Jesus is the Word of God
We've been thinking about a theology of mission grounded in the doctrine of God.
Here are some relevant talks from me on the subject.:
Luke 14 - Mission the way Jesus did it
1 Peter 2 - Doing mission together
Here is Paul Blackham on being salt and light
And here is hands down the best talk I've heard on mission and missional church. Tim Chester on Rethinking Attractional Church. The whole series of talks with him and Steve Timmis are just excellent.
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We have been thinking about mission grounded in God's own life. God is the Sending God, His Sent Son and the Reconciling Spirit - this is not simply something He does but who He is.
So it is with the Church. We have inherited our mission from the Sent One and we too find ourselves not simply doing mission, but being His sent ones to the ends of the earth.
There is discontinuity between God's mission and ours in that Christ has saved the world therefore we do not. Instead we point to His once for all saving.
But there is also continuity between God's mission and ours. Therefore, just as the eternal Father's concern has ever been the exaltation of His Son in His Spirit-empowered word, so too our mission must be thoroughly evangelistic.
At this point people will often ask, does social justice or care for the environment have a place within such an evangel? The answer is Yes, but we must emphasize that such concerns find their place within the gospel. Not instead of it. And not alongside of it. God does not have one goal for social, political, cultural and environmental well-being and another goal for the salvation of souls. Such a dualism has plagued the church's understanding of mission for too long.
There are some who have simply privileged one side of the dualism. So on the one hand there have been the evangelists like D.L. Moody who famously said: "I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, 'Moody, save all you can.'" Such a view divorces creation and redemption and privileges the latter. On the other hand there has been the 'social gospel' of Walter Rauschenbusch in which mission is "transforming life on earth into the harmony of heaven." This makes the same divorce but privileges creation instead.
In fact both fall into a dualism in which heaven and earth, time and eternity, the spiritual and the physical are pitted against one another. This cannot be the outlook of the Christian who has accepted mission from the hand of the risen Christ. In Him heaven and earth, time and eternity, the spiritual and the physical are united at the deepest level.
But there is yet another mistake to be resisted. We have not solved this dualism by accepting these two concerns for creation and redemption and simply determining to give them equal emphasis. A well balanced two-pronged approach to mission is not the solution, as though some cultural mandate lies side-by-side together with a gospel mandate for the world. Such a view seems to be that of the very influential Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization. Here is a key statement from them in 1982:
In addition to worldwide evangelization, the people of God should become deeply involved in relief, aid, development and the quest for justice and peace.
It is the phrase 'in addition to' that is so problematic. The authors liken the relation of these two concerns to 'two blades of a pair of scissors or the two wings of a bird.' Yet to accept this two-pronged approach is still to put asunder what God has joined together. These are not unco-ordinated concerns in God's mission. The Father does not have one desire for the lifting up of humanity and another for the glorification of His Son. There is not one will for creation and a separate will for redemption. Yet this seems to be precisely the assumption of Lausanne's authors.
John Stott (the driving force behind the Lausanne declaration) said this in a sermon given the morning before the 1975 Assembly in Nairobi of the Central Committee of the World Council of Church:
"[There are two freedoms and two unities for which Jesus Christ is concerned] On the one hand there is socio-political liberation and the unity of all mankind, for these things are the good will of God the Creator, while on the other there is the redemptive work of Christ who sets his people free from sin and guilt, and unites them in his new community. To muddle these two things (creation and redemption, common grace and saving grace, liberation and salvation, justice and justification) is to plunge oneself into all kinds of confusion." (quoted in Timothy Dudley Smith, John Stott: A Global Ministry, IVP, 2001, p204
With the greatest respect for John Stott, I don't think that's right. Creation and redemption are not separately addressed by the Lord and they shouldn't be separately addressed by His church. No, the Father has one almighty gospel passion that lifts up humanity and the world precisely in the gospel of His Son. So it is with God, so it must be with us. Whatever cultural mandate there is, it is included in and dependent upon the gospel mandate to make disciples of all nations.
