Kathy Escobar makes sense here...

NOTE: this is part of the missional synchroblog organized by rick meigs at blind beggar, over 50 bloggers participating, reclaiming the now fairly over-used and ever-popular word “missional.” although i don’t talk about it much, i consider myself a friend of missional and highly respect their work & heart to infect the kingdom with missional values. i encourage you to check out the other links (i listed them all below to make it easy) and hear what a diverse group of people across a wide strata of experiences, geography, and perspectives are sharing about living in the trenches as Christ-followers. the question was “what is missional, really?”

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i honestly do not use the word for one primary reason–the people i know who are really truly “missional” don’t talk about it too much & the people who are trying to catch the latest church-trend use it a lot. when we were planting the refuge a little over two years ago i had a few church leaders share with me how “they were becoming ‘missional’ and were we going to be, too?”, like it was the latest and greatest thing that no one had ever heard of before and surely we wanted to jump on the bandwagon. oh how that taps into all my church institution craziness! there i was, sitting across the table with leaders who had been in ministry, making decisions for churches for years and years i thought “you don’t even know, like really know, a poor person, do you? you have never ever been in close relationship with a single mom who just got beat up by her ex and is trying to raise her babies on $1,000 a month, have you? you have never held someone’s hand when they relapsed, have you? because if you had, you wouldn’t be asking me that question!” (sorry, but these are the things that get me a little amped up). Jesus was never about words without actions, hip & cool, or the latest trends. he was always about just doing it. he came for the sick, not the healthy, and he demonstrated what it meant to be in the deepest ugliest parts of people’s story and call out their dignity and value.

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