A More Academic Definition

The missional imagination is an understanding that the Triune God has a mission (missio Dei) to restore and recreate all things according to God’s original and ongoing vision of peace and wholeness. The conversation in the West around missiology and ecclesiology has seen a dramatic shift in the past one hundred years. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were dominated by a Christendom model in which the church sent missionaries into the world to convert heathen nations to Christianity, thus colonizing the world into Western European culture and propagating oppression and marginalization of non-European people and cultures in the name of Jesus. A missional ecclesiology recognizes the Eurocentric and devastating effects the Christendom model of missions and ecclesiology has had on the world and strives to reimagine the nature of the church as missional at its core.

It recognizes the polycentric and pluriform nature of the Holy Spirit at work in the world.1 The church, within this perspective, is the congregation of those who are both gathered around the risen body of Jesus and sent into the world to find and proclaim the reign of God in and among all cultures as the church forms an interdependent relationship with all nations.2 This missional activity is not uni-directional, moving from one central place where God is located and correctly understood to another place where God is completely absent. Rather, it is a polycentric, pluriform, multi-directional movement of God at work in all cultures, in diverse ways, bringing all cultures into generative conversation, in order to bring about peace and unity through the particular incarnation of the risen Jesus of Nazareth and the various incarnations of the Spirit within diverse cultures.