Missional Action Plan

A quick search on Amazon.com will yield a myriad of book titles from the search that targets titles, subtitles, or themes that include the word “missional.” Just in the last two years there have been atleast ten books written, 1) Seven Levers : Missional Strategies for Conferences by Robert Schnase, 2) Sentness : Six Postures of Missional Christians by Kim Hammond, 3) Soul Whisperer : Why the Church Must Change the Way it Views Evangelism by Gary Comer, 4) Who is the Church? : an Ecclesiology for the Twenty-First Century by Cheryl Peterson, 5) Created and Led by the Spirit : Planting Missional Congregations edited by Mary Sue Dehmlow Dreier, 6) Reformed Means Missional : Following Jesus Into the World by Samuel Logan Jr., 7) Understanding Christian Mission : Participation in Suffering and Glory by Scott Sunquist, 8) A Missional Orthodoxy : Theology and Ministry inaA Post-Christian Context by Gary Tyra, 9) The Missional Quest : Becoming a Church of the Long Run by Lance Ford, 10) Recovering the Full Mission of God : a Biblical Perspective on Being, Doing, and Telling by Dean Flemming. There were an additional twelve books published in 2012.
The use of the term can cause confusion as to what it means and how it is applied to each church’s ministry. It can also be argued that some elasticity is required to know how it is applied in each churches context. That being said, there are four unifying threads: 1) God is a missionary God who sends the church into the world. 2) God's mission in the world is related to the reign (kingdom) of God. 3) The missional church is an incarnational (versus attractional) ministry sent to engage a postmodern, post-Christendom, globalized context. 4) The internal life of the missional church...

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