“Mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God. God is a missionary God…There is church because there is a mission, and not vice versa.”
– David J. Bosch1
Missional theology starts with God.
Church movements sometimes struggle navigating the relationship between practice and theology. The missional movement that’s developed over the last 40 years is not immune to that, and sometimes devolves into an instrumentalist praxis that makes it a defense technique against the institutional failures of church. (See Andrew Root’s critique.2)
However, I do think that at the heat of the movement has been a marriage of the practical and the theological. For example, there’s been a lot of thought on how the ecclesiology of the movement is grows out of a robust trinitarian theology.
David Bosch, the South African missiologist whose work, particularly Transforming Mission, is an important part of the missional family tree, articulates one of the key principles in the quote above. “Mission” for the church originates in how we conceive of God—”mission” is simply another expression for God’s desires or intentions. God wants something.God’s actions are not random, but come from God’s nature, God’s desires. How we understand what God wants—how we interpret the actions of the Father, Son, and Spirit revealed in scripture—give us a framework for how we can see God’s activity in our own contexts.
That’s the heart of missional.
Steven Hovater 
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