There’s no doubt that missional has gone mainstream.  Every church planter I work with wants to be missional in some way or utilizes missional language.  My small town church is even becoming missional by adopting a community service and generosity focus.  In general, I think this movement is great.  We’ve been far too self centered as a church in the West for quite some time.  But I wonder, on the whole is missional just a new attractional method?

A few years back when we started to adopt a more missional posture at Stadia, we had a couple of planters who attempted to start a church birthed out of serving the community.  The idea was to build a team to serve first, thus cementing a missional DNA and then to birth corporate worship services later.  Many believed that those who had not accepted Jesus yet would be more likely to join together with Christians to serve than they would for corporate worship.  The idea was to convert the behaviors and the beliefs would later follow.  From my days of planting in Charlotte I had a couple of good friends who have not accepted Christ yet.  I ran the idea by one of them.  They had always proved to be good sounding boards.  After all they were the “target.”  After explaining, my friend told me that it just sounded like another form of marketing to him, another way to get people to go to church.

A few months back in a missions team meeting at my church in Tuscola, IL, we discussed plans to organize a community service day.  One wise lady on the team asked, “Are we doing this for the right reasons?  If we are just doing this to get people to think better about us, then we shouldn’t do it.  If we are doing this because we love our community and want to share the good news of Jesus then we should do it.”  Good point.

Here’s the third story that makes me ask is missional the new attractional.  A few weeks back I was up in Chicago with my Uncle, who has been in marketing for 30+ years.  He began to tell me stories of how an oil change company was doing community service projects as a way to get people in the door.  What my Uncle explained was that the culture is in to social justice and serving the poor.  So who influenced who?  Are churches being missional out of a Great Commission missiology or is it just the culturally cool thing to do. In the 90s and 2000s,  we were concerned about the seeker sensitive movement being less contextualization of the gospel and more syncretism of the culture.  Will the great fear of the 2010s be the same of the missional movement?  Is this a movement coming out of the culture or out of the gospel or both?  Let me know what you think in the comments.