In the past twenty years a new movement has emerged in evangelical Christianity that has reshaped the conversation in subtle yet profound ways by suggesting that these two priorities of a church are not separate but in fact essentially connected, subsumed under the umbrella of the mission of God. This missional church movement has significantly altered discourse about evangelism and worship, influencing the evangelical church with both a new posture toward culture in general and a new vocabulary regarding every aspect of its existence. Instead of wrestling with how different aspects of a church’s ministry relate to one another, missional church advocates explore how each ministry relates to the overarching idea of “mission.”

The following is the paper I presented in November 2013 at the national meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society:

Most church leaders readily recognize that God has tasked churches with several different purposes, yet how those purposes work together has equally mystified them. One of the most potentially difficult ministry relationships to reconcile has been that between worship and evangelism. The church growth movement addressed the issue by insisting that a church’s primary service should be an evangelistic meeting designed to attract and meet the needs of “seekers.” This perspective drew fire from some who argued that this ignores worship altogether, others who complained that believers were not discipled, and still others who claimed that this “attractional” model of evangelism just did not work.1
In the past twenty years a new movement has emerged in evangelical Christianity that has reshaped the conversation in subtle yet profound ways by suggesting that these two priorities of a church are not separate but in fact essentially connected, subsumed under the umbrella of the mission of God. This missional church movement has significantly altered discourse about evangelism and worship, influencing the evangelical church with both a new posture toward culture in general and a new vocabulary regarding every aspect of its existence. Instead of wrestling with how different aspects of a church’s ministry relate to one another, missional church advocates explore how each ministry relates to the overarching idea of “mission.”

The purpose of this paper is to survey the history, literature, and theology of the missional church movement in order to evaluate its impact upon evangelical worship theology and practice in North America. After ascertaining common principles guiding missional worship today, the paper will assess the strengths of this worship development and reveal weaknesses in three primary areas: its view of the nature of culture, the posture of contextualization, and the relationship between worship and evangelism.

A Brief History of the Missional Church Movement

In order to understand the driving impulses behind the North American evangelical missional church movement, this paper begins with a brief survey of the history of ideas embedded in missional. The most thorough analysis of the history of this movement is David Bosch’s Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission,2 from which this section heavily draws.

Contemporary missional thinking began within the larger ecumenical missions debates in the early twentieth century, particularly the 1952 Willingen meeting. Critics of standard missionary methods argued that current foreign missions models were too tied to Western cultural superiority and undermined indigenous cultural forms.3 Instead of missions being seen as an activity of the church, the meeting concluded that the church should be considered a part of the missio Dei—God’s mission on earth.4 These missiologists defined missio Dei as something larger than just the church, thus redefining the concept of mission.5 They extended missions beyond merely evangelism into broader works, especially social justice.

One of the early influential leaders of this movement was Lesslie Newbigin (1909–1998), an Anglican missionary to India. Newbigin was instrumental in formulating the position documents that resulted from the Willingen meeting, but his greatest impact upon the later missional church movement, especially in North America, came after he retired from missionary work and returned to Great Britain in 1974. Newbigin noticed upon his return that Western civilization now required the same kind of cross-cultural ministry that he advocated at Willingen and that he attempted while a missionary abroad. Newbigin recognized that the West had become “post-Christian” and pluralistic, now legitimately earning it the moniker of “pagan,” and he urged the church in the West to endeavor for a “genuine missionary encounter” with its culture.6 He began asking the penetrating question, “What would be involved in a missionary encounter between the gospel and this whole way of perceiving, thinking, and living that we call ‘modern Western Culture’?”7 Newbigin’s influence spread to North America in the 1980s, leading to the formation of the Gospel and our Culture Network (GOCN) under the leadership of George Hunsberger.8 The most notable missional writer from the GOCN was Darrell Guder, whose influential Missional Church provided the material for an explosion of other thinking and writing on the subject. Hunsberger contributed to this work, and other contributing authors such as Alan J. Roxburgh and Craig Van Gelder have proven to be influential missional leaders in their own right.

Perhaps the most relevant group to trace for this paper because of its direct impact upon the life of evangelical churches is evangelical pastors, church planters, and seminary professors who have been influenced to some degree by the missional theologians of the past and who seek to apply at least the core ideas propagated by these theologians to practical church context. Among these writers/theologians, Ed Stetzer and Alan Hirsch have probably done more to spread missional ideas to the average local church planter and pastor than anyone else. Tim Keller and Mark Driscoll stand out as notable pastors who actively articulate missional thinking.

