There is a lot of conversation that occurs, both on blogs and in the offline world, about being “missional.”
Not everyone agrees with everyone else about what being “missional” means. But, essentially, it usually means being more intentional about reaching out to the world around us.
Unfortunately, since “missional” and “missionary” both share all but three letters, it’s easy to confuse the two. Or at least it is for me.
“Missional” often seems to get confused with “being a missionary right here where you are.” It says “you don’t have to go to a different place” to “reach the unreached.”
Unfortunately we also often quickly slide into “let’s reach those surely-unsaved and therefore obviously unreached white college-educated English-speaking kids at Starbucks who don’t come to our church although we wish they did because then our church would be the cool place to be.”
So, if your heart is for missions to the unevangelized, let me suggest a differentiator: use the phrase “missionary” as sparingly as possible, and instead emphasize terms like “cross-cultural,” “language acquisition,” “poorest of the poor,” “absolute poverty,” “remote locations,” “persecuted,” “oppressed,” “hard to find,” “immigrant populations,” etc.
Think less about whether you are a missionary and more about who is being reached, and try to make sure who is being reached is an audience that absolutely no one else is reaching.
