“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them – particularly verbs, they’re the proudest – adjectives you do anything with, but not verbs – however, I can manage the whole lot them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”

“Would you tell me, please,” said Alice, “what that means?”

Humpty Dumpty gave a lengthy explanation of what he meant by the word.

“That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.”

We probably need to pay the word missional extra for all the work we make it do. A missional church is not any one thing. It is not simply a new style or model of doing church. And there is not one formulaic amalgamate (that means “word”) that sums up its meaning. The landscape of the missional debate is filled with questions, assumptions, and opinions – along with hard pressed critiques on wider issues such as leadership styles, congregation sizes, vocational/bi-vocational ministry, building church-based or house church-based as well as core theology.

One thing the debate about the word illustrates is the statement “Words don’t mean, people do.”

So what does that mean?

What it means is rooted in the word "mission" in one of several forms.

It means in order for us to use the word missional (and it’s a perfectly good word) we’re going to have to understand what different people have meant by it, and settle upon how we might use it constructively in the future. A useful way to get at this is to determine what people have meant by it in the past.

For example, Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian and well known missional thinker, dropped by the comment section of this post and wrote:

I agree with you that the concept of the Missio Dei is crucial and right, but it depends on what people mean by it... I've heard missiologists cite the Eastern view of the Spirit in order say 'God is at work in major ways out in the world, liberating people and it's the church's job to get involved with what God is doing"... I think, however, many people who cite the 'Missio Dei' concept are going beyond the teaching about common grace/natural law to say that the Spirit is working in people's lives in a major, virtually saving way apart from belief in Christ.

In my response, I agreed and wrote:

I think everyone would agree that the missio dei (mission of God) is larger than the missio ecclesia (mission of the church). The harder questions are, "How?" and, "For what purpose?"... and, I would add, "What is the role of the church in that work?"

And, if you combine such a missio dei missiology with the "Preferential Option for the Poor" that became prominent in the 1970s, you end up as did the World Council of Churches 1980 mission meeting at Melbourne... focused on economic liberation as God was "at work" there.

According to Jacques Matthey:

"Taking up the concept of Missio Dei, which had influenced WCC theology since Willingen, Melbourne defines its theological entry point into the world: God acts by and through the poor, the victims and the excluded. The aim of God’s action, described as 'shalom'... is also defined in the sense that God aims first at the liberation of the poor, a liberation that will bring about changed relations in the world and also the liberation of the rich and powerful. The poor and their fate thus become the yardstick for judging all social, political, economic, religious and missionary developments and programmes."

See the original post for the full quotes and context.

So, words do have meanings that "follow them" but they really have the meaning that we "assign them."

Hence the reason for this "meanings of missional" project...

Roots of Missional-- in the IMC Movement

As I have indicated before, you cannot understand "missional" without understanding the debate about "church and mission." The debate about "church and mission" was a (if not "the") defining missiological debate of the first 60 years of the last century. These debates took place in and around the International Missionary Council (IMC) meetings.

The IMC met from 1921-1958, as follows:

• Edinburgh 1920 (pre-IMC)
• Lake Mohonk 1921
• Jerusalem 1928
• Tambaram 1938
• Whitby 1947
• Willingen 1952
• Ghana 1958

After the Ghana meeting the IMC was absorbed into the World Council of Churches.

Why Start Missional in the "Mission" Debate?

Most early authors writing on the subject of the missional church all either root their ideas in, or draw some inferences from, the IMC movement. Yet, the definition of mission there was quite confusing.

I recently shared with my friend David Hesselgrave and co-editor about my "missional project." David is, I believe and think few would argue, the world's leading evangelical missiologist. He allowed me to share a quote that I believe will have some relevance to the discussion. (He also wrote me yesterday, "As for 'missional,' you are to be commended. It desperately needs defining, and in every context in which it is used.")

He is writing a paper which will probably appear in the International Journal of Frontier Missions which traces what he sees as the mistakes at Edinburgh that led to such great theological problems later. He wrote (in an unpublished document) about the definition of "mission" which, like its cousin "missional" is used by many people in many different ways.

