Missio Alliance Day 1

A good Day 1 of the first Missio Alliance meeting on "The Future of the Gospel."  I've been reflecting all day on what the cohesive principle is for this group of 700.  In some respects, it is a very diverse sociological group consisting of:

• Arminian Baptists
• Charismatics/Pentecostals
• Anabaptists and free church
• Wesleyan-Armininans
• Evangelical Anglicans

What do Scot McKnight, Howard-John Wesley, Alan Hirsch, Cherith Fee-Nordling, David Fitch, Amos Young, and Dallas Willard have in common?  You could go negative.  They're not Calvinists, mainline Protestants or catholics.  But there are Anglicans here too.

To invoke Wittgenstein, it is not so much a common core as a common constellation of values.  Some share more than others.  The constellation includes things like multi-ethnicity, women in ministry, social justice, optimism of grace, openness to the Spirit, free church, non-fundamentalist valuing of Scripture.  Sociologically, it is a group that does not want to have the excluding tone of the Gospel Coalition without losing orthodoxy like the Emergent Village.  They are post-conservatives who can use the word "evangelical" but feel a little uneasy about it.

But if I had to describe it positively, I think the word that really best describes this group is missional.  And by missional I mean the real deal, not its knock offs.  Missional means getting on board with what God is doing, not trying to get people to come to my church or using gimmicks to try to attract people to my group.  Missional means a full sense of the gospel that is king Jesus focused and doesn't have some narrow focus on getting a person to say a sinner's prayer.

It has been somewhat theology heavy and I want to process some of that in a different post, maybe in the morning. For now, I'll leave it at that...