In 1992, Sara Faye and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary with a trip to England. We still chuckle about a recording on the London "Tube" or "Underground" (subway) that admonished at each stop, "Mind the gap!" The voice was telling us to pay attention to the short empty space between the train and the platform, across which we had to step as we exited. "Mind"--a word of many uses. You have a mind that reminds you to mind authorities, to mind your business, and sometime not to mind irritations and slights real or imagined. The proper use of the mind (as well as the body) involves what … [Read more...]

In an "attractional" church, success is usually measured by the number of people in attendance, the size of the offering and (using those calculators) the growth of the institution itself. In a "missional" church, success will not be measured by counting heads or dollars but by faithfulness to God's mission, deepening faith and the development of Christ-like disciples. Obviously these intangible indicators are much harder to assess than those borrowed from the business world. That does not bother missional people, however, because their focus is not on the institutional church to begin with. … [Read more...]

If the church is to have a future in the countries that once composed "Christendom," missional church advocates tell us, we who constitute the church must undergo what the Apostle Paul calls a "renewal of the mind." That means that we must re-imagine the ideal which God calls the church to become. We must rethink the church's character and reformulate its purpose and goals. The word "missional" is crucial to this new understanding in several respects. It reminds us that Christian "mission" is not only something for special people who go overseas to foreign lands. It is the work of every … [Read more...]

Everywhere we turn these days, people are talking about the church of the future -- indeed, whether the church as we have known it in America even has a future. That is a valid concern and the fault is not God's but ours. G.K. Chesterton nailed the problem squarely. "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting," he wrote. "It has been found difficult; and left untried." Christian thinkers through the centuries have attempted to visualize this "ideal" church. Many thinkers today envision the ideal in terms of what they call the "missional church." The church with a future, they … [Read more...]