A Theological Survey of the Missional Church Movement

Understanding the impact of the missional church movement upon evangelical worship first requires a grasp of the fundamental principles that characterize the movement. Each of these ideas applies directly to worship philosophy.

Missionary Imperative

The first principle that drives the missional church is what it considers the biblically mandated missionary imperative. While evangelical churches have traditionally considered evangelism and missions a critical reason for their existence, the missional church understands such an emphasis as not just one ministry among many but as the overarching idea of what it means to be a church.

Missio Dei. Missional authors are critical of what they call an “ecclesiocentric understanding of mission” that has so characterized the church in the West since the birth of Christendom.9 Rather, they have sought to reclaim a theocentric vision for mission by defining mission, not as part of the church’s work, but as the missio Dei—the very purpose of God himself throughout history and into which the church’s work fits.10 Guder and others in the GOCN cultivated this theme, re-centering mission in its God-centered purpose.11 This refocus is important for missional thinking because it is inherently God-centered rather than church-centered or individual-centered. Missional advocates argue that God has been at work accomplishing his mission for mankind since the beginning of human history, and the purposes of his people fit within that mission.

Missional proponents will suggest that this conception is a subtle yet radical shift from the way missions has been viewed in the past. Previously, the church considered missions to be one of its several ministries; now, missions is not a component of the church, the church is part of the mission of God. As Hirsch succinctly states, “The church must follow mission.”12 The idea that the church is part of mission and not the other way around has important implications for how missional thinkers understand the role of the church in its cultural context. God has sent the church into the world, and yet, according to missional authors, the Western church has mostly expected the world to come to it. Proponents of missional theology are quite critical of what they call the “attractional” model of evangelism, where churches establish programs and design services to attract unbelievers so that they may encounter the gospel. Rather, the church must go out into the world.

The Incarnational Mode of Mission

If the “why” of mission is the fact that God sends the church, and if the “where” of mission is post-Christendom Western culture, then for missional advocates the “how” of mission is incarnation. By incarnation, missional writers mean that a truly missional church is one that is embedded in its target culture.13

Contextualization. For missional proponents, contextualization is at the heart of what it means for a church to be incarnational. In order for a church to reach its culture, the church must contextualize so that its message is intelligible to its audience. According to Newbigin, contextualization is “the placing of the gospel in the total context of a culture at a particular moment, a moment that is shaped by the past and looks to the future.”14 This is important, because as the culture moves further and further from its Christendom past, the gospel and Christendom methods will become more foreign.15 Thus since the West is now post-Christendom, churches in the West “should reflect the full social mix of the communities they serve, if they are truly contextual.”16

Missional Understanding of Culture. Inherent in this insistence upon incarnation and contextualization is the idea that culture is neutral and may be received with open arms. Some aspects of culture may be used sinfully or carry sinful associations, but even then they can be redeemed by Christians who take them and use them for good. Therefore, there is a two-fold relationship with culture that exists for a missional church: a missional church seeks to engage culture and influence it while at the same time allowing its message to be shaped by culture so that it will be intelligible to the culture.

Missional thinking has profoundly reshaped the debate about the relationship between various ministries of the church by subsuming them all under the missio Dei. Every one of the church’s various priorities must fit under the emphasis of “sentness” and thus must both engage and be shaped by the emerging culture of twenty-first-century North America. Nothing escapes this emphasis, not even—or perhaps especially—the church’s worship.

Synthesis of Missional Worship

Each of these theological emphases has affected worship philosophy in evangelicalism. This section will demonstrate the effect by synthesizing what missional authors have written about worship in particular.

The Missionary Imperative of Worship

First, for missional churches, worship serves mission. If the church is part of mission, not the other way around, then everything the church does, including worship, serves mission. Missional writers almost unanimously repudiate the seeker model, calling it “attractional” and citing it as the “Christendom” model of evangelism. They understand worship to be primarily about believers worshiping God, but they see this event as necessarily public and evangelistically potent, and therefore they are concerned that the worship service be accessible and intelligible to believers and unbelievers alike. For example, Guder specifically emphasizes the “public” nature of corporate worship17 and thus argues that “the language we use, the forms of communication we adopt, the music and symbolism, the liturgies—all of this can and must be translated for the sake of the witness we are to be and do.”18 Stetzer is even more adamant about this point when he insists that “the church and its worship are not intended solely for believers,”19 and thus “one of the most effective evangelistic methods a church can use is exposing the unchurched to the authentic worship of God.”20 Driscoll as well stresses the need to “make the church culturally accessible,”21 and Tim Keller insists that a church must “adapt its worship because of the presence of unbelievers.”22

