What is Missional Church?
By Jannie Swart

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In the last newsletter, we published a “50,000 feet” overview of the Partnership for Missional Church (PMC). Our intention is to unpack the PMC process in more detail over the next few newsletters. However, during our recent Sustaining Missional Leadership conference, it became clear to us that many people want to know, “What does missional church really mean?” We should not assume that everybody is aware of and understands the missional church discussion, especially since the drastic increase in the ways that people all over the world have started using the missional concept.

There is a danger, though, in approaching the PMC process with a pre-understanding or definition of what missional is suppose to mean. It can so easily happen in the mindsets of people that “missional” takes on the format of just another program, model or new fashion in the church world. The idea is most certainly not first to find the correct definition and then to figure out how to be Church in terms of that definition. This will give “missional” a much too generic meaning and can easily lead to a misunderstanding of the deepest intent of the missional church discussion, namely to focus on the specific vocation of a particular and local Christian faith community that is unique compared to other Christian faith communities.

Yet, having said that, it does not mean that one cannot say anything directional with regard to the notion of “missional.” The following is not meant to present a comprehensive framework for understanding “missional church,” but aims at highlighting four basic underlying assumptions of “missional church.”

• The word mission in “missional” refers first of all to the mission of God in the world (all of creation). The most fundamental reality for the missional church is not the mission of the Church, but the fact that God sent Jesus to save the world and sent the Spirit of Christ to sustain and recreate the world. The primary acting subject in “missional” is God through the Spirit, not the Church; the aim is the world, not the Church.
  
• Given the above, “missional church” refers to the position and role of the Church as participants in the mission of God in the world. The Church becomes part of the movement of the Spirit in the world. Therefore, the Church does not exist for its own sake, but always for God’s sake and fulfilling God’s purposes in the world. Missional Church always means a Christian faith community on a continuous journey, discerning the movement of God, and obediently and faithfully responding as participants in that movement.
  
• The reference to “missional” in this context is different from how people in years gone by understood “mission.” The popular understanding of “mission” is for the Church to send missionaries or to be involved in mission work outside of their immediate context (their own country, immediate community or neighborhood). All of that changed in recent years (hugely influenced by Lesslie Newbigin, British missionary to India, who returned to the UK realizing how increasingly the mission challenge for the Church in the western world shifted from a focus on somewhere else to its own context) with the realization that the Church in the western world cannot take its own context for granted as “Christian” anymore. Therefore, the focus of missional Church is especially within a congregation’s own context of the culture and the community in which God places it and calls it to participate.
  
• The above also means that “missional” refers to the being of the Church in the midst of its own context and not as a particular function of a church committee or a group of interested people setting out beyond their community. The missional focus influences everything the Church does and implicates a continued willingness to transform the culture of the local faith community for God. This aspect can have many different forms and shapes, depending on the particular situation of a specific faith community. Generally it means a church will be much more hospitable towards outsiders and strangers, and above all, to find the world a hospitable place where God is active and asking the Church to change for the sake of others.

Highlighting these four fundamental aspects will help people better understand the PMC process. PMC is not a program or model but a process that assists local faith communities to walk their own unique journey of spiritual discernment as participants in God’s mission in the world. It has built into it the formation and cultivation of habits and practices that will take the local faith community out of its own self-centeredness and into their communities to discover what God is up to and to experiment with hospitality within those communities for the sake of furthering God’s mission. We will unpack the different phases of this process in future newsletters.

Jannie Swart, CI’s director of Partnership for Missional Church, is a PhD candidate in the Congregational Mission and Leadership program at Luther Seminary.