A Missional Life – Part 1

Missional Living

If we are ever going to live lives that embrace, redeem, and transform both people and cultures it is imperative we understand the importance of missional living. But what does this mean? What does it look like and how do we accomplish it?

In the simplest of definitions, to live a “missional” life is to live a life on mission. This is crucial to understand because it forces us to define the mission we are pursuing. Nearly everyone I know is on a mission: find a mate, make more money, retire early, have a family, be happy, find God, build a church… but to live a missional life is not as much about defining the mission as it is about transforming the way we pursue our mission. It is less about self-actualization and more about giving oneself to the glory of God and the good of others. However doing this well is difficult. It requires much of a person and more of a family. And so I’d like to begin to look at some characteristics and habits essential to living a missional life.

1) A Christ-Centered Life

To some this seems the obvious beginning of a missional lifestyle but my fear is far too many desire to embrace certain qualities they admire in a missional life, without understanding the essential nature of the foundation of Christ. As such, I find it important to begin our conversation here. Any effort to serve, to live a life of generosity and community, to engage people and culture, that is not deeply anchored in the person and work of Christ can do little more than set us adrift in a culture hostile to the very God we love.

At best, we will locate a few individuals eager to embrace us and our ideas, yet fail to point them to Christ. At worst, we will find our life destroyed by the culture we initially embraced with the best of intentions. How then do we safely enter a culture with the goals: embrace, redeem, transform?

We must begin with our identity, our purpose, our very existence firmly established in the work of Christ on the cross. We do this by believing the gospel and understanding that Christ embraced us for the purpose of redeeming and transforming us. We must place our hope not in our good deeds, our noble pursuits, or even our ability to engage culture, but in Christ – his death, burial and resurrection – by which we are both saved and being saved.

We must then realize that Christ did not come “to condemn the world, but to save the world” – a reality which frees us to do the same and allows us to engage people where and as they are. As we learn to operate out of a sense of His righteousness and not our own we are freed from the extremes of arrogance and separation or absolute acceptance both of which leave us powerless to engage the culture as Christ did.

To the extent we derive our lives and righteousness from Christ we find ourselves free to engage the world. We are free to ask what in this culture can I embrace? How can it be redeemed? How will this ultimately transform both individuals and the culture at large? Thus freeing us to live truly missional lives.