the “sent” church 4

May 31, 2008

THE IMPETUS OF THE CURRENT MISSIOLOGICAL IMPULSE

Beginning in the early 1980’s and into the late 1990’s, this new ecclesiological-centered missional movement began to take shape within evangelicalism.

To understand this development, there are two streams that propelled this renaissance: 1) three key early, prophetic thinkers – Francis Dubose, author of God Who Sends (1983), Charles Van Engen, author of God’s Missionary People (1991), and Darrell Guder, editor of Missional Church (1998) – and 2) the “megatrends” that surrounded this era.

Today, we look at the early thinkers and next week, the “megatrends”…

DUBOSE: GOD WHO SENDS

Dubose, according to Ed Stetzer, is the first person found to use the word “missional” – in the gist used today – when he wrote God Who Sends in 1983. [1] Dubose bases his concept in the “sentness” of a “missionary church.” DuBose assumed that the Christian and the church are fashioned out of this missional intent and, consequently, in it have their existence and sense of distinctiveness, font of religious experience, criterion of morality, arrangement of values, and complete directive for life. In other words, this rationale is dual: 1) to be propelled to witness to God’s loving nature through ministry and 2) to be launched to witness to God’s salvific work through evangelism. [2]

VAN ENGEN: GOD’S MISSIONARY PEOPLE

Stetzer believes that many credit Van Engen as the first user of the term “missional” in the way we use it today. Though Dubose was first, less people would have heard of Dubose because his work was not as extensively disseminated as Van Engen’s opus. [3]

Following the famed missiologist, Lesslie Newbigin, Van Engen believed that a church that is “missional” realizes that God’s mission “calls and sends the church of Jesus Christ, locally and globally, to be a missionary church in its own society, in the cultures in which it finds itself, and globally among all peoples who do not yet confess Jesus as Lord.” [4] Mission is the result of God’s initiative, ingrained in God’s purpose to reinstate and heal creation and call people into a reconciled covenantal relationship with God. [5]

GUDER: MISSIONAL CHURCH

Of all the aforementioned authors, Darrell Guder, Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Missional and Ecumenical Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, is probably the most influential on the mode of the missional church. He edited and contributed to Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America, a magnum opus written by a team of six noted missiologists.

The book delivered a firm challenge for the church to recapture its missional call in North America by offering a biblically based theology that takes sincerely the church’s missional vocation. Missional Church drew out the consequences of this theology for the formation of the church by attempting to redefine and discern the nature of an authentic, missional church within postmodernity. [6]
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1) Ed Stetzer, “Thursday is for Theology of Missional – Meanings of Missional, Part 3,” EdStetzer.com – A Lifeway Research Blog, 31 August 2007, available from http://blogs.lifeway.com/blog/edstetzer/2007/08/thursday_is_for_theology_of_mi.html
#comment-1435; Internet: accessed 11 May 2008.

2) Francis DuBose, God Who Sends: A Fresh Quest For Biblical Mission (Nashville, TN: Baptist Sunday School Board, 1983), 159-160.

3) Ed Stetzer, “Meanings of Missional, Part 4: The Mission of Missional,” EdStetzer.com – A Lifeway Research Blog; Internet; accessed 11 May 2008.

4) Charles Van Engen, “Meanings of Missional Part 5,” interview by Ed Stetzer, EdStetzer.com – A Lifeway Research Blog, 2 October 2007, available from http://blogs.lifeway.com/blog/edstetzer/2007/10/meanings_of_missional_part_5_1.html; Internet: accessed 10 May 2008.

5) Ibid.

6) Darrell Guder, ed., Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998), 1-12.

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