pat loughery

Part of my doctoral program’s learning model includes reading and summarizing a large number of books. I’ll blog the appropriate ones here.

Missional Church
ed. by Darrell Guder
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (1998)
280 pages

Description of the Book
The church in North America is in crisis. The culture is no longer Christian, and is again a mission field. The church must change its theologies, structure, practices and identity in order to be missional, recognizing that it is sent into the world as an expression of the Trinitarian God.

The church must move from “church with a mission” to “missional church”. It must “take particular form, shaped according to the cultural and historical context in which it lives.” (14).

Missional Church establishes the need for this shift and then devotes sections to the church’s interaction with its cultural context and the state of the current church, then establishes the vocation of the church to be an apostolic witness to the world, and then the role of the Holy Spirit in the church’s mission.

The book then moves to structural discussions, first describing missional leadership, then structures for missional community, and finally the community of communities on mission.

Interpretation of the Book
The authors of this book establish the need for a shift in two ways. First they describe the current dynamics between church and culture, wherein both sides are largely entrenched and separated from one another. The culture has no need for the church, and the church often believes itself to be above or outside culture. Neither are true. Second, the authors establish theologically that the church’s ongoing role is to engage with culture from the perspective of being agents of God’s goodness – not being transformed by culture, but not hiding from it either.

Application
On my many bookshelves are perhaps a dozen books that I want to return and reread regularly. Missional church is at the top of this list. I read it at first when my church plant began, have read it twice since then, and it’s given me excellent language for what I feel called to do. It has also given me encouragement specifically in the chapters on leadership and structures. Its understanding of coventant is a significant “a-ha” for me. And it lines up well with my understanding of the central focus of the Biblical story: that the Trinitarian God is on mission to expand the Kingdom of God, and that humanity’s role is to partner with God in the work of the Kingdom. This book, in addition to Bosch’s Transforming Mission, will continue to be the key resources for me in this area of study.