Pastor. Consultant. Professor. Author. Church leadership developer. Reggie McNeal has served in many capacities, but his most basic desire is to understand the church’s mission in the world in which we find ourselves. In February 2007, Reggie was a plenary speaker at M7, the Mid-quadrennial Conference on Mission and Evangelism. Below is a reprint of an interview he gave just before M7 in which he describes what he means by missional and how this idea is changing churches across the country.

Many of the ideas expressed in this interview originate in Reggie’s book, The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church (Jossey-Bass, 2003). Recently, a video presentation based on the book was made available to church leaders in a ten-session four-DVD curriculum by Jossey-Bass. Reggie McNeal and his studio audience explore the six most important new realities that church leaders must face as they are to move beyond “churchianity” to a more authentic and missional Christian faith. The book may be ordered from Nazarene Publishing House. Visit their website at www.nph.com

Download Reggie McNeal’s M7 Conference address online at www.m7conference.org.

M7 Staff: Describe what you mean by missional church.

McNeal: While this may sound presumptuous, the rise of the missional church is the single biggest development in Christianity since the Reformation. The Reformation, among its many gifts, gave us the gift of denominations. The missional church is a much simpler taxonomy. It comes down to people who get it, and people who don’t. By this, I mean that the core issues are not around doctrine, or polity, or even ecclesiology, but around mission. So, mission is pushing this. Literally, the church is redefining itself as a missionary enterprise, but not one that sends people to other world areas, but does missions at home—that’s a huge difference.

M7 Staff: What is the focus of a missional church?

McNeal: At its root, the missional church is being powered by a kingdom focus rather than a church-centric approach to ministry. This is a huge tectonic shift of the landscape, and it’s changing everything. Literally, it is a reply or a reattachment to the movement of Christianity from its earliest days. I tell people all the time, “It’s A.D. 30 all over again,” which of course takes the church back to a time before its position in society was established and secure. When you are not part of the establishment, you develop a different theology, a different lens, a different worldview.

M7 Staff: So, being missional is about adopting a larger frame of reference than the church infrastructure.

REGGIE: That’s right. It’s a move beyond the church as club. It’s about a contribution in the larger world where God is at work. The scripture doesn’t say, “For God so loved the church,” but “For God so loved the world.” It is a recognition that God is at work redeeming the world, and the church is being invited to be a partner. The church is not the destination; the kingdom is the destination. We play a part in God’s agenda, but we are not the point of God’s agenda. That’s a huge distinction.

The church, for missional Christians, is a verb—a church at work, a church at school, a church at Starbucks. And, religious leaders who can’t begin to move to that larger rhythm and expand their bandwidth of knowing what to celebrate and look for are going to miss out.

In a kingdom worldview, we know that God is always at work beyond His people. He is already in the streets. He is already in the office, in the neighborhood, in the school, wooing people to Himself. And, so we begin to look for God, for glimpses of Him, and ways to join Him in this net drawing, in this lifting up. And our job is to lift Jesus up, and God does the rest of the heavy lifting. He is already at work drawing people to Him. We just need to learn to see it, and we need to learn how to dance with that.

The Quotable McNeal – His words from his writings and messages

• Taking the gospel to the streets means we need a church where people are already hanging out. We need a church in every mall, every Wal-Mart Supercenter, every Barnes and Noble.

• God is still inviting us to join him on a mission, but it is the invitation to be part of a movement, not a religious club.

• Church-based leaders think God is most at work in the church; apostolic leaders understand that God is most at work in the world.

• I doubt that God went to bed last night thinking about how many people you had in your church. Most likely he went to bed last night thinking about the two billion people that live on less than a dollar a day or the 30,000 people who died because they didn’t have clean water or about human trafficking or the genocide in Africa.

by M7 Staff