Authentic social, political, economic, cultural and environmental renewal happens within the gospel. It occurs within the sphere of Christ's explicit Lordship. This means, minimally, where the word of Christ is proclaimed as authoritative on its own terms (for instance where the church speaks prophetically into the issues of the day). But more usually and concretely it occurs where this word of Christ is received in faith and His Lordship is lived out first in the body and, then, spilling over into the world.
In this way the most radically political, social and environmental revolutions can occur. Yet they occur as gospel revolutions where King Jesus is reigning by the power of His Spirit-anointed word.
More to follow...
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In the last post, we saw the deepest continuity between God's mission and ours.
But now we must highlight the discontinuity.
Continuity and Discontinuity
Perhaps the Matthean Great Commission will show both the continuity and discontinuity points:
'All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.' (Matt 28:18-20).
Here at the resurrection of Christ we see the very consummation of the missio Dei declared decisively in history. And incredibly Christ says 'therefore', and with that connector He lays bare a profound continuity between God's mission and ours. The Gospel-mission of God is handed to the Church.
Yet precisely because our mission comes from the hand of the risen Christ it must not be confused with His. Here is where the discontinuity comes in. Our marching orders do not come from a hopeful Commander, trusting us to win victory. Emphatically our commission comes from the Victor. All authority is His. The risen Christ has established the kingdom. Sin is atoned for, wrath is averted, Satan is vanquished, death is defeated, heaven and earth are reconciled, Man stands on the earth as King under God. And where this Head has come, His body will most certainly follow. What can the church, His body, add to such an accomplishment? All we can do is point to this King and this kingdom.
Christ's command is simply to 'go' with His resurrection power and presence in a baptizing and teaching ministry that realizes in advance of His return that obedience in the nations which Easter has already won.
Our part in the missio Dei is, therefore, very different to Christ's, yet, on the basis of His completed work we are called to extend His mission to the world.
Consequences of this Continuity and Discontinuity
Now that we've seen both the continuity and discontinuity between God's mission and ours we can elaborate on some consequences.
Firstly, because of the discontinuity point, we see that faithfulness to the completed missio Dei in the resurrection of Christ requires witnesses not activists. We do not bring redemption to the world, we bring Christ to the world as One who has already accomplished our redemption.
We betray our gospel-mission the minute we think we can establish Christ's kingdom. We do not save the world. In the risen Christ it is already saved. We are not the do-ers - we are witnesses to His ultimate and all-encompassing Doing. We 'go' as heralds not mini-saviours.
Secondly, because of the continuity point, we can learn much about the nature of our mission by enquiring as to the nature of the missio Dei. Let us ask, does God's mission have a centre and goal? And what is it?
We can answer this with confidence. The purposes of the Father from all ages have been exclusively focussed on His Son.[1] In the power of the Spirit, His word has been the agent for all divine activity in creation and redemption.[2] In the Incarnation of the Word, the Father gives to Jesus His word,[3] which accomplished all that Jesus does,[4] and it is this word that Jesus entrusts to his followers.[5] The Church has inherited a Gospel mission for the world, i.e. the Father's mission to the exalt His Son in His Spirit-empowered word.
The triune God - the God who is Sender, Sent and Perfector - is not concerned in a general glorification of Himself nor of the world. His mission has never been an abstract betterment of the creation. Rather, the purposes of this Gospel God have always been to create and redeem a people - to reach out and to draw in a bride for the Son, an inheritance for the Heir, a body for the Head. The goal of God has always been the glorification of the Son through the inclusion of His people by the Spirit so that all may participate in the triune life.
To put it more plainly, from beginning to end God's mission is wholly and thoroughly evangelistic. Both creation and redemption find their place within this evangelistic economy.
Next time we will see the implications of this for our mission. In particular we will argue that since God's mission is thoroughly evangelistic, so must ours be.
