“missional” trumps “emergent”

I must apologize about the look of my blog yet, I know it is an eye sore, I’m hoping to get it fixed soon. However, I wanted to share something with you that I read on Scott Hodge’s blog, who grabbed this from Alan Hirsch’s blog.

In my opinion what is expressed through Emergent, the Alt-Worship movement, and what has been called Post-Evangelicalism, is not by-and-large a missionary movement, but is rather what I would call a renewal

As for me, I am happy to call the so-called “emergents” friends and fellow travelers, I personally do not feel the need to question the inherited theological tradition as many of its adherents do.

Emerging forms of the church must always be subservient to the missional purposes of the church. My advice to “emergents” is therefore, don’t emerge before you have a mission.

My advice to all you folks on both sides of the debate that mix up the term, be warned! What you are doing is only making it harder for the Church to come to grips with its deepest sense of call and purpose in this time and place, no less! For God’s sake, be clear in your use of the term or can I suggest that you stop using it.

To guard against a further degrading of the word, I want to suggest (as I did in The Forgotten Ways) that we combine the term “missional” with the associated term “incarnational” to come up with the term missional-incarnational.

If “missional” carries the sense of being “sent”, then “incarnational” gives definition to the nature of that “sentness.” If “missional” means being thrust into the world as witnesses to the redemption that is in Jesus, then “incarnational” shows us that we ought to engage the world in the same way that God did in and through the Incarnation of the Word in Jesus the Messiah.

Mission always sets our Agenda and Incarnation must always describe our Way.

Good stuff, now I’m going to go to bed…