responding to God’s mission, many have wanted to be more mission-shaped and have therefore made everything “mission.”

3. In relating God’s mission, the message increasingly includes the hurting but less frequently includes the global lost.

4. In refocusing on God’s mission, many are focusing on being good news rather than telling good news.

5. In reiterating God’s mission, many lose the context of the church’s global mission and needed global presence.

The full text and Ed’s solutions for the unmissional missional church

HT: Michael Clark

For the past few years, I have been observing, listening, and asking questions about the missional movement. I have a suspicion that the missional model has not yet proven itself beyond the level of theory.

Dan Kimball

Dan hopes he is wrong. I think he is right.

The emerging/missional church has not delivered on multiplying new Christians and new disciple-making churches. But why?

more from Dan. . .

HT: Alan Hirsch

Are the glory days over? Leonard Sweet speaks out on the emerging church. . .

The emerging church has become another form of social gospel. And the problem with every social gospel is that it becomes all social and no gospel. All social justice and no social gospel. It is embarrassing that evangelicals have discovered and embraced liberation theology after it destroyed the main line, old line, side line, off line, flat line church.

Leonard Sweet

Is he talking about “Emergent” or “emerging” or both? Or about what Ed Stetzer calls the “revisionist” stream of the emerging church?

Does it really matter?

HT: Michael Krahn

Url Scaramanga announces the early demise of the “emerging church” in RIP Emerging Church: An overused and corrupted term now sleeps with the fishes. The overwhelming majority of movements don’t make it out of infancy alive. Will this be the fate of the EC?

HT: Alan Hirsch

UPDATE: Ed Stetzer’s article on The Emerging Church, the Emergent Church, and the Faith Once Delivered to the Saints.

HT: DashHouse via Matt Stone

There are striking parallels in the story of the Episcopalian demise in the US and Canada and the woes of the Uniting Church in Australia.

The heart of the problem is a failure of nerve in confronting a culture that is hostile to the Christian faith. Hitchcock quotes TS Eliot who said of liberalism that,

[It] tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, to relax rather than to fortify. It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards, something definite.

In religion, Liberalism may be characterized by a progressive discarding of elements in historical Christianity which appear superfluous or obsolete, confounded with practices and abuses which are legitimate objects of attack. But as its movement is controlled rather by its origin than by any goal, it loses force after a series of rejections, and with nothing to destroy is left with nothing to uphold and nowhere to go.

Unfortunately, this history will be repeated in the postmodern world by the stream of the emerging church described by Ed Stetzer as “Revisionists“. The scenery has changed but not the story.