Books: The Road to Missional

If you are a student of the church for any length of time, you quickly realize the church tends to see ministry happening in waves that it eagerly rides. To be sure, there is nothing wrong with surfing, but the flippancy with which the church seems to jump from one wave to the next is curious. We have seen church growth, seeker sensitive, purpose driven, simple church, organic, and missional. Often in our attempt to catch the wave of the Spirit, we grab a pinch of this and a dash of that. It’s common to hear of a church that is a seeker sensitive, purpose driven, missional community.

In The Road to Missional, international missiologist Michael Frost takes offense at this. He argues that the ubiquity of all things “missional” symbolizes that the church at large has failed to grasp what the word truly means. Instead of experiencing a paradigm shift, many have seen it as just another attempt to do church more effectively or worse yet, as an evangelistic buzzword. The way he describes it, “Most of us have had just enough exposure to being missional to become inoculated.” Read more