This is a story of our times, surely: a person I know slightly, trapped a while back in an evangelical Reformed seminary, drawn to the narrative-historical argument but not sure what to do with it, has now abandoned his faith, identifying as someone who is at best sympathetic to the metaphorical force of the Christian story.

I have Daniel Hoffman to thank for this little aperçu.

Jesus is riding on a young horse (pōlon), perhaps awkwardly on a young donkey, descending the Mount of Olives towards Jerusalem (Lk. 19:37). There is no explicit reference to Zechariah 9:9, but presumably the allusion was not lost on Luke’s readers (cf. Matt. 21:4-6):

Rejoice greatly, O daughter Sion! Proclaim, O daughter Jerusalem! Behold, your king comes to you, just and salvific is he, meek and riding on a beast of burden and a young foal (pōlon neon). (Zech. 9:9 LXX)

The books I’ve been reading on “missional church” have a couple of key objectives in common: to describe the progress of the Western church towards a new “missional” paradigm, and to map that paradigm on to an expansive reading of the biblical narrative. It’s an obvious, perhaps inevitable, methodology, so let’s have a go at it. Nothing very thorough or polished—just thinking out loud, really.

A significant tranche of missional church thinking centres on the APEST paradigm. The argument is that if the church is to become a movement again after the sclerotic institutionalism of the Christendom era, it needs urgently to reactivate the gifts of apostle, prophet, and evangelist. Shepherds and teachers have a necessary function in caring for and building up existing and new communities, but they are not the people to give life and direction to the missional church.

It is clear from reading recent books on missional church that a missional theology needs to extend in two directions. It needs to extend in a social direction to encompass the existence of churches as communities interacting with societies; and it needs to give an account of the temporal dimension of the existence of churches by telling the story of which they are part.

If you’re looking for a primer on missional theology, John Franke’s Missional Theology: An Introduction is not a bad option. It’s clearly presented and to the point, with just five chapters on “Missional God,” “Missional Church,” “Missional Theology,” “Missional Multiplicity,” and “Missional Solidarity.” I’m about halfway through, so I can’t tell you what “missional multiplicity” is all about, but I do rather like this statement at the beginning of a section on the “nature of missional theology”….

John Franke’s Missional Theology: An Introduction starts with the idea associated with Karl Barth and the missiologist Karl Hartenstein that the biblical God is in his very nature a missional God. Mission is not primarily what the church does; it is what God does, expressed most fully in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.