Missional living is a Christian practice to adopt the thinking, behaviors, and practices of a missionary in everyday life, in order to engage others with the gospel message.
Background
Traditionally, Christians have seen mission as a either a special event (eg, a one-week series of meetings, or a conference) or as a full-time job for a few individuals (eg, sending a missionary to a foreign country for several years to convert new people to Christianity). Missional living is seen as a way of life for all Christians at all times.
The Missional Church Movement, a church renewal movement based on the necessity of missional living by Christians, gained popularity at the end of the twentieth century, mainly due to the publication of “Missional Church” by Darrell Guder in 1998, and advocates like Tim Keller Advocates contrast missional living in ordinary life with the idea of a select group of "professional" missionaries, emphasizing that all Christians should be involved in the Great Commission of Jesus Christ.
Terminology
The missional living concept is rooted in the Missio dei (Latin, "the sending of God").
In 1934, Karl Hartenstein, a German missiologist, coined the phrase in response to Karl Barth and his emphasis on actio Dei ("the action of God"), seeing God as the primary acting agent in the world and within the church.
During the International Missionary Council conferences of the 1950s and 1960s, Mission Theology began to take shape. It came to public attention in 1962, in Johannes Blauw’s book The Missionary Nature of the Church.
In 1983, Anglican Bishop, and missionary to India, Lesslie Newbigin published The Other Side of 1984, which looked at the close ties between Western Christianity and Western society and the loss of influence which the church had upon society around it. In 1989 he wrote that according to Jesus’s statements in the Gospel of John, every Christian has been sent by Jesus with the gospel into the community to live with those in the surrounding culture for the sake of the King and His kingdom: “The Church is sent into the world to continue that which he came to do, in the power of the same Spirit, reconciling people to God.” Jesus said, “As the Father has sent Me, I am sending you” (John 20:21). "No one can say: ‘Since I’m not called to be a missionary, I do not have to evangelize my friends and neighbors.’ There is no difference, in spiritual terms, between a missionary witnessing in his hometown and a missionary witnessing in Katmandu, Nepal. We are all called to go - even if it is only to the next room, or the next block.”"
Belief
Theory
Missional living is the embodiment of the mission of Jesus in the world by visibly living out the gospel.
There is no definitive definition of ‘Missional Living’ and many Christians interpret it in different ways. Guder notes that this happens when “we experience the transforming truth of Christ and bring it to everything we do.”. The Reformed Theological Seminary in the US sees it as “live as a saint, one of the Lord … to live as a sent one, to think as a sent one, to write as a sent one for the sake of God’s glory, the edification of God’s people the church, and the salvation of the lost, across the street and around the world.” The Missional Challenge workshop sees it as “embodying the mission and message of Jesus and seeking to be Jesus to everyone everywhere.”.
The Missional Challenge workshop also notes that for any Christian, Mission Living covers many areas of life including, to seize Christ’s mission as a personal goal, to commit to proclaim the gospel to a specific geographical area, to influence non-believers towards Christ and to motivate other Christians.
Distinctive Reasons for Missional Living
One author has written, "It is imperative that Christians be like Jesus, by living freely within the culture as missionaries who are as faithful to the Father and his gospel as Jesus was in his own time and place.". This embodiment of the gospel is often referred to as "contextualization" or "inculturation." "Both refer to more than a simple translation of the gospel into different languages and cultures in the way that one translates a history book or a science text. Rather, they point to the embodiment of the living Word in human culture and social settings in such a way that its divine nature and power are not lost. True contextualization is more than communication. It is God working in the hearts of people, making them new and forming them into a new community. It is his Word transforming their lives, their societies, their cultures."
These five biblical distinctives form the foundation of a missional perspective: