Missional

Definition

Missional is a term, coined in the late twentieth century, for the conviction that mission belongs to the church’s own identity and calling rather than being one program among its activities. The term is also applied, more broadly and more contentiously, to God himself: some missiologists describe God as “missional” to make mission an attribute of his own being, a usage that has become common since the 1990s.¹

Confessional Witness

Neither the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession nor the Westminster Confession uses the term “missional,” which is a twentieth-century coinage.²

Historical Development

The underlying idea, that God himself is the primary agent of mission and the church’s task is to participate in a work already his, is old: Augustine wrote of the Father’s sending of the Son and the Spirit into the world in The Trinity, and the seventeenth-century Dutch Reformed theologian Gisbertus Voetius used this to distinguish God’s own activity in mission from the church’s subordinate role in it.² The Latin phrase missio Dei (“the sending of God”) for this idea is much more recent: German missiologist Karl Hartenstein coined it in 1934 to make the same distinction, the term was popularized at the International Missionary Council at Willingen in 1952, and it was further developed by the Lutheran theologian Georg Vicedom in 1958.³

The adjective “missional” followed missio Dei by several decades and shifted its meaning further. South African missiologist David Bosch wrote in 1991 that “mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God. God is a missionary God.”¹ Darrell Guder’s edited volume Missional Church (1998) then popularized “missional” as a description of the church’s own identity and practice.⁴

Objections and Responses

Some missiologists describe God as “missional,” making mission an attribute of his own eternal being rather than something he does in time. Reformed theologian Brian DeVries traces this usage to David Bosch’s 1991 claim that “God is a missionary God” and argues it conflates two different theological categories.¹ Classic Trinitarian theology distinguishes God’s eternal, immutable attributes from his temporal activity in the world: “the divine sendings, unlike the eternal processions, are activities of the economic Trinity that are enacted in time and space. Mission is a temporal work of God; it is not an eternal divine attribute. Using the term missional to describe God’s eternal being muddles our understanding of missio Dei.”⁵ DeVries proposes missio Trinitatis as a more precise substitute for missio Dei, naming the Father’s two distinct sendings, of the Son and of the Spirit, rather than one undifferentiated divine “mission.”⁶

If the term invites this confusion, should it simply be abandoned? DeVries does not call for discarding “missional” altogether. He credits Christopher Wright’s use of the term for a “missional hermeneutic,” an interpretive lens for reading the whole of Scripture alongside a Christological or covenantal lens, as a legitimate and more limited use, distinct from the claim that God’s own being is “missional.”⁷

Related Doctrines

• Covenant of Redemption
• Great Commission
• Missions
• Trinity
• Church

References

1. David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 390, quoted in Brian A. DeVries, “Missio Trinitatis: Theological Reflections on the Origin, Plan, and Purpose of God’s Mission,” Themelios 50, no. 3 (2025): 567. ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. DeVries, “Missio Trinitatis,” 564. ↩ ↩²

3. DeVries, “Missio Trinitatis,” 564-65. ↩

4. Darrell L. Guder, ed., Missional Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), cited in DeVries, “Missio Trinitatis,” 564n5. ↩

5. DeVries, “Missio Trinitatis,” 567-68. ↩

6. DeVries, “Missio Trinitatis,” 568. ↩

7. DeVries, “Missio Trinitatis,” 572. ↩