[2] 2 Peter 3:5-7; Hebrews 1:3; 1 Peter 1:23; John 1:1-3; 5:24; 6:63,68;
[3] John 8:55; 14:24;
[4] John 14:10; Mark 4:41; Luke 4:43; John 5:24; 12:48; 17:17
[5] John 15:20; 17:6,14,20
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When Karl Barth addressed the Brandenburg Missionary Conference in 1932 he introduced a missiological perspective which has determined the shape of mission theology in every part of the Church.
"Must not even the most faithful missionary, the most convinced friend of missions, have reason to reflect that the term missio was in the ancient Church an expression of the doctrine of the Trinity-namely the expression of the divine sending forth of self, the sending of the Son and Holy Spirit to the world? Can we indeed claim that we do it any other way?"
Barth cuts through soteriological or eschatological consideration to bring us right back to the Source of mission. It is not that 'Salvation is like this therefore mission should be like that.' It is not that 'The End will be like this, so mission should be like that.' No, the real argument is that 'God's being is like this, therefore mission should be like that!' There are missions because of the missio Dei - because God is a sending God. In Himself, in eternity, God's being is a being of outgoing love. This is the Fountainhead for mission.
David Bosch has memorably put it like this:
To participate in mission is to participate in the movement of God's love toward people, since God is a fountain of sending love.
This insight has been picked up by all wings of the Church, from the conciliar to the Anabaptist, from the Roman Catholic to the evangelical.
More important than all this consensus however is the bible's own testimony.
Consider the Johannine 'great commission':
As the Father has sent me I am sending you. (John 20:21; cf 17:18).
We ought to take that little word 'as' with full seriousness. In the same way that the Father sends the Son, so the Son sends His church. Let us ask, how has the Father sent the Son?
Lest we be Arians we must acknowledge that the Son's generation from the Father is not a mere product of the Father's will in time. It is rather an eternal begetting that is of the very essence of the eternal Godhead. There is not a God and then a sending. There has only ever been a sending God - the missio Dei. Both Father and Son are eternally constituted in these relations of Sending and Sent.
The Son's being and act is a being and act found and expressed in the Father's sending. The Son's own life is a life in mission. This has always been true in eternity and it was made manifest in incarnation.
Christ's most common self-identification in John is as the One sent from the Father. And His most common articulation of His mission was always to do the will of His Father - a will expressed in thoroughly evangelistic terms - e.g. John 3:16; 4:23; 6:29; 6:38-40. Christ is sent as the world's Saviour, the One who seeks worshippers for the Father, who glorifies the Father in His saving death and only then says 'it is finished' (John 19:30).
Therefore, because Christ's being is a missionary being, so His activity is a missionary activity.
On the cross, the true being and glory of the Son was manifested, and in Him the glory of the triune God (e.g. John 13:32; 17:5). Here was demonstrated Christ's obedience to the Father and, at one and the same time, His love for the world. Christ's being and act are laid bare at Golgotha, and shown to be a missionary being and act.
Therefore, returning to John 20:21, we see the continuity of Christ's mission with ours. Just as Christ has His being in sent-ness for the world's salvation, so does the church. We have received a commission that was passed from the Father to the Son in the depths of eternity. Our missionary activity finds its origin not in any human enthusiasm for witness but in the being of God. And our sent-ness for the salvation of the world is not only our activity. It is, like God's own missio, constitutive of our very life.
'The Christian community is not sent into the world haphazardly or at random, but with a very definite task. It does not exist before its task and later acquire it. Nor does it exist apart from it, so that there can be no question whether or not it might have or execute it. It exists for the world. Its task constitutes and fashions it from the very outset. If it had not been given it, it would not have come into being. If it were to lose it, it would not continue. It is not then a kind of imparted dignity. It exists only as it has it, or rather only as the task has it. Nor is it a kind of burden laid upon it. It is the inalienable foundation which bears it. Every moment of its history it is measured by it. It stands or falls with it in all its expressions, in all its action or abstention. It either understands itself in the light of its task or not at all.' (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/3, p796.)
