Rick Meigs at The Blind Beggar initiated a synchroblog on “What is Missional?” Busyness kept me from signing up, but I’ve enjoyed reading the answers others have posted. Though I’m not participating, I thought I’d offer the following quotation from Darrell L. Guder’s book, The Continuing Conversion of the Church regarding the good news of God’s mission in the world. Guder is something of a founding-father in contemporary missional discussions.

Through the particular encounter of God with Israel, the good news that God is loving and purposeful enters into human history and becomes knowable. Apart from such a particular history, Christianity has no universal message to proclaim. The Bible is not a collection of universal ideas cloaked in a particular culture. Universal ideas cannot be the good news that the concrete testimony of a particular people at a particular time can well be, if their witness is credible. Such universal ideas are merely the product of human imagination and creativity. Christian witness is not the interpretation of philosophy but the continuation of the event of God’s self-disclosure in human history. The historical experience of God is the surprising result of God’s initiation, God’s desire to speak and be heard. That surprise continues to define the concrete history of the world, and of the mission community within the world which is called to be the witness to God’s goodness, the “gospel of God.” God’s mission is good news because it is historical: it has been historical from the beginning and continues to be the history that defines our hope. We encounter God within that same history as God makes us part of salvation history for the sake of the world he loves. (29-30)