Emergent is a growing generative friendship among missional Christian leaders.
This is what emergentvillage.com has to say about the word "missional" in the above description:
First, it expresses our belief that God intends Christianity to be more than a system of belief or even a way of life. As we understand it, our beliefs are intended to foster a way of life that in turn sends us into the world to serve God and our neighbors, so that God’s will may be done on earth as it is in heaven, and so that God’s kingdom may come. This missional focus on God’s kingdom tells us that the church is never to be the withdrawn or isolated end user of the gospel; rather, we receive the gospel so that we may be equipped and sent into the world to love our neighbors and serve “the least of these.”
Second, the term missional implies a narrative way of looking at the Scriptures. In other words, for us, the Bible is not primarily the repository of abstractions or propositions which need to be extracted and systematized from its stories and poetry; rather, we see the Bible as the record of the story of God’s emerging mission in human history. This record conveys the trajectory of God’s work with which we seek to align and into which we seek to invest our lives.
Notice, first of all, that there is no mention of "mission" being all about what we have termed "evangelism." God loves people—mind, body, and spirit. We have to get past the false dualism that places all the emphasis on the soul. We are one being, which is described as having different parts. There may be some point at which our souls are separate from our bodies, but this is not the "natural" state, if you will. Doug Pagitt made an interesting statement at a seminar I attended this past Spring. He said that we struggle not because we have bad theology, but because we have a horrible anthropology. Hmmm...
Don't get me wrong. I believe that the key to real transformation is a radical change on the inside. However, I don't now that we understand how that all works. I don't know that we can create a strict chronology of the salvation process by taking passages like Romans 8:29-30 as if it's something akin to Piaget's theories of cognitive development. Some even question if salvation is truly an individualistic concept/process. But none of that means we shouldn't tell people about Jesus! We have no mission objective without him. We will not affect individuals, societies, or the world without him...well, at least not in a worthwhile way!
The mission, as the second paragraph described above, is set forth in this compendium of God stories we call the Bible. In those pages, we find narrative, poetry, wisdom literature, even law, that describe people on a mission. We find, in the pages of Scripture, an account of how God and humankind have attempted to work together. We hear about a relationship...one in which people have screwed up a lot and God has had to accomodate to us to the point at which he, himself, became human in order to "relate" to us. This is not a "Christianity for Dummies" book, despite the expectations of so many believers. There is no chapter on whether or not to legislate against gay marriage. There is no chapter on how to hold a church service in a highly technological society. And there is definitely no sinner's prayer, which is a great example of an abtraction. I don't think there is anything wrong with the notion of confessing-your-sin-and-trusting-in-Jesus-as-your-personal-Savior, but I question the wisdom in reducing the message of the gospel to such an extent that people think that's all there is to it. Our mission is so much bigger than handing out "Get Out of Hell Free" cards.
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