The Missional Church in Perspective, by Craig Van Gelder and Dwight J. Zscheile

The missional church discussion is alternately exhilarating and mystifying for pastors and church leaders. On the one hand, missional church literature addresses trenchant issues in ministry, offering a new vision that moves congregations beyond inward focus and toward participating in the triune God’s renewal of the whole creation. On the other hand, understandings of what constitutes the missional church vary widely. According to some, a missional church is one that has rediscovered the centrality of worship in word and sacrament; others contend that worship is simply a motivational session for individuals who are going out into the world, where they are more likely to encounter Jesus. The fact that a new book comes out every few months claiming to disclose the secret of being truly missional does not necessarily help.

In this context, a map of the conversation is a helpful step toward clarity. Craig Van Gelder and Dwight Zscheile, who teach congregational mission and leadership at Luther Seminary, provide a bird’s-eye view of the landscape, along with suggestions about where the missional church movement should go.

But this book is not merely a map. Throughout, the authors propose a course for moving the missional church discussion forward—a proposal that will be highly contentious in missiological and especially theological circles. The first volume in a new Baker Academic series, it explicitly draws on “continued developments in trinitarian studies” since the 1998 publication of Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America, edited by Darrell L. Guder—developments that “emphasize the social trinity in relation to the sending trinity,” but it scarcely engages the barrage of recent historical and theological works that call into question or provide alternatives to such a perspective.