The Incarnational Mode of Missional Worship

Christians simply worshiping their God alone is not sufficient to reach unbelievers, however. For the missional church, worship expressions must reflect the dominant cultural forms of the target group. Stetzer insists that “worship must take on the expression that reflects the culture of the worshiper if it is to be authentic and make an impact.”23 He sees this contextualization as a self-evident reality in which all churches take part when they use the common language of the people to whom they minister. Specifically addressing musical styles, Stetzer suggests that a church should seek to discover what styles are dominant in its target “focus group” and “adapt [its] own tunes and styles to the preferred styles of [its] focus group.”24 Contextualization in worship is a significant emphasis of Hirsch, who argues that “worship style, social dynamics, [and] liturgical expressions must result from the process of contextualizing the gospel in any given culture.”25 Driscoll based his entire church planting strategy on the principle of contextualization, arguing that churches must be willing to change regularly their worship forms “in an effort to effectively communicate the gospel to as many people as possible in the cultures around them.”26 Likewise, Stetzer and Towns advocate forms that are acceptable for worship that is “biblically faithful as well as culturally relevant.”27 Their primary thesis is that “God has no preference regarding style, but highly regards motives and outcomes,”28 and this would apply to music, preaching, service structure, and even the service elements themselves.

Missional authors believe that there are, therefore, virtually no cultural forms that are incapable of being adapted for Christian worship. This is no more evident than when missional writers discuss music in worship.  Guder insists that music must be “translated for the sake of the witness we are to be and do” and says nothing about the possibility that certain styles might be unusable.29 Stetzer specifically states that “there is no such thing as Christian music, only Christian lyrics”30 and that “God has no preference regarding style,”31 implying that cultural forms are neutral and only lyrics may be judged as moral or immoral. Driscoll implies the neutrality of culture by insisting that “it was God who created cultures,”32 thereby rendering various cultural forms intrinsically good. Therefore, contextualization becomes as simple as discovering the dominant cultural forms of a target group and reflecting them in worship.33
In missional thinking, two important reasons necessitate that worship must be contextualized. The first is that worship must be intelligible to unbelievers, which has already been discussed above. But the second reason worship must be contextualized is that even believers have been shaped by the dominant culture, and so for worship to be intelligible and even authentic for them, the forms used in worship should reflect the outside culture. Guder exemplifies this thinking when he argues, “Our changing cultural context also requires that we change our worship forms so that Christians shaped by late modernity can express their faith authentically and honestly.”34 Driscoll also implies this when he notes that “God promised that people from every race, culture, language, and nation will be present to worship him as their culture follows them into heaven,”35 demonstrating the same line of reasoning as Hirsch when he claims that “it is from within their own cultural expressions that the nations will worship.”36 Kimball likewise argues that “since worship is about our expressing love and adoration to God, and leaders teaching people about God, then of course the culture will shape our expressions of worship.”37

Preliminary Evaluation

There is little doubt that the missional church movement has been influential in evangelical churches and that it continues to grow. Having surveyed the history and theology of this important movement and specifically its impact upon the worship of evangelical churches, the question remains as to whether this influence has been beneficial. This concluding section offers some suggestions of positive contributions missional thinking has made to evangelical worship as well as a few areas that will require further critical evaluation.

Positive Contributions

The missional church movement has provided positive change in at least two important areas of thinking.

Emphasis on Intentional Evangelism. First, the missional church movement’s strong emphasis upon every Christian participating in fervent evangelism is quite welcome. Whether or not one agrees with the missio Deiemphasis of the missional church movement, its focus on evangelism that is profoundly God-centered and more than an invitation to come to a seeker service is a refreshing development in how evangelical churches understand missions.

Recovery of Believer’s Worship. This refocus on the proper place of evangelism has led to another beneficial contribution—the recovery of worship as primarily a believer’s service to God rather than a “seeker” event. Regardless of the various degrees of connection between worship and evangelism that missional writers advocate, each of them insists upon worship that consists primarily of believers directing their attention toward God in a meaningful way. This has led to several side benefits, such as a recovery of congregational singing with more substantive content rather than performance in worship to attract seekers. Additionally, the missional emphasis of true worship itself having evangelistic benefit seems to fit biblical teaching (e.g. 1 Cor 14:23–25) better than the seeker model.

Points for Evaluation

At least three key areas of thought in missional thinking, however, require critical evaluation. This section is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather an introductory analysis with the goal of stimulating further discussion and exploration.

