The nice folks at Allelon have asked for a post on the Alan Roxburgh/Ryan Bolger video over on their site. It’s part of their series asking the question, what is the missional church? The video is worth the time. I read some of Roxburgh’s work for classes while in seminary and I find him to be challenging and articulate. I took a class from Bolger, but I met him prior to going to seminary. Bolger tracks emerging churches and their developments. I think in the video, he gives a great and detailed thumbnail sketch (can you have a detailed thumbnail sketch?) of what the missional church is all about. Primarily, missional churches differ from attractional churches in that they go and dwell in the community rather than seek to only bring people to the community, the emphasis is not on the worship services, and there is a large critique of Christendom and Constantinianism.
Roxburgh also asks how the ideas of the missional church and the emerging church agree or differ. Bolger’s answer was that there is significant overlap and significant differences, especially in their starting places. The missional church movement seeks to transform existing congregations and denominations to move beyond the attractional system and Christendom mentality that assumes the Church still has a central seat in cultures. The missional church questions a lot of our assumptions about the kingdom of God and what it means to be a church, but it can exist well within the structures we inherited. The movement seeks to empower existing churches. Emerging churches on the other hand are characterized much more by church-planting. They start out in the broader communities, witnessing to the culture and their structures are usually rather different than what is found in most mainline or otherwise traditional church models. Many emerging churches actually focus more from missiology and look to missionaries as their examples, whereas missional churches do draw from some missiology, but there old-school ecclesiology remains very important.
Anyway, check out the video. It’s well-done and a good conversation between a couple great thinkers. Wess Daniels has a good synopsis and review of the video that you can find here.
