What's in a name?

What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Romeo and Juliet

"Missional" has now replaced "emerging" as THE word to use to describe your ministry, book, or conference.

Search for the keyword "missional" on Amazon and you'll find 393 books.

Search for the word "Missional" in book titles and you'll find 127 books.

I'm pretty indifferent to the term. The English words "missionary", "mission", "missional" derive from the Latin missio (“sending”) and mittere (“to send”). The New Testament Greek verb is apostellein ("to send") from which we get our English word "apostle".

Missionary, missions, mission, missional—you can take your pick.

What matters is not the form of the word but the substance of what it means to be "sent" and how that reality is worked in everyday life and ministry.

Unfortunately, I am now convinced that the term "missional" is often used to conceal a lack of clarity about what it is we are meant to be doing, and what faithfulness and fruitfulness really looks like.