Almost Christian 6

Youth ministry focuses on the basics, and one of the basics of the entire Christian message and community is missional.

Are you seeing a missional imagination among the youth in your church? How so?

Kenda Dean’s new book, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church, examines that theme in chp 5, and her chp is as good a summary of the meaning of “missional” as you are likely to find.

By the way, for another set of posts on Dean’s book, check out the excellent and informed series by Tony Jones.

Her concern is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, and MTD is inherently individualistic, self-expressive, and selfish. The Story of God in the Bible is entirely other: it is a Story of other-orientation. God sent his Son to be with us and God calls his people to extend that sending-love and dwelling-with-love to others.

She calls parents, churches and youth groups to develop a missional imagination. She calls us to “waste” our life for others — she’s playing with the word “waste,” where she ties Mark 14:4 (the woman’s waste of ointment on Jesus) and Jesus’s use of the same word for his disciples to “lose” [waste] their life for him and the gospel (8:35). In this one finds the essence of a missional imagination.One of her points is that “mission is not a trip,” the well-known experiential dimension of mission groups. Mission is what the local church is and does.

She dwells on Andrew Wall’s famous indigenizing and pilgrim principles, and sees here a paradigm for missional theology in a youth group: indigenizing is the incarnational dimension of entering into the world of others, and the pilgrim principle is to join others in following Jesus wherever that might lead.

A missional imagination, and a missional life, are the opposite of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.