The Forgotten Ways

Alan Hirsch wrote in his book, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church -

Missional church is a community of God’s people that defines itself, and organizes its life around, its real purpose of being an agent of God’s mission to the world. In other words, the church’s true and authentic organizing principle is mission. When the church is in mission, it is the true church. The church itself is not only a product of that mission but is obligated and destined to extend it by whatever means possible. The mission of God flows directly through every believer and every community of faith that adheres to Jesus. To obstruct this is to block God’s purposes in and through his people.

On his blog site, also called The Forgotten Ways, he takes issue with the word 'missional' being made to be the new emergent. In other words, if I'm reading him rightly, he doesn't believe that the emergent church is a new way of being missional. For him 'it was not so much that the church has a mission but that the mission has a church' - that is, mission is what the church does, and the reason many churches fail is that they forget to keep on in mission.