Understanding of Culture. I have shown elsewhere38 that the current missional/evangelical definitions of culture39 essentially derive from anthropological discourse. This fact does not necessarily imply that it is an invalid or unbiblical idea since many biblical ideas take on contemporary articulations.The problem occurs when some unbiblical implications and applications that naturally flow from secular anthropology also find their way into the thinking and practice of missional evangelicals.

This is particularly true with the anthropological understanding of culture as neutral and the related issue of religious beliefs being but one component of the broader idea of culture. I have already illustrated above how missional authors, like anthropologists, consider culture itself as neutral. Most importantly, like cultural anthropologists, missional advocates understand religion as but one component of culture rather than the other way around. For example, the Hirsches list “religious views” as one element of culture40and Newbigin himself states unequivocally, “Religion—including the Christian religion—is thus part of culture.”41 This position is also clear in their discussion of the relationship between culture and evangelism. According to missional authors, the gospel must be “contextualized” in a given culture so that the recipients will accept the message and change their religion, but the culture itself must not change. John Stott insists that conversion will not mean a change of culture: “True, conversion involves repentance, and repentance is renunciation. Yet this does not require the convert to step right out of his former culture into a Christian sub-culture which is totally distinctive.”42 Additionally, Driscoll explains that the gospel “must be fitted to” culture.43 New believers are thus encouraged to worship using the cultural forms most natural to them.44 Religion changes while culture remains unchanged, signifying that religion is only one element within the larger idea of culture.

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Endnotes:

See David M. Doran, “Market-Driven Ministry: Blessing or Curse? Part One,”Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 1, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 54–84; David M. Doran, “Market-Driven Ministry: Blessing or Curse? Part Two,” Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 1, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 187–221; Os Guinness, Dining with the Devil: The Megachurch Movement Flirts with Modernity (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1993); John F. MacArthur, Ashamed of the Gospel: When the Church Becomes Like the World, 3rd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2010); Larry L. McSwain, “A Critical Appraisal of the Church Growth Movement, ”

“Review and Expositor 77, no. 4 (Fall 1980): 518–35; Douglas Webster, Selling Jesus: What’s Wrong with Marketing the Church (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992). [↩]

David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991). [↩]

Ibid., 4–6. [↩]

Craig Van Gelder, The Ministry of the Missional Church: A Community Led by the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007), 183 n. 9. [↩]

See Johannes Christiaan Hoekendijk, The Church Inside Out (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966). For a helpful analysis of Hoekendijk’s work, see Jan A. B. Jongeneel, ed., Philosophy, Science and Theology of Mission in the 19th and 20th Centuries: A Missionary Encyclopedia (New York: Peter Lang, 1997). [↩]

Lesslie Newbigin, The Other Side of 1984: Questions for the Churches (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1983), 31. [↩]

Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture(Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1986), 1. [↩]

Darrell Guder notes Newbigin’s influence on the formation of the GOCN: “Bishop Newbigin and others have helped us to see that God’s mission is calling and sending us, the church of Jesus Christ, to be a missionary church in our own societies, in the cultures in which we find ourselves. These cultures are no longer Christian” (Darrell Guder, Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America [Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998], 5). [↩]

The rise of so-called “Christendom” began with the Edict of Milan in 313 in which Roman Emperor Constantine I (272–337) declared religious toleration in the empire. The formerly persecuted Christian church now began to enjoy new-found freedom, reaching its climax in 380 when Emperor Theodosius I (347–395) made Christianity the Roman Empire’s official religion. In 392 he outlawed any form of pagan worship, and the church thus became the controlling influence in the entirety of the empire. [↩]

Newbigin was instrumental in this shift in thinking. Without using the termmissio Dei, he expressed its essence when he wrote, “The missionary movement of which we are part has its source in the triune God himself. Out of the depths of his love for us, the Father has sent forth his own beloved Son to reconcile all things to Himself, that we and all men might, through the Spirit, be made one in him with the Father in that perfect love which is the very nature of God” (Norman Goodall, ed., Missions Under the Cross: Addresses Delivered at the Enlarged Meeting of the Committee of the International Missionary Council at Willingen, in Germany, 1952; with Statements Issued by the Meeting [London: Edinburgh House Press, 1953], 189). [↩]

Guder, Missional Church, 4. Emphasis original. [↩]

Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2009), 143. [↩]

