Ed Stetzer – “Toward a Missional Convention”

Not interested in joining a controversy. Not my role, not NAMB’s role. Yet compelled to speak.

Ecclesiology and Missiology will be the defining issues in the next years.

“Missional” being used across the SBC, but are we? What are the signs? How can we get there?

Origin of the term. Not new, not mine. 1907 Oxford English Dictionary. A sending God, sends His church. The normative expression of NT Christianity. It has become a buzz word and lost its context for many. We have always attempted to be Missional.

Seminaries, conventions, associations and pastors are calling for missional plan. There is a distinction between “mission minded” (in favor of others doing missions) and missional (us all as missionaries). The use outside evangelical circles lead some to believe it is a liberal paradigm, but it is being used widely within evangelicalism as well.

It is taking root across the SBC, but not everyone is happy about it – mostly because of some roots in ecumenicalism.

Missional is who the church was created to be and needs to be in current context.

Missional is not about terminology, but focus.

Conservatives often avoid anything that non-conservatives are doing. If they are doing it, we must avoid it. Still we cannot simply distance ourselves from such or we will be forced to abandon Scriptural terminology itself.

We have embraced it in International Missions, but we have failed to realize that we must implement the thoughts within local context.

11% of SBC churches are growing through healthy evangelism. We separate ourselves from the culture we are supposed to reach. The frontier Baptists that are often held upas our models were criticized, in their day, for being “too close to culture.”

Being mission minded is not Missional. We must adopt the same training and practice we expect of our international missionaries. We are missionaries in our culture. We are not doing it, and we are, therefore, failing to reach those in our surrounding communities.

We are trying to press the old models of reaching culture to work today. If we just work the paradigm, it will work. We just need to work it harder. The culture that those paradigms reached no longer exists.

Our current cultures are mission fields that are untapped. We are the missionaries and we must engage them. Our task is not to pine for the methods that once worked but to capture the motivation that spawned them. We must find the “best practice” that will make us effective in reaching the lost.

It is risky to be contextualized. There are many things that will pull our kids and parts of our body into things that are not healthy for them. Still, it must be done lest we never reach the lost next door.

Many do not accept what they do not understand or simply don’t like. Nevertheless, it is working. We can make Missional work.

3 things for success:

Contend for the faith. We must engage, work hard and get involved.

Contextualize. We have to plant indigenous like we do in International Missions. We used to plant colonial churches that sought to convert people to westernism as much as to Christ. Within our own culture, we must make our churches indigenous within a new culture in which we already live, rather than attempting to pull our culture back to where the church paradigms worked – the 50′s? We need to be Biblically faithful, culturally relevant and counter culturally significant. We must have inerrancy and sufficiency. We can’t hide in theology alone, though it is important. Still we must see if that theological introspection is working in winning the lost.

Cooperate. Are we going to tell an entire generation of younger leaders that they are not needed or wanted in the SBC? We have already done that with an entire generation of Purpose Driven leaders. How can we survive, if we do? The result of preaching against innovation at every denominational gathering is that the best and the brightest have left the SBC, or are leaving. They are NOT seeking appointments, etc. They are leaving and it may be our end. We must cooperate around our mission and our agreed upon theology. If we can’t cooperate, we must prepare for our demise. We must not force one another to be like us, no matter who we are.

The infighting and controversy will kill the SBC, but will also condemn millions of souls to hell. Let us get on mission together. Will you join me?

Q&A

Alan Cross: Went to Golden Gate, and back to AL. Ignored around the denominational gatherings and when they talk about missional, they don’t understand and the conversation focuses around their frustration. What do we do? ES: I’m sorry that we have failed you and that you have to go to other places to find out how to be Missional, and I understand – I love denominational gatherings because they make me feel young and thin, put that on your blog – but we need you. There are more Scriptural validations for you having a concubine than for us to form a denomination, put that on you blog, but we need you in this denomination, because we can do more together than we can apart.

Marty Duren: How do you respond to leadership who denigrate missional as “culture chasers” when it appears that they don’t understand what is going on? ES: Preaching against culture is like preaching against their house – it’s just where they live. I don’t think they are really as opposed to engaging culture as they sound.

How can we welcome in the missional pastors at the institutional level – they are providing separate gatherings rather than integrating them into the current platform and power structure? ES: You are right. We are hurting ourselves by separating. We can only get there if you stick around.

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