Indecisiveness as to the nature and meaning of mission led to continuing confusion and vacillation as to what the mission is and also as to the relationship between church and mission. At one point leaders proposed that “mission is church;” at another point that “church is mission.” In 1968, Uppsala delegates proposed to “let the world establish the agenda” while at the same time turning a deaf ear to the question “What about the two billion (who, it was reckoned, had not yet heard the gospel)?” Themes of subsequent conferences often had a hopeful ring to them but attendant discussions and understandings were much less hopeful. The theme at Bangkok in 1973 was “Salvation Today” but in the end “salvation” turned out to be “humanization.” Ten years later the theme at Vancouver was “Jesus Christ—the Life of the World,” but no major speaker referred to it. Speakers focused, rather, on “world affairs in ecumenical perspective.” (Cf. Arthur F. Glasser, “World Council of Churches Assemblies,” In Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions. A. Scott Moreau, general editor. Grand Rapids: Baker 2000:1026). If the “ecumenical perspective” on mission were to be boiled down to a single sentence it might be, “Mission is everything the church does in the world,” or the more nuanced, “Mission is everything the church is sent to do in the world.” But both definitions run afoul of Stephen Neill’s oft-quoted dictum, “When mission is everything, mission is nothing.”

It was that very concern that prompted Francis Dubose to use the term "missional" in the first writing on the subject.

The International Missionary Council Meetings

Although there were many meetings, I’ll focus particularly on the meetings at Tambaram (Madras) and Willingen because they are most significant in the missional discussion.

Tambaram: Church and Mission Are One

Long before the missio dei language that would emerge after Willingen, the missiologists and missionaries gathered at Tambaram believed that "church and mission are one." And, by "mission" they focused on the "sentness" of the church.

In 1938, the IMC leadership met in Tambaram (Madras) in India. This conference was one of the most theologically focused, and became a transition point in the understanding of church and mission.

By the time the council met, many of the evangelicals from Western countries had already distanced themselves from the IMC movement, although they would still be greatly influenced by the meeting (and continue to be today). Several shifts in understanding were emphasized—shifts that would sound similar to the missional conversation today.

According to helpful summary from Moreau, these shifts included:

• a shift from a focus on the atonement to a focus on the incarnation.
• a renewed high view of scripture (based, partly, on Barth’s influence).
• “Larger Evangelism” became the focus of the mission. This was a compromise position between the evangelistic impulse of Edinborough and the more social gospel influence of the 1928 Jerusalem conference which had driven evangelicals away.
• A focus upon the church as the hope of the world, if it would live, act, and be different for the gospel.
• An assertion that indigenous expressions of church were needed and valued if the church was to be God’s missionary in every global context.

T.V. Philip explained (italics are mine):

The main conclusion of the Madras Conference was that church and mission are inseparable... It is the church that is God’s missionary to the world. So from Madras on, it was impossible to speak of mission without directly linking mission to the church.

The church being the center of (or central to) the mission was a new development. Oddly enough, the church was not the center of missionary activity in the early 20th Century: Rather, the individual mission was, as directed by the missionary sending agencies.

These mission agencies were not "real" churches. These agencies were what Ralph Winter's called “sodality structures” – kind of like parachurch agencies – which, while energized by the “modality structures” of churches, were really not churches. They were seeking to plant churches, but were not (for the most part) churches themselves.

The terminology of “daughter” or “younger” churches had begun to emerge out of this colonial period to describe churches planted by missionaries. In their struggle to become indigenous a natural tendency to develop organizations resulted in a focus upon the institution of the church and not upon its mission. It was the wish to move these churches on to becoming missionary-minded themselves – and full partners in the missionary task – that pushed those gathering for the Tambaram council to look back at the church itself as the foundation of mission, and to see mission as the church’s purpose.

