Reflection & Influence 

Christians love catch-phrases and keywords.  Making fun of or lamenting "Christianese" or the Christian subculture is a relatively easy and lazy thing to do.  The more fruitful approach - the one that would hopefully build up the church rather than armchair quarterback it - is to lovingly critique it.  

How we use language is something that really interests me.  It's something that's important to see and think about because, while I'm not a linguist, I can see that language carries with it two big factors.  First, language is a reflection of what we think, believe, and value.  Secondly, language influences what we think, believe, and value.

Blurred Definitions 

Which brings me to the word I want to bring up in this blog article: missional.  "Being missional" or "to be missional" has been a descriptive or imperative catch phrase for about the last five years, particularly among younger Emerging churches.  It's a word that I've always felt a little uncomfortable with because of it's ambiguity (but that's another article).

Many in the new seeker-sensitive experiment in “doing church” have seen only the surface habits of this postmodern world and have not really understood its Eros spirituality. Theirs is an experiment in tactics in which innumerable questions have been asked about the ways the Church can become successful in this culture and they are all prefaced by the word how. How do we get on the wavelength of Generation Xers? How do we do worship so that the transition from home to church, from mall to church, and from unbelief into a context of belief, is seamless and even unnoticed? How do we speak about Christian faith to those who only want techniques for survival in life? How can we be motivational for those who need a lift without burdening them? How can we say what we want to say in church when the audience will give us only a small slice of their attention, especially if we are not amusing? And what is emerging, as the evangelical Church continues to empty itself of theology, is that it now find that it is tapping, wittingly or not, into this broad cultural yearning for spirituality, and capitalizing on that disposition’s inclination not to be religious. Evangelical spirituality without theology, that even sometimes despises theology, parallels almost exactly the broader cultural spirituality that is without religion. Evangelical faith without theology, without the structure and discipline of truth, is not Agape faith but it is much close to Eros spirituality.

I was reading the interestingly-titled and well-written "Why Are There Never Enough Parking Spaces at the Prostate Clinic" by Carl Trueman at Reformation 21 and a sentence in his last paragraph had an important conviction/reminder for me as a Christian who somewhat of a cultural commentator.

Trueman says, "Alternatively, I could try to move out of my own little world, start thinking less in cultural and more in biblical terms.  I could become less obsessed with particularities and more concerned with universals.  I could engage less with the accidents of culture and more with the substance of nature." [emphasis mine]

That is something I wanted to bring up, especially among all of the cultural conversation on this site.  We can get so busy scanning our culture like iTunes' "cover view" feature or flippantly analyzing every cultural flash in the pan and completely miss the point as Christians.  As Christians our lives are lived in view of eternity, in view of the one and only God who creates and sustains and who has revealed Himself to us in the Bible and continues to do so every day.  These facts carry with it some fundamental truths that we, in all of our contextualizing bluster, can skim right over: God has a nature and we have a nature.  That is exactly where the greatest Christian missiologist/apologist/evangelist started his Gospel presentation in the last half of the first chapter of Romans.