A Short History of Missional

The missional conversation is as old as the Scripture.  But it’s more contemporary articulation, which has blossomed in recent years through the voices of people  like Ed Stetzer, Reggie McNeal, Hugh Halter, Neil Cole, and my pal, Alan Hirsch, is traced back to and  largely credited to Lesslie Newbigin.

As Christianity in North America was experiencing a move away from the the dominant influence it had over society, as traditional and mainline churches where experiencing rapid decline, Newbigin was one of the first voices to recognize this shift to a post-Christian, neo-pagan, pluralistic missional field that America was becoming.

As the church growth movement, which would become what is now called attractional, was taking off  and offering a much need reformation of methodology of how we do church, Newbegin went beyond methodology to meaning, more particularly, ecclesiology.  As our culture changes at an exponential rate, we are in a constant and intense need to study and explore the nature of the church. This is the reason we’ve hosted the AND conference, retrained our staff and congregation, and taken two years to form and articulate a new vision (which makes my heart beat hard!).

In 1974, Newbigin, after 40 years of missionary engagement in India (oh yeah, check out Share the Well), returned to the West and began to dream about what it would be for the church in the West to take on a missionary position.  For those with their minds in the gutter, I’m not talking about “s” word either. ;)  He said, “The church could be neither the starting point nor the goal of mission.” It’s a simple, but profound shift. As it has famously been said, “The church doesn’t have a mission. A mission has a church.” Missio Dei creates missiones ecclesiae.

The Mission is derived from the very nature and heartbeat of God.  Here’s how Newbigin intersects that truth with the challenging doctrine of election.

No one can say why it is that one was chosen and another not, why it is that here the word came “not only in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost” (1 Thess. 1:5), while there the same word carried no regenerating power. The answer to that question is known only to God. But if we cannot know for what reason one was chosen, we can most certain know for what purpose he was chosen: he was chosen in order to be a fruit-bearing branch in the one true vine (John 15:16), a witness through whom others might be saved. He is chosen in order that through him God’s saving purpose may reach to others, and they too be reconciled to God in and through His reconciled and reconciling people…

And we can also see that wherever the missionary character of the doctrine of election is forgotten; wherever it is forgotten that we are chosen in order to be sent; wherever the minds of believers are concerned more to probe backwards from their election into the reasons for it in the secret counsel of God than to press forward from their election to the purpose of it, which is that they should be Christ’s ambassadors and witnesses to the ends of the earth; wherever men think that the purpose of election is their own salvation rather than the salvation of the world; then God’s people have betrayed their trust.”

Lesslie Newbigin, Household of Faith

Thoughts?

Comments

[Stevelutz.wordpress.com]

Hi Rob--
Good summary. To the list of influential modern proponents I would add a few others:

1. The book edited by Darrell Guder "Missional Church" (released in 1998 I believe) was groundbreaking in getting the Newbigin conversation going for a new audience/generation.

2. Tim Keller's ministry, punctuated by this brilliantly brief exposition of missional in 2001, was groundbreaking for many city-centric, culture-positive, church planting, and Reformed types. http://www.redeemer2.com/resources/papers/missional.pdf

3. Mark Driscoll's ministry and early books (Radical Reformission) helped many people articulate what a new generation was looking for in ministry.

In each case, Newbigin is explicitly credited as influencing this "new" form of ministry.

[Rcfrench.wordpress.com]

Brother Rob,

A good place to lay a foundation. Newbigin is profound because he has lived out Christianity and has been challenged by the multiple cultures and traditions that encompass Christianity throughout the world today. This perspective, viewing the Church from a global lens, will allow Western practitioners not only the insight of the Holy Spirit's movement in this time, but also His movement throughout the world and the amazing things He is doing outside the West. Continue reading Newbigin and add to your reading list Lamin Sanneh, Phillip Jenkins, Timothy Tennet, and others that are crying out for Western Christians to see what our Lord and Savior is doing throughout the world (consider that North America accounts for only 15% of Christian adherents in the world:2008) and how these movements may indeed breathe new life into Western Christianity. Finally, remember that Newbigin wasn't as concerned with any form of ministry as he was with identifying the Lord's will for the Church while bridging various cultural expressions of Christianity so that they might all serve the Lord together as one body. Perhaps most interesting is hIs diagnosis that for the Church, especially those in the Western Church, to move forward, there needs to be a reliance upon and acknowledgment of the Holy Spirit (which he wrote in 1950 during a ecumenical council involving Roman Catholics and Protestants). Newbigin is a brilliant because he walks with authority in places many of us have not and can remind us that at the end of the day it is not our conceptions of how we are following Jesus that matter but rather Jesus' direction and His church that inform our walk.

in His love,
rob french (a friend of bruno)