This was really continued growth in the understanding of what it meant for a church to be truly indigenous. The language of the "indigenous church" became important here. A church had to be “rooted” in its culture and context. (And, I actually quoted this in my first book, Planting New Churches in a Postmodern Age.) They wrote:

An indigenous church, young or old, in the East or in the West, is a church which, rooted in obedience to Christ, spontaneously uses forms of thought and modes of action natural and familiar in its own environment. Such a church arises in response to Christ’s own call. The younger churches will not be unmindful of the experiences and teachings which the older churches have recorded in their confessions and liturgy. But every younger church will seek further to bear witness to the same Gospel with new tongues. (From /International Missionary Council, “The Growing Church: The Madras Series,” Papers Based upon the Meeting of the International Missionary Council, at Tambaram, Madras, India, December 12–29, 1938. Vol. 2, (New York, International Missionary Council), 276.)

The significance of the shifts in focus brought about by Tambaram would be hard to overstate: The church was again recognized as the instrument of God’s missionary activity. But, this was an ecclesiocentric and mission focused approach, and was soon after criticized as such. Yet, it was still a missiologically informed and mission-focused emphasis.

The conference documents explained:

It is the Church and the Church alone which can carry the responsibility of transmitting the Gospel from one generation to another, of preserving its purity and of proclaiming it to all creatures. It is the Church and Church alone which can witness to the reality that man belongs to God in Christ with a higher right than that of any earthly institution which may claim his supreme allegiance… We may and we should doubt whether the churches as they are do truly express the mind of Christ, but we may never doubt that Christ has a will for His Church, and that His promises to it holds good.

Not everyone agreed. E. Stanley Jones pointed out that the council did not emphasize the Kingdom of God as much as he believed they should. E. Stanley Jones (quoted from here) complained about Tambaram:

It blazed no great way. Why? Because of its basic starting point-- the Church. It began there and worked out to all its problems from the Church standpoint.... "The Church is the world's greatest hope!" That is not a chance sentence. It sums up the presuppositions of Madras.... Is the Church the hope of the world? If so, God help us! . . . God is laying hold of other instruments besides the Church to realize the Kingdom of God . . . the Kingdom is a demand upon the total life-the whole of life, personal, devotional, economic, social, international-comes its way.

There were certainly some issues with the Tambaram meeting. Like all of us, they saw through a glass darkly and all the emphases will not be embraced by all Christians. Evangelicals will be uncomfortable with the idea that Karl Barth's neo-orthdoxy returned the council to a higher view of scripture. Others will want to move more fully into the ideas of the missio dei.

But the reason I spend so much time here is that this is where the first author to use the term "missional" rooted his ideas. In 1938, the International Missionary Council saw the church as a missionary church, as an indigenous church, and as a church centered on mission, and focused on God’s mission. At Tambaram they believed that God worked through the "sent" church to redeem a people (and to some degree a world) to Himself.

In our August 13th phone conversation, Francis Dubose indicated to me that it is from here that many of his ideas flow-- not from the ideas of the later Willingen conference and the missio dei concepts that flowed from it. For that matter, Dubose shared his concern that the missio dei emphasis distracted God's people from focusing on the purpose and focus of our God given mission. In other words, he believed that the "mission" was defined too broadly.

Dubose wanted to focus on the church as "missionary" but specifically chose not to use that language since books like The Missionary Nature of the Church defined the term in ways he found problematic. Thus, Dubose used "missional" as a replacement for the word "missionary."

Thus, as I look at the early uses of the word "missional," the ideas there were focused on a sent church, indigenous to its culture, being the incarnation of Christ in that context.

Dubose explained it this way in God Who Sends. When Dubose refers to "universiality," he is referring to the universal mission call on all believers and churches. He knows that all believers are called to "it." His concern is that the "it" was not defined as Biblical mission.

