This week I suggested that a friend put the word missional on their resume. The response: what do you mean missional? Followed by: well, they (meaning the recipient of the resume) won’t have a clue either. This got me thinking, I have read a bit of missional stuff, lately, and most of it written by some really smart folks who sometimes seem to want to prove how smart they are. That means they didn’t put the cookies on the bottom shelf.

So I was thinking, Missional, what is it? It reminds me of the bit from the movie Airplane!, “This woman has to go to a hospital! A hospital, what is it? It’s a large building with lots of patients, but that’s not important now.”

We want our church to be missional. Missional, what is it? It’s an aspect of the character of God, but that’s not important now.

So in my search of this definition, I found the Missional Manifesto. I agree with most of what the framers of this document wrote, but IMHO, there are too darned many words on that web page. So let’s see if I can simplify it for myself.

Missional means that the church (all of us who profess faith in Christ), needs to get off their butts and start producing some fruit. Missional is like our dear old Clara Peller, in that Wendy’s commercial “Where’s the beef” –

except that she is asking of every believer – “Where’s the fruit”. Simply put, missional means we take the great commission as our mission – go therefore into all nations and make disciples. How – following the constraints of the great commandment – Love your neighbor as yourself. I may be a total simpleton, when it comes to theology. But that is as much as I need to define missional.

So how can we make our church, a missional church? Answer – our church cannot be missional, until we (the members) are missional. That’s it. Period. The missional church, is a church focused on making disciples.

Of course, we can all go and get totally twisted up in methods and programs and theology – but that’t not important now.