Ed Stetzer and Philip Nation came to New Hope when they wrote Compelled by Love, The Most Excellent Way to Missional Living. It happened that the two of them had been teaching and preaching on this very subject.
I recently asked Philip to explain his personal feelings about writing Compelled by Love. In case you haven’t heard, Compelled by Love is the 2011 Baptist Doctrine Study and is available as both a discipleship kit and the book through Lifeway Christian Stores.
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Every movement begins with a reason. It could be a brand new idea that works against 
everything we have known previously. Sometimes it begins with a rebellion against the status quo. Or, it could be the desire to return to a preferred reality. The movement toward missional living is all of these things.
In 2008, New Hope Publishers asked Ed Stetzer and me to write a work focused on the reason behind a movement. With the reintroduction of the word “missional” into the vocabulary of church leadership, it was becoming the modifer du jour. Everything was missional. Missional church. Missional church planting. Missional believers. And, I’ve heard Ed joke about the missional lighting we use during worship. Because of the popularity of the word, exploring the motivation behind the movement seemed needful. Otherwise (to paraphrase an astute missiologist) when everything is missional then nothing is missional.
With Compelled by Love, there is a specific aim: to push the concept of missional out of the church leadership library and into the lives of everyday believers.
I believe that missional living is necessary. Even if saying missional church and missional Christian are phrases filled with redundancies. Perhaps that is why we wrote a book that found its origins in 2 Corinthians where the word missional is never used. (For that matter, missional is not a word ever found in scripture.) Instead, what we see from Paul and the believers in Corinth is a committed group of disciples seeking to live out their love for Christ by fulfilling His work. They were a living in and for the mission of God. To make it adverbial, they were missional.
As Paul described the greatness of Christ’s mission for the church, all sorts of motivators could be employed. Guilt, legalism, and the promise of reward are some of humanity’s favorites. But not Christ’s. He taught the Corinthians and us (through our fellow missionary Paul) that love must be the force that presses, pushes, and compels our mission.
Love is the new idea from the heart of God that challenges all we have known before.
It is the rebellious force that is determined to redeem believers and restore creation. And, in it, we find the desire to return to Eden, the preferred reality in which we ought to live.
For we the church to live as our Lord lives, love is a necessity. Compelled by His character that perfectly aligns love, justice, holiness, and glory, we live as new creations in front of neighbors, coworkers, and friends. Our lives play out differently because we see the world differently. Rather than a place to survive, it has become our vantage point to watch a people redeemed.
Compelled by Love is not a complex book fit for academics who like to toy around with ideas. Rather, I hope it is a work in which any believer can rediscover why to live with a passion for God’s glory among all people.
Philip Nation
