Missional and Mission Minded

Bob Roberts is a pastor in Fort Worth, TX. The first church planting seminar/conference I ever went to was at his church while I was in Seminary in the late 90's. This guy gets it! He wrote a post on his blog about how churches can do missions and still not be missional. He recounts a conversation some at his church had with someone. Check it out.

It is possible to be missions minded (support the CP, give to Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong, send people on mission trips, etc, etc) and not be missional. What is the difference in a missions minded church and a missional church? Being mission minded is an occasional event - we give money occasionally to missions and go on mission trips occasionally. A missional church IS a mission in their own community. It is where we exist to do missions in our own town. It is not an occasional event...it is not a "part" of what we do...it is not one of the many things we support: It is our reason for existence...the mission that definaes everything we do as a church.

Trevor said it best last week when he was here talking to us about missions in Mozy. He talked about doing missions by "proxy". He said that we do missions by proxy when we give money to missions but dont go on mission and when we dont see our lives as missional. Just because we have people in the church that go on missions and who give to missions does not mean that we are a missional church.

Being missional is all about being a disciple and making disciples.