“Many churches have mission statements or talk about the importance of mission, but where truly missional churches differ is in their posture toward the world. A missional community sees the mission as both its originating impulse and its organizing principle. A missional community is patterned after what God has done in Jesus Christ. In the incarnation God sent his Son. Similarly, to be missional means to be sent into the world; we do not expect people to come to us. This posture differentiates a missional church from an attractional church” (Alan Hirsch, “Defining Missional,” Leadership Journal, Fall 2008, http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2008/fall/17.20.html; accessed November 26, 2012). [↩]

Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 2. [↩]

“It is important, then, for the church to study its context carefully and to understand it. The technical term for this continuing discipline is contextualization. Since everyone lives in culture, the church’s careful study of its context will help the church to translate the truth of the gospel as good news for the society to which it is sent” (Craig Van Gelder, “Missional Context: Understanding North American Culture,” in Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America, ed. Darrell Guder [Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998], 18). [↩]

Craig Van Gelder, “Missional Challenge: Understanding the Church in North America,” in Missional Church, 70. [↩]

Guder, Missional Church, 242. [↩]

Darrell Guder, The Continuing Conversion of the Church (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2000), 96. [↩]

Ed Stetzer, Planting Missional Churches (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2006), 260. [↩]

Ibid., 263. [↩]

Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears, Vintage Church: Timeless Truths and Timely Methods (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), 289. [↩]

Timothy J. Keller, “Evangelistic Worship,” June 2001, http://download.redeemer.com/pdf/learn/resources/Evangelistic_Worship-Keller.pdf. [↩]

Ed Stetzer and David Putman, Breaking the Missional Code: Your Church Can Become a Missionary in Your Community (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2006), 100. [↩]

Ibid., 64. [↩]

Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, 143. [↩]

Mark Driscoll, The Radical Reformission: Reaching Out Without Selling Out(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 80. [↩]

Elmer Towns and Edward Stetzer, Perimeters of Light: Biblical Boundaries for the Emerging Church (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2004), 13. [↩]

ibid., 43. [↩]

Guder, The Continuing Conversion of the Church, 96. [↩]

Stetzer, Planting Missional Churches, 267. [↩]

Towns and Stetzer, Perimeters of Light, 43. [↩]

Driscoll, Radical Reformission, 80. [↩]

Van Gelder seems to be the only significant missional author who recognizes that cultural forms themselves may actually express meaning and shape content. See Van Gelder, “Missional Context,” 30–31. [↩]

Guder, The Continuing Conversion of the Church, 157. [↩]

Driscoll, Radical Reformission, 100. [↩]

Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, 138. [↩]

Kimball, Emerging Worship, 2009 298. [↩]

Scott Aniol, “Toward a Biblical Understanding of Culture,” Artistic Theologian1 (2012): 41–45. [↩]

Likely the most influential missional definition of culture comes from Lesslie Newbigin, who defines it as “the sum total of ways of living built up by a human community and transmitted from one generation to another” (Newbigin, The Other Side of 1984, 5). Darrell Guder cites this definition early in Missional Church, (Guder, Missional Church, 9) thus revealing its impact upon later missional thinking in the Gospel and Our Culture Network and beyond. Other later definitions reflect similar thinking. For example, Alan and Debra Hirsch maintain, “Culture is a complex jungle of ideas, history, language, religious views, economic systems, political issues, and the like.” (Alan Hirsch and Debra Hirsch, Untamed: Reactivating a Missional Form of Discipleship[Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2010], 25). Kathy Black defines culture as “the sum attitudes, customs, and beliefs that distinguishes one group of people from another. Culture is transmitted through language, material objects, ritual, institutions, and art forms from one generation to the next” (Kathy Black,Culturally-Conscious Worship [St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2000], 8). [↩]

Hirsch and Hirsch, Untamed, 25. [↩]

Newbigin, The Other Side of 1984, 5. [↩]

John R. W. Stott, Christian Mission in the Modern World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1975), 181. [↩]

Driscoll, Radical Reformission, 20. [↩]

This was illustrated earlier. Examples include the following: “Our changing cultural context also requires that we change our worship forms so that Christians shaped by late modernity can express their faith authentically and honestly” (Guder, The Continuing Conversion of the Church, 157); “It is from within their own cultural expressions that the nations will worship” (Hirsch,The Forgotten Ways, 138); “Since worship is about our expressing love and adoration to God and leaders teaching people about God, then of course the culture will shape our expressions of worship” (Kimball, Emerging Worship, 298); “God promised that people from every race, culture, language, and nation will be present to worship him as their culture follows them into heaven” (Driscoll, Radical Reformission, 100). [↩]