'[The task of the Church] is no less, no more and no other than the ministry of witness required of it and constituting it.' (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/3, p834))
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This began life as an essay I wrote for post-ordination training.
Typically 'mission' is understood as an activity that the church undertakes. On this understanding, the church, alongside its other duties, is also a sender and supporter of gospel workers.
In this paradigm a church may seek to enlarge their "sending arrow" greatly. They may tirelessly champion missionary work, hold constant prayer meetings for overseas workers, schedule regular missions' Sundays with special fundraising efforts. They could receive constant visits and prayer-letters from missionaries. They may even have a missions or outreach committee with a significant budget to support the work. Such churches may be used wonderfully by the Lord. And they would undoubtedly gain a reputation for being a 'sending church'.
But what should we make of this?
Certainly such an ethos is far superior to the sleepy church that thinks of nothing but maintaining its own buildings and ageing congregation. We might think - better to have one arrow among many than none at all! And that would be true.
Yet even such an activist church has missed something foundational to a theology of mission. Namely this: Mission is not something the local church does. Church is not the sender of gospel witnesses. The church is the body that is sent.
We are the missionaries - the church as a whole. Our very existence is an existence on mission. We have our being as church in the commission which is laid upon the whole body to be Christ's witnesses to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). Mission is not what we do, it is who we are.
As a friend from Crosslinks recently remarked, the ultimate missionary movement is not "West to the rest" nor is it "The rest to the west." The ultimate missionary movement is always Heaven to Earth. We are not senders so much as sent. As members of Christ's missionary body we find ourselves, wherever we are, as His ambassadors, God making His appeal through us. This is not a function that we resolve to undertake (whether poorly or eagerly), it is the very nature of our life together.
Such thinking is radical, yet it is the necessary outcome of a theology of mission grounded in the Missio Dei.
More on this in the next post...
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Thinking about the last post...
Why does Matthew Parris see God as the hope for Africa but not for Europe?
Well his diagnosis of Africa's problems boils down to this: too much crushing passivity and collectivism. And so...
Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.
While he makes excellent points about the need for Christian evangelism in Africa, we must ask: Is Africa the only place that needs 'liberation'? Surely to avoid an awful colonial condescension, we'd want to answer no! But the alternative is to say that the Christian God needs to liberate both the African animist and the Western atheist. Wouldn't it? But Parris is a western atheist. So what's going on?
Effectively Parris wants Christianity to convert Africa to the Enlightenment! You see Parris has his own gospel of fearless individualism that will transform Africa's fear-bound collectivism. The great trouble for Parris (and for all secularists) is that he has no basis for bringing this philosophy to Africa. He's not allowed to proselytise. The very autonomy that he prizes is incapable of crossing cultures. How can the individualist enforce individualism? Simply modelling it will not be enough as he himself admits. The group-think, the tribalism, the spiritual bondage to fear is too great. So what does he need? He needs a stronger spiritual power that can proclaim freedom for the captives. But what he also needs (yet doesn't own up to) is the warrant to cross cultures with such universal truth claims.
He's wants to piggy-back on Christian evangelism to bring one aspect of the gospel's fruit to Africa. This really shouldn't surprise us. The Enlightenment itself had to come via this route. It didn't have the power of its own rational cogency to birth itself! It flowed out of a distorted Christian gospel, and could only have done so.
You see, Parris's fearless individualism based on unmediated access to God isn't the Christian gospel. What's it missing? Well, notably - the Mediator and the community - Christ and His church.
Why has Parris missed such obvious elements of the gospel? Because this is precisely what the west collectively misses. If Africa's problem is 'fear-bound collectivism' who could deny that the west has an equally dire problem: 'me-first individualism'?
And from this problem the west, equally, needs liberation. And for this problem there is only one solution - the Christian Gospel.
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It's been a busy week. I've only just read this from the the Saturday papers and now realise it's all over the blogosphere anyway - nonetheless...
