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In many cases, the phrase missional church simply puts new clothes on old trends, such as the seeker-sensitive church movement, the church-growth movement, and so on. Often, those critiqued by the authors of Missional Church are now themselves claiming to be missional.

For example, church-growth specialists have long wanted churches to create mission statements, so some church-growth consultants now claim it is missional to try to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of ministry. Yet the original meaning of missional church referred to God's mission in the world, not to management advice for accomplishing our own projects. Indeed, the mission of God doesn't fit the formulas of measurable results and effectual outcomes. It focuses instead on the church living into the coming reality of God's new creation.

For others, the missional impulse has been translated into a consumer-oriented mentality—again, an approach that the authors of Missional Church explicitly reject. Some pastors I know are being pressured with missional language to focus their preaching on felt needs. Thus, preaching on "How to Be a Better Spouse" or "How to Be Financially Successful" is considered missional, while preaching straight through a book of the Bible, a common Reformational practice, is seen as an old habit of Christendom. When our needs set the agenda, how can we learn to embody the gospel that is not just our story, but first and foremost God's? The seeker-sensitive mentality reflects a profoundly different ecclesiology from that of Missional Church, which claims that God's people need to rediscover the centrality of God's action in shaping our witness to the world.

Another use of the word missional makes it synonymous with the kingdom of God. This connection is not surprising, as Missional Church speaks about the mission of God as the kingdom of God—something larger than the church of which the church provides a foretaste. Yet this emphasis can become reductionistic.

For example, Brian McLaren, one of several Emergent church leaders who self-identify as missional, focuses so much on the kingdom "message of Jesus" in the synoptic Gospels that he sidelines other scriptural themes. Most significantly, he doesn't take into account that no one can see the kingdom apart from being "born of the Spirit" (), and that the church's identity is centered in the person and proclamation of Jesus Christ (; ). Hearing McLaren and others, the kingdom often sounds like nothing more than a set of ethical activities in which anyone—Christian, Muslim, or atheist—can participate. The centrality of Jesus Christ himself can be eclipsed by the ethical "message of Jesus." Whereas Missional Church sought to free Scripture from its cultural captivity, some kingdom theologies reduce the gospel to a fashionable cultural creed of ethics, inclusion, and social action.

Certain missional-church authors have also developed a dismissive view of church history. For example, Alan Hirsch claims that from A.D. 313 to 1996, the church was dominated by a sterile and unbiblical "Christendom mode." Not surprisingly, thinkers who take approaches like this see most of church history as bereft of valid, externally focused models. (Never mind the great monastic missionary movements of the Middle Ages, or the bold cross-cultural efforts by people like Matteo Ricci and Francis Xavier.)

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March 2008, Vol. 52, No. 3