Good morning. Missional is a hot-button word. It hasn’t been around all that long, but a quick google search will immediately show over 1 ½ million results. “Missional” is a word that began in Christianity but has been adopted by business and industry. “Missional” was first used as a description of the church of our Lord Jesus Christ. “Missional” speaks of who we are, what we are, why we are, what we should be thinking about, what we should be talking about, and of what we should be doing, about what we are thinking and talking about, and so on. “Missional” is a big concept, and it is a concept that has been discussed and written about in tremendous detail.
I would like to take the word and the concept of the missional church and boil it down to its essence: The missional church understands that its primary reason for existence is to save the lost of this world, bringing sinners to a soul saving relationship with their only Savior Jesus Christ. The missional church recognizes that everything else that we are a part of as a church body is secondary to this one, primary mission.
The primary intention of the missional church is to satisfy the call to exponential duplication. That is a fancy way of saying that we, the Body of Christ, are supposed to be multiplying ourselves. The old illustration of doubling a penny works to illustrate: if you take a penny and double its amount every day, in two days you have two pennies. In ten days, you have $5.12. In 17 days, you have $655.36. It is at this point that it gets interesting, because in another week, day 24, you would have $83,886.08. In one more week, by day 31 you would have $10,737,418.23!
And that is missional Christianity. If Christians went about making a disciple from the lost once a week, and each of those disciples did the same, in few months you would have millions of disciples. If, on the other hand, you have non-missional believers who are happy in their faith but have no desire to share it…well what you have is what you get.
Jesus, assuring His own that they are never alone, but are empowered by His living presence, the Holy Spirit, explained it this way just before He was taken up into heaven: But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. Acts 1:8
Perhaps the best way to launch the missional church is for each of us to consider how we could become a missional child of God, a missional believer in Jesus Christ.
Vern