Most church leaders readily recognize that God has tasked the church with several different purposes, yet how those purposes work together has equally mystified them. One of the most potentially difficult ministry relationships to reconcile has been of that between worship and evangelism. The church growth movement answered the question by insisting that the church’s… Continue Reading
In order to understand the driving impulses behind the North American evangelical missional church movement and its impact on worship, I will begin with a brief survey of the history of ideas embedded in missional. Contemporary missional thinking began within the larger ecumenical missions debates in the early twentieth century. Critics of standard missionary methods… Continue Reading
The first principle that drives the missional church is what it considers the biblically-mandated missionary imperative. But while the evangelical church has traditionally considered evangelism and missions a critical reason for its existence, the missional church understands such an emphasis as not just one ministry among many but as the overarching idea of what it… Continue Reading
Flowing naturally from the idea that God has an overarching mission for mankind, thus rendering that mission God-centered, is the assertion that the church, as one component of that mission, is sent by God to help accomplish the mission. Newbigin saw a natural flow from the idea that mission begins with God’s purpose of reconciling… Continue Reading
Understanding this missionary imperative for the church leads missional writers to ask the question, “Is the 21st-century North American church fulfilling its place in the mission of God?” Guder answers bluntly, “Neither the structures nor the theology of our established Western traditional churches is missional.”1 Rather, the church today is locked in the mode of what… Continue Reading
Missional authors argue that the church today has failed to recognize that the Christendom era has ended. It no longer enjoys the level of influence and status it once did, but its structures, ministries, philosophies, and methods nevertheless remain the same. Mead notes, We are surrounded by the relics of the Christendom Paradigm, a paradigm… Continue Reading
If the “why” of mission is the fact that God sends the church, and if the “where” of mission is post-Christendom Western culture, then for the missional advocates the “how” of mission is incarnation. By incarnation, missional writers mean that a truly missional church is one that is embedded in its target culture. Hirsch notes,… Continue Reading
Inherent in the missional church’s insistence upon incarnation and contextualization is the idea that no aspect of culture is inherently sinful, or at very least unredeemable. Missional proponents believe that there are very few aspects of human culture that are actually sinful in and of themselves; they might cite pornography or something similar as an… Continue Reading
Part of the difficulty in attempting to synthesize a philosophy of missional worship is that many different groups have adopted the term missional to describe their approach to church ministry, not all of which ascribe to the fundamental characteristics of the missional movement. For example, while missional church advocates discussed in this series repudiate an… Continue Reading
According to missional authors, the Christendom model significantly affects how the average 21st century American church practices worship. During the Christendom period, the church dominated the culture, and therefore the forms used in worship were in many ways indistinguishable from the forms of Western culture. According to Murray, “Sunday” as a holy day, the clergy/laity… Continue Reading
With regard to the missional movement’s understanding of Christendom, it is important to recognize that they saw what happened during this period as little more than the church contextualizing worship to the dominant culture of the civilization. Since Christianity happened to be the dominant religion of the western world, the church was able to easily… Continue Reading
There is little doubt that the missional church movement has been influential in evangelical churches, and that it continues to grow. Having surveyed the history and theology of this important movement and specifically its impact upon the worship of the evangelical church, the question remains as to whether this influence has been beneficial or not.… Continue Reading