When Ed Stetzer and I were writing the second edition of Planting Missional Churches, we wrestled with whether or not to change the title. Since the word missional has been around for a while, we were questioning whether it was still relevant to ministry today. While no one quite knows who coined the term or when it happened, we see that Francis Dubose, in his 1983 book God Who Sends, used the word in the sense that we use it today.1
In 1998, after a three-year research project to recover the church’s missional call in North America, Darrell Guder and his team published the landmark book Missional Church. Since then, some have used the word missional to refer to a specific style of ministry, in contrast to attractional models or other pet-peeve models of ministry.
For Ed and me, we decided to keep missional in the title of our book to reclaim its original meaning as ministry centered on God’s mission, focused on the kingdom, and part of the culture that we’re seeking to reach, rather than a pet-peeve style of ministry. Thus, being missional is really more of a posture than a style of ministry. Read More
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