Posted by Anthony Adams

The first in a series of questions about world mission, posed to me by Stephen Murray, church planter in South Africa.

1. How would you define mission/missions/missional? Do you see distinction between these terms or are they one and they same thing?

The trouble is, these are not biblical words, so I don’t believe it is worth getting too hung about them. ‘Missions’ seems to be an American way of saying the same thing as ‘mission’. People don’t tend to talk about ‘missions’ in the UK. I know some missiologists like Bosch define them differently, but I tend to use tem interchangeably and don’t see a problem with that. On the other hand ‘missional’ is a word that is sometimes controversial. It often seems be used in contrast to ‘attractional’ or ‘evangelistic’, where such approaches are described as those where people are called into events/meetings etc, whereas a ‘missional’ approach involves going out and living among people in a more low-key way. I think the divisions between the words are arbitrary in some ways, since truly evangelistic work – any work centered on the evangel – will surely involve going out and living among people where they are as a key element, and such activity should also be ‘attractive’. The concepts behind these words may be important, but the words themselves are frequently arbitrarily defined; it starts to slide into semantics. If you want to know more about what I think about the concepts, come back at me. And for what its worth, I do believe in what is generally meant by ‘missional’ – an emphasis on a church going out into its community, rather than expecting people to come in.