“Missional”

If you read the publications of other denominations, you’ve probably bumped into it. It’s one of those old words (too old, apparently, to make it into my Canadian Oxford Dictionary) that gets re-discovered and suddenly seems to be everywhere. And, depending on your side of the fence, it’s either helpfully fresh or just plain frustrating.

Brian D. McLaren, author of A New Kind of Christian, defines the word in the summer issue of Leadership magazine as a replacement for adjectives like missionary, evangelistic, and socially active. It subsumes them, he says.

McLaren links missional with “current” (as in “the missional current”) to explain what he sees as an important shift in Christianity, “from a system in which ‘missions’ is one department of theology, to a new place where theology is one department of mission.”

Lois Barrett, director of the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary Great Plains Extension in North Newton, Kan., one of the co-writers of Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America, says “ ‘Missional’ means everything the church does is a witness to the gospel. We’re talking . . . about [the church’s] very being.”

Barrett is just one of the people editor Paul Schrag polled in a long article devoted to the word “missional” in the June 23 Mennonite Weekly Review. He found Nelson Kraybill, president of Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, for example, to be an “ardent advocate of the concept” though cautious about using the word because of some people’s “allergic reaction” to it.

On the other side, Marlene Kropf, director of the Mennonite Church USA Office of Congregational Life, considers the word jargon and avoids it. She calls it an “inside code word” that is “limiting rather than evocative.”

Brad Thiessen, director of media and communications for Mennonite Brethren Missions and Services International, told Schrag the term is “only beginning to gain prominence in the MB conference.” Thiessen said it is being used at the MB seminary in Fresno, Cal.

It has not appeared often in the MB Herald, but reporting of events like the upcoming lectures by Dr. Paul G. Hiebert at Canadian Mennonite University called “Doing Missional Theology,” for example, will make the word unavoidable, and perhaps, popular. Like it or not, missional is coming soon, to sentences near you.

—Dora Dueck