Do you remember ever noticing, as a kid perhaps, that after repeating any common word often enough, it eventually starts to sound like a meaningless jumble of syllables? I’ve written extensively on defining ‘missional’ in the past and don’t want to cover all the same ground again… but up to the present time, it appears that the word “missional” has had so much repetition of late that it has begun to lose it’s meaning — it’s just all so much “missional soup.” This is the trend I identified more than a year ago and which led to my series on the subject last summer. The trend has not changed though, and if anything it’s getting worse rather than better. This is true of people both inside and outside of the missional conversation taking place around the globe. I have seen the word “missional” used to describe programs, as a synonymic substitute for “seeker-sensitive” or the emerging church, and for the sending of missionaries to other cultures in the 2/3 World. I have seen posts on “how to start a missional conversation” and on… well, missional shampoo. None of these uses gets to the heart of what I consider to actually be missional, and some of them are contradictory.