Missional: Is it a good word?
Reflection & Influence
Christians love catch-phrases and keywords. Making fun of or lamenting “Christianese” or the Christian subculture is a relatively easy and lazy thing to do. The more fruitful approach - the one that would hopefully build up the church rather than armchair quarterback it - is to lovingly critique it.
How we use language is something that really interests me. It’s something that’s important to see and think about because, while I’m not a linguist, I can see that language carries with it two big factors. First, language is a reflection of what we think, believe, and value. Secondly, language influences what we think, believe, and value.
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Blurred Definitions
Which brings me to the word I want to bring up in this blog article: missional. “Being missional” or “to be missional” has been a descriptive or imperative catch phrase for about the last five years, particularly among younger Emerging churches. It’s a word that I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable with because of it’s relative ambiguity (but that’s another article).
A recent Q&A video from John Piper helped me see more clearly the restlessness I felt about the word. In this clip he makes a very good distinction between “evangelism” and “missions”.
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Cause & Effect?
I’m left with a couple questions:
1) Do churches and Christians use the word “missional” because they are afraid of the word “evangelism”?
2) Though it claims to do otherwise, will this North American emphasis on being “missional” negatively effect global missions and the global Church by affirming (instead of challenging) our culture’s narcissism and producing culturally insular Christians?
