Breaking the Missional Code

Breaking the Missional Code

Summary

Dr. Ed Stetzer is one of the most important Christians in the country thinking through the issues that arise when the gospel and a culture intersect. There is a great buzz lately about being holistic missional Christians engaging culture but very little insight on what that means or how that is achieved. This book is a very important and timely contribution, particulary for those Christian leaders in the emerging church conversation. This book combines the best of biblical thinking and practical insight to help you interpret your culture so that Jesus can be most effectively introduced to people. Most importantly, Ed is not simply giving prescriptions for reaching a culture but rather principles for reaching any culture with the mind of a professor and the heart of a church planter.

This book is about how we do church. More specifically, it is about the need to reinvent or change the church in order to make it more attractive and welcoming to the culture where it is planted.

The book contains some very challenging and helpful information for church planters/pastors/leaders and local church mission teams. For example, the authors begin with a helpful picture of the U.S. changing "glocal" (global/local reality) culture and practical steps to identify the unreached/unchurched people in their community. I also appreciate the emphasis on discipleship and the acknowledgement and warning that we an actually attract a crowd without having a church.

Every church should continually examine human imposed traditions and customs, which can cause a church to stagnate and die. The church must be willing to grow, adapt and try new things to stay healthy and effective. However, the book puts too much emphasis on style, technique and marketing know-how. The authors point to the many "successes" of other churches as a defense of the importance of being missional.

Critique

In Breaking the Missional Code, Ed Stetzer and David Putman try to erase the apparent distinction the church tries to make between missions and evangelism. "Missionaries have known...that they must have a profound understanding of their host culture before planning a strategy to reach the unique people group that exists in that cultural context." We have a mindset that mission work is done with totally lost people overseas while evangelism is sharing coffee with our unsaved neighbor. The church's focus needs to be on the lost people in our own communities and the immediate condition of their souls (Stetzer, Putman, 2006).

Today's American culture is becoming less and less aware of the Christian message and foundation of our society. The authors note that people who are seeking answers to spiritual questions no longer look to the church; contrarily they look anywhere but the church. The majority of Americans (77%) have been to church and may call themselves Christians, but they have no idea what it means to be a disciple. The growing trend in this country is for people to refer to themselves as "spiritual, but not religious," giving them the warm feelings of "spirituality," without the ...