I have been working my way through Ed Stetzer’s compendium of information under the heading “The Meanings of Missional.” You can check it out at edstetzer.com. I pasted it into a word document to read offline and it came to about 40 pages.Ed is arguably Southern Baptist’s leading thinker regarding missional understanding. I will gladly defer to his expertise on the historical, ecumenical, theological, and other varied ways the term, recent as it is, has been treated. I will opt for a much more simple and personal discussion.I do not like most new terms. I have never liked the term “prechristian,” for example. I am fine with “postmodern,” although I think postmodernism has been a bit overly hyped. But I love the term missional. It seems most discussions I have read of the term deal with it as it concerns the church, and in particular the universal church. I want to look at the term from a very practical, personal, even specific perspective.Evangelism, in short, refers to communicating the good news of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, with the goal of new believers being birthed into the Kingdom and following Christ. Missions, briefly, means getting to know a people and a culture so that you can better share Christ in their world. Every culture has an orthodoxy. Take your wife to Iran and walk around with her in western clothing and let her start street witnessing to the men and you will quickly learn the wisdom of understanding culture.So if evangelism refers simply to sharing the good news, and missions means getting to know a culture, its language, customs, and orthodoxies to be a better witness, then what is missional?Again this is my simple definition. It is intentionally personal and at one level even nationalistic. By missional I mean the understanding that wherever we live, whether in the United States or the United Arab Emirates, we take the stance of a missionary. We share the gospel from the perspective of missionaries rather than a majoritarian position. We approach any culture, even our own, from the position of humility and servanthood, not as a pervasive, entitled majority.I realize that is not exactly how many use the term. But I think my context, the Southern Baptist Convention, whose understanding of evangelism in North America moves from the overwhelming emphasis of attractional, institutional, and methodological/programmatic witness, must shift her focus to resemble much more that of our International Mission Board. Only we need to do so in our cul-de-sacs with the same fervor we take on our mission trips.I have eleven homes on my street. We have eleven families, none from NC originally. We have different races, a multiethnic family, and a couple who cohabitate. We now, blessed be the name of the Lord, have several families involved in local churches, mostly ours. But our street in suburban Raleigh illustrates my point. My family has not simply invited them to church, which is the Baptist way. Nor have we merely given them a tract or a memorized presentation (I am not knocking these and all have received tracts and most a gospel witness beyond that). They have received gifts, acts of kindness from us. We have attended parties with them (they now set out sodas for our family), we play ball in the street with their children, and more than once we have joined with them on an issue of social justice in the community. We have as a family tried to think of presenting the gospel in ways just like we would were we sent as NAMB missionaries to Toronto or Anchorage.I recognize my use of the term missional may obfuscate more than aid. But I think the term can help conventional believers in the US who have seen their Christianity lived as an entitlement. What if every Christian family lived, worked, raised their children, as if they were missionaries? Because we are. And thus we must live. So this is not so theological, or ecclesiological, or transcendent a definition. But I believe it is a start to understanding better how we can reach an increasingly lost America.
