Tim's E

Assumptions: 1) The term "missional" could be defined as revolving around or focused on the mission. 2) The primary mission of humanity is to glorify God. 3) The primary means by which this is done in the church is by knowing and loving God and helping others to do the same, or in religious terminology: growing in personal discipleship while making disciples of others. 4) While these are the primary means I do not see them as the exclusive means. 5) I also assume that I will only have "abundant life" if these purpose and means are set and seen exclusively in the context of a daily, authentic relationship with the living God. 6) I assume that glory and discipleship are terms given to help us understand and chart certain aspects of that relationship. In the broadest sense how can one quantify or evaluate the quality of any given relationship, let alone a relationship with the divine? My assumption is that the term "missional" is an attempt to do just that; quantify and evaluate the quality of an aspect of this relationship. Specifically, the term "missional" is there to help us understand how effective we are at shaping our lives and ministries around the pursuit of God in our lives and the lives of others.


Evaluation: I believe that at the end of these 2 years I should be able to 1) give adequate defense to these assumptions of the mission, the means, and the term "missional" or 2) I should be able to give a well supported rebuttal to these assumptions and a defense for the newly formed assumptions.

Given the first scenario I will need to be able to quantify the level at which I (and the ministry that I lead) am becoming missional in order for the term to serve its purpose of quantifying a certain aspect of my (our) relationship with God. I will attempt to quantify that by a few different means. a) I will list the major duties that I perform and the major things that I give my resources (time energy and money) to. I will explain, for each of those, how and to what extent they do or do not conform to the mission. b) I will provide true purpose descriptions of the ministries that I work with and compare and contrast them with the mission. c) I will ask 3 close friends and fellow journeyers (at least one of which will be from the SPE cohort) to help me in the personal evaluation. d) I will take a fruit inventory in my life/ministries to see if there has been fruit born of the mission.

Given the second scenario I should be able to a) diagram how those new assumptions will shape my future life/relationship/ministry. I should also b) develop a method to measure my effectiveness in that pursuit.