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What is Missional Preaching?
First of all, let us ask . . . What does missional mean?
Good question. A cursory glance at uses of the term “missional” indicates that missional is a rather fluid term that has become a buzzword of various meanings. Missional doesn’t just mean doing mission work, though that is certainly a part of what it means to be a missional church. Rather, missional is a broader word used to describe a certain way of being church.
The term missional describes one of the primary reasons the church exists — namely, to be about God’s mission of redeeming and sanctifying the world through Christ in Holy Spirit. Mission is not something we do. Growing out of the worship of the Sovereign Lord, missional is something we are.
As an apostolic commission of Christ the church is sent out to proclaim, embody and extend the gospel that God is at work to redeem and repair the brokenness of life.
Missional doesn’t mean that the church exists only for mission. This is too narrow an understanding of what it means to be missional. The missional church is one that is on the move, along the Way, called to both come and go. It is not a club, but a movement — God’s movement — a movement of grace we are invited o participate in.
A missional church is first of all called to come and worship and then go and tell others to come and see for themselves the divine glory that we have glimpsed.
Be aware
If our understandings of what the missional church is do not begin in the worship of the triune God, then we need to be leery. In a desire to be missional, we may find ourselves deceived by too easily equating our human aims with God’s. It is by God’s grace that our actions become part of God’s redemptive activity. So we need to beware of those who presume to know the mind of God. Our thoughts and ways are not God’s, which are always higher than we can imagine, as Isaiah 55:8-9 tells us. Grounding the missional church in worship that begins with the acknowledgement of sin is thus essential.
Without this awareness of the gap between our desires and God’s, we fall prey to a smug triumphalism that usurps God’s place. Such a missional understanding of church is in danger of being a human movement that uses God language to support its own aims, which usually results in the worship of ourselves, or certain people in power, or even a certain way of doing church. No one this side of Glory knows the truth of God; we only experience God’s Truth, the living Lord Jesus Christ, from our own particular perspective. Christ comes to each of us, in our uniqueness, according to our need. This is part of the good news of God-with-us.
The shape of God’s way
If the church exists to bear witness to the mission of God, this begs the question as to what God’s mission is.
Although it is true that we do not know the mind of God, we do know the basic shape of God’s Way in the world. We see it in Christ. And what did Jesus do? Jesus came preaching the Kingdom (basileia) of God as the central theme of all he did in ministry.
The Greek word for Kingdom, basileia, actually denotes not a place (as the word kingdom implies), but the sovereign activity of God in the world. God’s dominion (basileia) is one of the central themes of the entire Bible, placing Jesus’ work in continuity with what God has been doing since the beginning of time. As we see through the grand testimony of the Bible’s story of God-with-us, God’s sovereign activity centers around setting humanity in right relationship with the Creator and other creatures, which involves redeeming creation from its bondage to sin. The good news that Jesus preached is that God our Creator does not leave us alone, but, as Lord, actively works for our redemption so that we might have the abundant life our Sovereign desires for us. This is true on both a personal and corporate level. As Sovereign Lord of all, God desires the harmony of justice and right relationships that honor all people regardless of their status in society, and it is God who works all things together for the good of all even in the midst of life’s tragedy and evil.
Jesus not only preached God’s sovereignty, however; he also embodied its ethic as depicted by the prophets. Jesus’ healing, feeding and exorcising were enacted signs of what he preached — God’s dominion over the forces that enslave human life. His resurrection was vindication of his way of life as the new Moses who gives a new Torah and makes a new covenant with humanity. As his disciples, the church is called to follow Christ, the Way, continuing his earthly ministry on his behalf. The Christian way of life, which involves walking in the Way/Torah of God1 through Christ, is following in the sovereign way of God in the world. Thus, we proclaim the good news of Emmanuel, asking Christ to exorcise forces that get in the way of God and calling for people to turn to God’s Way, even as we embody signs of the divine presence among us in ministries of love and shalom.
To be a missional church, then, is, by the grace of Christ’s Spirit and with humble thanksgiving, to be a part of God’s resurrection mission of reclaiming the world from its captivity to sin and death.
So we obey our commission to go and tell and live as good news people. We invite others to join us along the Spirit Way of Christ as we journey toward God’s New Day/Kingdom (basileia). As we fulfill our apostolic commission in this way of being church, we find ourselves overshadowed by and caught up in God’s sovereign-way-of-being-in-the-world. By the grace of God through the Spirit of Jesus Christ, as we live in this gospel Way, we (yes, even we!) participate in God’s mission of redeeming the world.
The preaching of a Missional Church
If we are a missional church, sent to proclaim and live in accordance with God’s Way of Christ, then preaching becomes about discerning God’s basileia work of redeeming the world through the Spirit of Christ so that we can proclaim the good news that God is at work for good in the world here and now. This means that our sermons are about more than just preaching a biblical text, though we certainly prize scripture! Missional preaching is not about telling people about the Bible as much as it is about proclaiming what the Bible itself proclaims — the good news of God.
Of course, we can only discern what is of God in the ambiguous admixture of our human reality by being assiduous students of scripture. Therefore, we preach the good news by looking through scripture, using it like a magnifying glass as we inspect our world in order to detect God’s redemptive activity. A missional preacher will preach through scripture in order to amplify its good news that God wants us to live a redeemed life of shalom — full of peace, justice, harmony and well-being. As Paul Galbreath observes, “the preacher cannot lose sight of the fact that the primary purpose of preaching on [Biblical] texts is to open up and present options about how to live and function in the worlds before us and around us”2 as faithful followers of the Way. Discerning God’s way of being/working in the world, then, we preach through scripture to proclaim where the Lord is among us here and now so that we can tell people how to get in on the goodness God wants for us.
We preach the gospel that in Christ, God offers us the Way of shalom that we can live, in part, here and now until such day when the kingdom of this world becomes the kingdom of our Lord. Casting forth the vision of God’s desire for us, preaching thus creates a space in time in which one might encounter the living Lord whose presence in this world changes everything: instead of living for ourselves in despair unto death, we now live toward eternal life for all in worship and praise.
Because God’s way in the world is inherently incarnation, missional preaching pays careful attention to the context in which it speaks so that, like Christ, it can meet people where they are. Missional preaching proclaims the good news of a living God working for our good here and now. At the same time, it invites people to come and see for themselves the living Lord Jesus Christ as they join us along the gospel Way, caught up in the wonder and praise of God’s redeeming of a broken world.
For more on Missional Preaching:
- “Way of life” is also a possible translation of Torah.
- Paul Galbreath, “The Hermeneutics of Preaching: Cultivating Word Consciousness,” The Register of the Company of Pastors, 9:2 (Fall 2008), 11-21; 13.
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