meaning of missional by Frank Viola

the following was posted on a blog site called futuristguy

1. What does “missional” mean to you?

I found the link on The Blind Beggar and came over here to see what was happening. The post and comments generated a lot of thinking … thanks for an opportunity to synthesize some of what I’d already been pondering for a long time.

After thinking about the meaning of “missional” for at least a year, I think I’m finally getting a handle on the “what,” “so what,” and “now what” of it all. And as it turns out, it’s a much bigger picture than I realized!

To me, “missional” means everyday discipleship that brings our personal presence into all venues where we have influence. This is both individual and corporate – living out and the character of Christ as individuals and Kingdom culture as a community of sojourners among our neighbors and neighborhoods. There will always be a dynamic tension or paradox between missional individuals and community. We cannot sustain being missional on our own, but if we are not being missional individually we cannot sustain being mission-shaped corporately.

Being missional involves being both contextual (relevant in our engagement with these cultures) and countercultural (resistant and challenging to the anti-biblical aspects of these cultures). It neither colonizes (attempts to control the culture or make it conform externally) nor syncretizes (lets the culture control us). Mission-shaped engagement with our neighbors and our/their cultures calls forth expectancy, creativity, and responsibility. It also challenges us to advocate for those who have been victimized, to call out those who perpetrate evil and injustice, and to be present with people in the midst of the mundane moments, pains, and joys of their life.

Living this kind of intentional, mission-shaped life requires us to practice regularly the disciplines of:

GIVING (sharing, blessing, praying),

RECEIVING (listening, asking, thanking), and

PERCEIVING (Who/What did I notice that was a surprise? What do I wish I’d done differently/more Christlike just now? How was the Triune God providentially at work in it?)

Persevering in these disciplines develops our missional consciousness and our conscience.

The practices of giving, receiving, and perceiving help transform us from religious consumers into spiritual-cultural producers. Missional attitudes and actions make an incremental difference in the lives of ourselves and others over time, as we root ourselves into the locales and spheres of influence God providentially graces us with. As Tolstoy said, “True life is lived when tiny changes occur.” So, being missional is about living out an incarnational life of gradual changes in the commonplace activities of each day together. It is about sacrificial obedience that costs, not seeking for super-spiritual or super-supernatural or self-serving experiences that we think will pay off.

2. Do you feel that this is a good word – why or why not?

“Missional” is a fairly good word to use … when applied with understanding of it as a term of spiritual production, not religious consumption. However, many now seem to want to USE the term WITHOUT LIVING by the terms of the term. I have to wonder if their name-it-and-claim-it approach relates more to marketing promotion than to missional paradigms. If they don’t want to use the word appropriately, then they should not use it at all.

This misapplication is very naughty behavior, even if driven by sincere desires to reach people for Christ. Purveyors of missional emptiness ought to be sent to theological time-out until they have repented of their dilution of the term’s terms, meanings, and methods!

3. To your mind, what is the difference between a “missional church” and a “non-missional” church? Give examples if you like.

Oh, oh …now there’s The Big Question: differences between missional church and non-missional church. I’m a researcher on paradigms and cultural systems, so I’ve got a lot of technical blah-blah-blah ideas and reasons on that subject. Let me say the relatively non-technical stuff here, and leave the rest for my blog or somewhere else, sometime else.

I like what Brother Maynard said in his summary of the Missional SynchroBlog in June 2008: “Live your faith. Share your life.” That keeps things integrated and holistic – and that’s the essence of the missional paradigm. The reverse: “Live your life. Share your faith” is reductionist. The essence of non-missional is compartmentalizing – it divides evangelism and missions and discipleship and etc. away from the rest of life.

I’ve blogged about the differences this way:

What makes mission and missional different? Mission requires “incursion” – people commute into the community, and then return to their home turf when they are finished. Missional requires “incarnation” – people root into the community, because that is their home and they never finish.

I also think a key difference lies in the realm of being collaborative producers instead of passive consumers. In non-missional churches, there are deep-level paradigm assumptions that set up surface-level operating systems that block people from being discipled as spiritual producers; they keep people immature religious consumers. And while creativity is definitely a reflection of God’s image in us, I’ve yet to figure out what aspect of God’s personhood or character consumption reflects