Researching the Emerging Missional Church: What and How?
A major challenge in researching the EM church is simply the definition. For example, in ChurchNext3, Eddie Gibbs describes the EM church using the twelve empirical indicators of a missional church proposed by the Gospel and Our Culture Network (GOCN) 4. However, these indicators merely point to the ideals of any church – for instance, if we try to decide whether or not a church is missional by the standard of “a church that proclaims the gospel…where all members are involved in learning to become disciples of Christ, [where] the Bible is normative…[and] Christians behave Christianly toward one another”5, we would find that most churches agree that they too share these ideals but are sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing to bring them to reality. Exclusive use of the terms ‘emerging’ and ‘missional’ has further complicated the issue – it has become controversial in some conversations that people are rephrasing and broadening their definition so the entire church’s call to mission
