I challenge the institutional church, where are you spending your R&D [research and development] money now? ... If it’s trying to figure out the next big church, I think you should not spend your money that way. ... I actually believe that you will see major organizations in the next few years investing in R&D because of the missional question … because of the things they are discovering now … ¹³

Confessional Reformed churches should share this concern. It is a fair question whether building mega-churches is the mission of the church. As he continues, the picture becomes clearer:

I really believe the institutional church will die to itself … even though it will destroy our Sunday morning event … even though it will mean no longer investing in training biblical teachers for the one-hour event … for the greater good, the greater cause, the missional opportunity…. ¹⁴

Let me be clear, if Reformed folk are to apply the adjective “missional” to themselves, it must be defined clearly and that definition must be quite distinct from that used by the EM. Indeed, if we are to use it to describe ourselves we must, to use Bradley’s terms, hijack it or co-opt it.
Let’s us begin doing so. The Oxford English Dictionary defines missional in this use as an adjective relating to missions or missionary work, but this is not what the EM means by it.

According to the EM, Sunday mornings are no longer considered the Christian Sabbath or the Lord’s Day morning, the day of public worship, the divinely appointed time and place for the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments. Sunday morning is just an event and not even a “missional” event at that! Tripp Fuller says,

There is much to learn and keep from the Reformation, a movement that was thoroughly modern, but there is reason to give pause to returning to it with a clinched fist. Right now I think the last thing the Church needs are white dudes with clinched fists, especially when what they are clenching is ‘God’s Truth.’ Throughout modernity white dudes have had God’s truth in their hands too much, and behind them are ditches filled with God’s and/or their enemies. (This confusion is easy when you have truth tightly gripped in a fist.) ... I am confident that, as the Church finds its bearing in a new world, we don’t need any more clinched fists, for it is God’s world and God’s truth after all. ¹⁵

We see a similar anti-ecclesiastical approach to mission in The Missional Church, edited by Darrell L. Guder and co-written by five different authors.¹⁶ They agree with many of the EM writers who reject the “Western mission” as a “European-church-centered enterprise.”¹⁷ In its place they seek a “theocentric reconceptualization of Christian mission.”¹⁸ In the EM there is a turning away from the church as organization and toward the church as organism. They regard the institutional church as a remnant of “Christendom,” the medieval church-state complex.¹⁹ Many of the EM/Missional theorists seem to accept, to greater and lesser degrees, the nineteenth-century theory that the apostolic church was purely kerygmatic and charismatic and that organization was a later, post-apostolic corruption of authentic Christianity. On that premise they seek to recover some version of primitive Christianity.²⁰ In the chapter on the church drafted by George Hunsberger, Missional Church contrasts the missional approach to the doctrine of the church with the “heritage of a functional Christendom and forms of church life shaped by modern notions of voluntary association and rational organization.”²¹ This is at least partly true and helpful, but they continue by calling into question the very notion of the “marks of the church.” They write that, though the Reformers did not intend it, the result of speaking of “the marks of the true church” has been that Protestants have come to think of church as “a place where certain things happen.”²² The argument throughout the chapter is that we must move beyond a conception of the church as a “place where things happen” to a dynamic community caught up in the mission of God in the world. They are more helpful, however, when they note that the verbs most often used by the New Testament in association with the “kingdom of God” and the “kingdom of heaven” are “to receive” and “to enter.”²³ That the kingdom is not something we can usher in through evangelism or cultural action is a truly important point.

Finally, in contrast to a good bit of the contemporary literature coming from the EM, Christopher J. H. Wright provides one of the most helpful approaches to the question of a missional theology.²⁴ He argues that we should use a “missional” hermeneutic on analogy with our Christocentric hermeneutic.²⁵ Just as we read the Bible to see how it progressively reveals the person of God the Son in Christ through the history of redemption,²⁶ so too we ought to recognize that the mission of God is also progressively revealed in redemptive history.²⁷ Thus, e.g. he distinguishes between the missional character of Israel’s relation to the nations, inasmuch as they existed to fulfill the divine intention, and the Christian mission to preach the gospel to all the nations.²⁸ In that respect, he argues that though it is true to say that the Bible teaches a mission, it is also true that the Bible itself is the product of God’s mission.²⁹ The whole history of redemption is the history of the outworking of the divine plan moving from creation, to fall, to redemption, and finally to glory.³⁰