Twelve Hallmarks of a Missional Church

The Gospel and Our Culture Network has fostered much research into cultural trends and the revisioning of a new (missional) approach to church. They have defined twelve hallmarks of a missional church:

1. The missional church proclaims the gospel.
2. The missional church is a comunity where all members are involved in learning to become disciples of Jesus.
3. The Bible is normative in this church's life.
4. The church understands itself as different from the world because of its participation in the life, death, and resurrection of its Lord.
5. The church seeks to discern God's specific missional vocation for the entire community and for all of its members.
6. A missional community is indicated by how Christians behave toward one another.
7. It is a community that practices reconciliation.
8. Peoples within the community hold themselves accountable to one another in love.
9. The church practices hospitality.
10. Worship is the central act by which the community celebrates with joy and thanksgiving both God's presence and God's promised future.
11. This community has a vital public witness.
12. There is a recognition that the church itself is an incomplete expression of the reign of God.

Frost and Hirsch propose three additional overarching principles that give energy and direction to the above:

1. The missional church is incarnational, not attractional, in its ecclesiology. It does not create sanctified spaces into which unbelievers must come to encounter the gospel. Rather, the missional church disassembles itself and seeps into the cracks and crevices of a society in order to be Christ to those who don't yet know him.
2. The missional church is messianic, not dualistic, in its spirituality. Instead of seeing the world as divided between the sacred (religious) and profane (nonreligious), like Christ it sees the world and God's place in it as more holistic and integrated.
3. The missional church adopts an apostolic, rather than hierarchical, mode of leadership. It abandons the triangular hierarchies of the traditional church and embraces a biblical, flat-leadership community that unleashes the gifts of evangelism, apostleship, and prophecy, as well as pastoral and teaching gifts.

Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch, in their book The Shaping of Things to Come, refer to the Gospel and Our Culture Network (GOCN) which defines the missional church as one that "seeks to discern God's specific missional vocation for the entire community and all of its members." p.11-12  www.gocn.org