Mission, Missions, Missionary, and Missional – the word that is becoming less helpful over time.

The reason “missional” is becoming less and less helpful is that many churches are adding “missional” to whatever they already doing. But, adding the label “missional” does not make a church missional.

The first and most important question is the question of identity – not “What are we to do?” but rather “Who are we?” For people of faith, identity is crucial to the missional vocation. Knowing who we are is the key to mission and the key to standing against the forces of the world that seek to lead us away from trust in the one true God. Without a clear sense of our missional identity, we become pushovers for attractive ideologies, fads, and trends with no real sense of purpose.

This is where missionSHIFT>> comes in. The idea is to “bring together missiologists, theologians, and practitioners” in order to move from “debate to action.”

To accomplish this goal, in “the months leading up to missionSHIFT [a conference to be held July 12-15 at Ridgecrest Conference Center], many of today’s leading missiologists, theologians, and practitioners will begin to draft a document entitled “The Missional Manifesto.”

This is will solidify missional in that the manifesto will be a statement that says, “This is what we mean when we say Missional.”