maybe i’m just talking ahead of the game. prophetic blog comments, maybe. haha (if apostle paul lived today, would romans have been written using wordpress or blogger?)

i think i’d like to go to freeway some sunday coming up. i’ve been there for gigs or coffee, but never for a service… sorry. gathering.

Now, not every “relevant” community understands fully what the deal is, i would argue. Some communities are started by folks who think all you need to do is put a new coat of paint on the thing and send it back out the door. This would be a lot of those trendy church plants that are seen as evangelism that will hook people into ‘real church’ once they grow up…

And some folks are re-imagining the gospel for their culture. A close-to-home example of the second type would be Freeway in Hamliton (http://www.frwy.ca)

Here is a quote describing the ethos of Freeway:
“The Freeway is a bit of a different story. According to Alan Roxburgh, ‘[The Freeway] is an understanding of place, belonging, identity and community most churches have lost. It’s not just the idea of opening a coffee house in one of the poorest urban areas of Canada, but how a group of disparate Christians moved into the neighbourhood - not so much to ‘plant a church’ – but to live among and become neighbours with others. This is an understanding of Christian witness and community that challenges assumptions about the Gospel. Here, you will find a group of Christians who, through trial and testing, are learning how to live out Luke 10 in their context.’ ”

Missional churches understand the gospel as being deeply contextual. It’s kind of frustrating that the “relevant” churches are popping up everywhere at the same time. It creates quite a bit of confusion.

Some news network in the states did a reporting piece on “emerging church” and they couldn’t have missed it more. They reported emerging churches as being young people with tattoos and rock music. I watched that and kicked the wall for an hour.

in my experience, i find these communities are churches with names like LiFT or XPRESSION or freedomize or whatever, that skew toward white people in their twenties and thirties. not even sayin’ i wouldn’t enjoy being a part of one of these types of communities, but they definitely do ooze a certain coolness factor and sport a lot of techy, indie or avant or artsy innovations, ideas and image (brand, even, if you will), as i’ve seen it. calling something hip though, i realize, is always a bad move. virtually no one is comfortable with saying they’re hip. hipsters would die before admitting they’re hip. but non-hip people usually don’t say they’re hip either. it’s kinda like calling someone fascist. no one’s going to fess up, whether they are or aren’t.

but regardless, that’s been my experience thus far, and i’m not going to pretend i haven’t observed it just so my comments are PC and inoffensive. i guess that’s a fault of mine to speak too forthrightly sometimes (although thanks for spinning that when you endorsed me for city council, dave )

what exactly you’re saying its a ‘cop out’ from, i’m not sure… a cop out from getting involved maybe? it’s possible that i’m using it as a defense mechanism, i’ll admit. i’m not sure that it is, but i’ve been alienated from churches before, it’s true, and have grown wary of glitz and glam and seeker-sensitive and powerpoint and housegroups and whatever else. just seems like the church pops from one contrived piece of distraction to the next, inventing little devices to make ourselves relevant rather than simply immersing into relationships, forgetting labels and judgements and divisions and this and that and the other thing. it’s like we try to add layers in order to shed layers.

i guess that’s why i’m trying to reduce my christian faith to its simplest, most reduced and distilled truths and practices and terms so that i don’t need to ‘niche’ to find meaningful relationship and community. and maybe my critical attitude and wariness is hampering that. that’s something i should contemplate more, i think.

at any rate, thank you for challenging me on my attitudes and the perceptions i might have been causing for myself. it is always nice to have someone rise to the occassion and call me on things the way they see them. i appreciate it.

I understand your feelings I just think it’s a silly point to stick to - the fact is, there is the label and it is useful, no one is saying you have to use it and I couldn’t care less if you think you’re missional or not or if you want to connect with me because I am.

i will say that with this particular label, missional, it seems very counterintuitive to me. gets me confused. i a little less so now, but that’s cause i was thinking of it as a refined belief system, rather than, as you say, the name for a christian ’social grouping’. that makes more sense to me, even if the word’s full meaning is still hazy. as for my calling it a buzzword, that’s how i usually see it presented, and i’m reacting to that. it’s always these hip, avant-garde 20-something-focussed ‘communities’ posting that they’re ‘missional’ on their website, usually with no context as to what the heck they mean by that (and maybe they’ll even get it flash-animated). as if its a codeword that you have to ‘get’ before you can join. haha. please keep in mind i say a lot of things with my tongue half in my cheek. i’m not at all trying to belittle the ‘missional’ way of living christianity—just playing with words, their perceptions and meanings. it’s true, we all need labels, and i guess this ‘authentic, progressive christianity’ ‘emergent’ ‘ordinary radicals’ etc. modern movement of back-to-the-social-roots-of-jesus’-teachings is in need of a uniting moniker, if this ‘missional’ bit is it. i suppose its as good a label as any.

“missional” is Gospel IMO but most of evangelicalism has really gotten off track in this area so I think the best thing I can say is that missional people are learning to live the Gospel in our current context. We are learning to join the missio Dei - the God of mission, where He can be found. Of course this isn’t new, but our human understanding of it I think is - - now, maybe not for you, maybe not even for me but I’m finding solace and encouragement and camaraderie in a group of people who are together bucking the trends of modern evangelicalism and emerging into something bigger and better than the ways we’ve done christiantity before

I get prickly about criticisms sometimes and I shouldn’t.

however, it does seem like from the explanations so far that ‘missional’ is a new label for an old concept. that concept being to live devoted to acting on the gospel of god’s profound love for people and his commission to us as his followers. and in that case i hope more and more christians become ‘missional’, but i don’t understand the need for a new buzzword to describe what’s always been at the heart of christianity, whether you’re anglican or catholic or anabaptist, etc.

but maybe missional is more of a cultural (or subcultural) label than a belief-driven or theological term and that’s why i’m having problems separating it out from other concepts. actually, now that this is occured to me, i’m thinking it probably is the case, seeing as you’ve commented that i’ve “clearly never… experienced” missional living. (i’m reasoning this because one may only think and talk theology or belief systems, whereas one can experience culture.) food for thought. i’ll try to read some of those resources dave posted before engaging in this discussion again though.

i should shut up until i listen to this frost fellow talk about it and look at those links you posted tonight, dave, but i thought i’d give my initial reaction anyway.

It’s more than just a different name for evangelism and it’s more than just changing the outer garments of evangelicalism. Many people have co-opted this term inappropriately (the problem with labels).

that article frames it as what i understand to be a less harsh word for ‘evangelical’; more palatable to the postmodern or ‘emergent’ christian since it doesn’t infer the less ‘relevant’ practices and belt-notch attitude evangelicals sometimes have espoused. is that fair?

-Alan