I like how he said that being missional means redefining and recreating all of our "stuff" into a post-christian environment.

Truthfully, we have too much of a habit to overcomplicating thoughts by making them into categories. If you say that you are missional then you need to define what missional is versus what missional isn't so that you can determine who can label themselves as it.

Why do this? For years, I've heard the term missional and I never considered it as a label or "type" of church. Instead, I've always considered it as a characteristic of a church.

I'm enjoying all of the talk about Missional stuff. It's been refreshing to have serious conversation about a popular buzz word.

I love that Keller carries so much weight that his comment in someone else's blog section can end up linked in this one.

I think he got it right. The question we need to ask isn't "which methodology should we use?" so much as "is God present in this community and are we communicating the gospel well in all we do?"

"Missional Model" is a misnomer. Being missional is a mindset, not a model. Much of the confusion in the missional-attraction (and let's not forget, incarnational) is due to trying to compare "the missional model" to their own ministry context, when in reality part of the essence of being missional is exegeting the cultural context in which ministry occurs. It is faithfully translating and inculcating the Gospel into that context. Thus, being missional is vastly different in New York or Chicago than even in the suburbs of those cities, or from the East to West Coast to the South and Midwest. Dr. Keller's comments at Dave Fitch's post communicate this well.

I'm starting to feel like we're becoming less clear about what it means to be "missional" because we're staking out linguistic territory.

Is it really that important to distinguish that being missional is an "approach" (David Fitch on his blog) or a "mindset" (Matt Stephens above) rather than a "model?" Isn't it appropriate and helpful to ask, "how does Life on the Vine (Fitch's Church) model what it is to be a missional church?"

Or when David Fitch says being missional isn't about "methodology" but about "ecclesiology," is that distinction really that helpful? Isn't being missional a "way of being church?"

In these videos, Tim Keller says that being missional isn't about having "programs"--does he mean it isn't about being organized? Are we supposed to reject, for example, recovery meetings as non-missional? Worship planning teams?

Clarifying the term missional can only happen if we reduce the jargon, not increase it. This is a plea for incarnational explanations: instead of making semantic distinctions, it would be much more helpful to me to enflesh these distinctions with stories of what it looks like to be missional.