The most insightful works on mission, as well as the more popular ones, confront us with this dilemma. Some authors assume a definition but do not give one. This can be illustrated from those authors which assume “the universal” as the missionary motif of Scripture without demonstrating this hermeneutically. This is seen in such popular treatments as Julian Price Love’s The Missionary Message of the Bible, and more scholarly works as Ferdinand Hahn’s Mission in the New Testament, and Johannes Blauw’s The Missionary Nature of the Church. Hahn says, “A fundamental element of missionary thought and action is the universalist understanding of God.” Most of the chapters in Blauw contain the word universal. His first chapter is “The Point of Departure and General Perspective of Universalism in the Old Testament." Dubose, God Who Sends, pp22-23

The suspicion is that we begin a priori with the idea of universality, starting perhaps largely unconsciously from the orientation and mystique of the modern world missionary enterprise, and then going back into the Scripture in an effort to discover the biblical justification for the universal activity of the Christian world mission. We do this rather than first going to the Bible with the expressed purpose of discovering that first meaning, that original idea, impulse, event (whatever) which is the mission genius of the biblical message, that living verity, the proto-missio, which developed ultimately into the worldwide missionary enterprise.

He indicates that his central approach is that missional means “sending.” He explains:

There are, of course, objections to this approach. Why limit the meaning of mission to sending? The answer is because that is what mission means. If we are to capture this essential idea, we must be guided by the discipline of that idea. Since mission and sending have essentially the same meaning, we look for its meaning in the message it conveys in Scripture just as we look for the meaning of covenant, kingdom, grace or any other biblical concept through that precise language, at least at the outset.Dubose, God Who Sends, pp25

(1) Mission means sending. The naked language establishes the genius of the germinal idea: the Sender, the sent, the sending purpose. The contextualized language in Scripture determines the theological perimeters of the concept.

(2) Mission as sending refers to the outreach of God from the lovingkindness and purposefulness of his nature.

(3) This expresses itself basically in the providential sendings reflective of his goodness, the judgmental sendings reflective of his justice, and the salvific sendings reflective of his love.

(4) The climatic expression is the sending of Jesus into the world for the redemption of humanity.

(5) The Christian and the church are created out of this missional purpose and, therefore, in it have their being and sense of identity, source of religious knowledge, standard of morality, system of values, and total directive for life.

(6) This purpose at its heart is twofold: to be sent to witness to God’s loving nature through ministry and to be sent to witness to God’s salvific work through evangelism.

(7) All Christian and ecclesial functions find their ultimate expression in the rhythmic return to God of the worship of loving service which has its motivation in the loving impulse of the divine sending.

(8) The sending judges the elitist idea and paternalistic practice of mission and places every Christian and every church in the world at the heart of the missional calling and task.

(9) Finally, it focuses on the praxis of mission; for we are sent into the world to bear a life-witness to God’s redemptive concern for all people everywhere in the face of issues which affect their daily lives.Dubose, God Who Sends, pp159-160

Francis DuBose via Brad Briscoe

Brad has done an excellent job summarizing God Who Sends by Francis DuBose, the first book I can find to use the term “missional.” His summaries come in several parts linked below:

• God Who Sends: A Fresh Quest
• Being Sent and the Pentateuch
• Being Sent and the Historical Books
• Being Sent and the Prophets
• Being Sent and the Gospels
• Being Sent in Acts & Epistles

Conclusion

Each "missional" thinker who roots their ideas in the historical debate over "church and mission" takes an "off ramp" somewhere off the IMC highway so they don't end up where the IMC movement led (see above). If the ideas of Dubose, Van Engen, and Guder (et. al.) are rooted in the church-mission conversation (and they all indicate they are to some degree), it is helpful to know where and why they rooted their ideas.

Dubose roots his idea in the "sentness" of a "missionary church." That impacts at least one stream of the missional conversation which I will call that the “missionary” stream.

Next time, we will look at the second early adopter of the term (Chuck Van Engen) and where he roots his missional ideas.

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I am going to take off this next Monday since it is the day after my birthday and Labor Day. And, also, since this is a very long post!

More on Monday the 10th.

Feel free to interact in the posts, particularly in reference to the missional view of Dubose and the mission theology of Tambaram.