Blogging on "Breaking the Missional Code"

For the next week or so, I am going to be posting some highlights of Breaking the Missional Code by Stetzer and Putman. I will also be providing some reactions to their work. I recommend this book highly for anyone who is seeking to be a missionary agent in their community and has the position to lead his/her church to do the same.

Introduction

I read this book with a mind that is focused on my job as a regional collegiate ministry coordinator in central Missouri. One of my objectives is to begin a missional community that seeks to impact the University of Missouri for Christ. Our goal is to connect with our community, the University of Missouri and all that that implies. We are seeking to create a biblically faithful and culturally relevant outreach.

The book Breaking the Missional Code attempts to assist the reader in being able to think through your context, apply universal principles in your mission setting, and then identify and apply strategies that will make you more effective in your context.

Breaking the code does not mean just finding the best model for your community. Instead, it means discovering the principles that work in every context, selecting the tools most relevant for your context, and then learning to apply them in a missionally effective manner.

Mark Mittelberg, in his book Building a Courageous Church, states: “we must step back and figure out what our mission field’s cultural landscape looks like.”

Missional thinking forces us to see our geographical context through the lenses of people groups, population segments, and cultural environments.