Ed Stetzer until recently, served as the Director of Research and Missiology for the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. David Putnam is one of the pastors at Mountain Lake Church in Cumming, Georgia. Both of these men through God’s providence have been able to break the cultural code where they served which resulted in explosive church growth.

The book is built upon the missional principle that each church must function as a missionary people exegeting their culture in order to better present the Gospel. Missionary agencies understand this well, but our North American churches often presume both that they understand the culture and that what they have always done is the best way of presenting the Kingdom of God to their community. But as Ed points out in Chapter One, The Emerging Glocal Context, the culture has changed, and is changing and our understanding of our context will impact the way we communicate Jesus. He is not arguing that the modern era has completely passed, or that there is one formula for the church to follow. This is not a book for postmodern ministry. It all comes down to where you live, the soil your church has been planted in.

1. What is Missional – A Short Answer

"Jesus told us to go into all the world and be his ambassadors, but many churches today have inadvertently changed the "go and be" command to a "come and see" appeal. We have grown attached to buildings, programs, staff and a wide variety of goods and services designed to attract and entertain people.

Missional is a helpful term used to describe what happens when you and I replace the "come to us" invitations with a "go to them" life. A life where "the way of Jesus" informs and radically transforms our existence to one wholly focused on sacrificially living for him and others. It speaks of the very nature of the Jesus follower.

2. Every Culture Has a Code That When Broken, Church Growth Explodes

The authors begin with the premise that each community and culture have not been breached by churches and ministries because they have been unable or unwilling to engage that culture with a missional mind-set. Through extensive research and experience, Ed and David believe that pastors and their churches must be able to read the culture and translate ministry into a biblically faithful and culturally appropriate expression of faith. When the church is able to break the code, it will become the missionary to its culture.

3. Missional is a Shift in Thinking

In the era of "movements," missional is often looked upon as just another phase or program. But we error when we do so for missional is more than just another movement, it is a full expression of who the ecclesia of Christ is and what it is called to be and do. At its core, missional is a shift in thinking. This shift in thinking is expressed like this:

• From programs to processes
• From demographics to discernment
• From models to missions
• From attractional to incarnational
• From uniformity to diversity
• From professional to passionate
• From seating to sending
• From decisions to disciples
• From additional to exponential
• From monuments to movements

Making this shift can be difficult for many (particularly Evangelical Americans), but to fully appreciate what the missional church is, we must look outside of our traditional understanding of how we do church and realign ourselves with the biblical narrative. So, as you consider the following "description," don’t attempt to understand it within your traditional framework, shift your thinking.

4. Leadership of a Missional Church

They are neither traditional nor contemporary or something that doesn’t look like either of the two. The authors believe that in order to break the code of their culture, there must be leaders who think differently. These values of missional leaders that break the code spring from the firm knowledge that following Jesus is a way of life that transforms us to be the incarnation of Jesus in our culture. Missional leaders are driven by theology rather than pragmatism. There is an idea that pastors don’t have the luxury of doing serious study. That is to be left for those living in ivory towers. In the real world we just need to get busy and find out what works.

The authors assert that missional leaders focus on people. Most leaders focus on programs. But missional leaders focus on people. They focus on the people already in the congregation. They focus on the people in the community. Jesus never let his plans prevent him from addressing the needs of people. The authors believe that in order to break the code missional leaders will focus on:
• Spiritual formation
• Discipleship
• Reaching the unchurched/unreached
• Evangelism
• Culturally relevant expressions of church
• Spiritual warfare