I am in Minneapolis today. It is odd to be back in the town after being here a few weeks ago at Bethlehem Baptist Church, then watching the bridge collapse on national television, and now returning a few weeks later.

Yesterday, Earl Creps spent all day with the Evangelical Free Church national leadership in their first ever "missional summit." We are meeting at Grace Church, a huge church in Eden Praire, MN.

More tomorrow... I have to go back to the meeting room, which, oddly enough is the choir practice room that seats 300... so, hopefully I won't just be "preaching to the choir," but we will be "provoking one another on to love and good deeds" (Hebrews 10:24).

This morning, we unpacked ideas of God's mission, the sending nature of God, biblical fidelity, the sending of the church, and the Kingdom. It is exciting to me that a whole denomination would bring its national and regional leaders together to ask the hard questions about how to be intentionally missional in their approach. There are about 200 leaders here wrestling through what it means to be a missional movement.

Tomorrow, I willl post my next "Meanings of Missional" post.

In the meantime, let me direct you to a few articles or posts that I think provide helpful context for the missional conversation.

As always, uberblogger Brother Maynard is typing away with his most recent helpful post. This one deals with "Missional as the Defragmentation of Missions."

Alan Roxburgh, of Allelon, was one of the original authors of The Missional Church, the most influential book in the missional conversation. Alan weighs in on what our missional focus should be.

I use Roxburgh's Missional Leader when I teach on missional church. Its a good read.

Bob Roberts dropped by the blog and commented a bit here, but then wrote a much more lengthy post on his own blog about the relationship to the Kingdom of God to the missional church. This is a big part of the discussion to come, but less prominent in the early history that I have been laying out... so stay tuned.

Bob also added another post about "Missional and the Sunday event."