Dr. David Dunbar, President of Biblical Seminary in Hatfield, PA has a Missional Journal. In the entry entitled, “A New Imagination”, Dr. Dunbar gives Distinctives of Missional and Missional Churches. Here are some snippets from the article.
1. Missional is not McChurch
Missional practitioners recognize that the principle of contextualization applies equally to churches in the West. From region to region, city to city, neighborhood to neighborhood, we see a kaleidoscope of cultures. One size will not fit all. Franchising is usually unsuccessful. Missional therefore means a local, culturally-specific application of the message.
2. Evangelistic/attractional ? missional/incarnational
It is missional because it is “an outwardly bound movement from one community or individual to another. It is the outward thrust rooted in God’s mission that compels the church to reach a lost world. Therefore, a genuine missional impulse is a sending rather than an attractional one. The NT pattern of mission is centrifugal rather than centripetal” (The Forgotten Ways [Brazos, 2006], pp. 129-30).
It is incarnational because it understands God’s action in Christ as the model for the life of the church. “If God’s central way of reaching his world was to incarnate himself in Jesus, then our way of reaching the world should likewise be incarnational. To act incarnationally therefore will mean in part that in our mission to those outside the faith we will need to exercise a genuine identification and affinity with those we are attempting to reach” (Forgotten Ways, p. 133).
As the church confronts wide-spread cynicism about the Christian message, the gospel displayed will give credence to the gospel declared.
3. Cultivating spiritual discernment
In the culture of late modernity many churches adopted a corporate model for leadership, decision-making, and planning. Pastors became CEOs, elders (or deacons) transformed themselves into corporation directors, and top-down, vision-driven planning became the order of the day.
It is a sign of biblical-theological health that this paradigm is being questioned in the missional church movement. Here is a good place to begin “re-imagining” the nature and function of the church for a post-Christian and postmodern era. What is there about the decision-making and planning process of the church that makes (or should make) it distinctively Christian? Or, to ask the question differently, what is missing from the older model?
The short answer is sensitivity to the leading of the Spirit. Or, in the words of Craig Van Gelder, “An essential dimension that Christian leaders must attend to in the midst of a discernment and decision-making process is how to keep God in the conversation” (The Ministry of the Missional Church [Baker, 2007], p. 99).
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The point is that missional churches need to cultivate what for many of us is a forgotten art–the ability to discern what God is up to in our world (or neighborhood). This is best accomplished in a community of believers who are able to listen prayerfully for what the Spirit is saying in Scripture, in and through the voice of the congregation, and in the specific context where the church is located.
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David is an entrepreneur, pastor, coach, and author. He has his doctorate from George Fox Seminary where he studied under Len Sweet, his M.Div. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and has done post graduate work in communications from the University of Alabama and the University of South Florida. He lives with his wife Brenna Phillips in Smyrna, DE. 