Whenever evangelicals lose their nerve, Matthew Parris (columnist for the Times) can be counted on to set us straight - atheist though he is.
There was this famous piece in 2003, declaring that Evangelical Anglicans were right to oppose gay bishops.
As it happens I do not believe in the mind of God. But Christians do and must strive to know more of it. Nothing they read in the Old and New Testaments gives a scintilla of support to the view that the God of Israel was an inclusive God, or inclined to go with the grain of human nature; much they read suggests a righteous going against the grain...
Revelation, therefore, not logic, must lie at the core of the Church’s message. You cannot pick and choose from revealed truth.
Or there was this brilliant aside here when comparing climate change advocates with Christians:
British ministers talk about climate change in the way many Christians talk about their faith. If they believed only half of what they profess, then the knowledge would surely have galvanised them, shaken them rigid; they would be grabbing us by our lapels and begging us, imploring us, commanding us, to repent.
But his Saturday piece on Christian evangelism as the hope for Africa was just excellent:
Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good...
Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.
Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.
And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.
Of course in among all those "M" words there's a glaring omission - but the point is well made no?
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It's been a busy week. I've only just read this from the the Saturday papers and now realise it's all over the blogosphere anyway - nonetheless...
Whenever evangelicals lose their nerve, Matthew Parris (columnist for the Times) can be counted on to set us straight - atheist though he is.
There was this famous piece in 2003, declaring that Evangelical Anglicans were right to oppose gay bishops.
As it happens I do not believe in the mind of God. But Christians do and must strive to know more of it. Nothing they read in the Old and New Testaments gives a scintilla of support to the view that the God of Israel was an inclusive God, or inclined to go with the grain of human nature; much they read suggests a righteous going against the grain...
Revelation, therefore, not logic, must lie at the core of the Church’s message. You cannot pick and choose from revealed truth.
Or there was this brilliant aside here when comparing climate change advocates with Christians:
British ministers talk about climate change in the way many Christians talk about their faith. If they believed only half of what they profess, then the knowledge would surely have galvanised them, shaken them rigid; they would be grabbing us by our lapels and begging us, imploring us, commanding us, to repent.
But his Saturday piece on Christian evangelism as the hope for Africa was just excellent:
Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good...
Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.
Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.
And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.
Of course in among all those "M" words there's a glaring omission - but the point is well made no?
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Here's a talk I did in the middle of a pub quiz (audio here). I posted up the script in advance here. In the end I modified it a bit. Essentially the original talk boiled down to 'Go and live for Christ!' The changes I made were basically to say 'See how He lived and died for you... Now don't you want to live for Him.' An improvement I think!
Here's a talk I did on John 4 (audio here). If I'd known about it, I'd have definitely included this quote from Malcolm Muggeridge (thanks Marc)
I may, I suppose, regard myself, or pass for being, a relatively successful man. People occasionally stare at me in the streets-that's fame. I can fairly easily earn enough to qualify for admission to the higher slopes of the Inland Revenue-that's success. Furnished with money and a little fame even the elderly, if they care to, may partake of trendy diversions-that's pleasure. It might happen once in a while that something I said or wrote was sufficiently heeded for me to persuade myself that it represented a serious impact on our time-that's fulfilment. Yet I say to you, and I beg you to believe me, multiply these tiny triumphs by a million, add them all together, and they are nothing-less than nothing, a positive impediment-measured against one draught of that living water Christ offers to the spiritually thirsty, irrespective of who or what they are. What, I ask myself, does life hold, what is there in the works of time, in the past, now and to come, which could possibly be put in the balance against the refreshment of drinking that water?
Sermon delivered at Queen's Cross Church, Aberdeen, 26th May 1968, reprinted in Jesus Rediscovered (Garden City NY, Doubleday, 1969) pp76-82 and also in Seeing Through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith edited by Cecil Kuhne (Ignatius, 2005) 'Living Water' p97
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In this post I've been thinking about how we tend to pray before evangelistic efforts.
Often the prayers we say will sound something like:
'Lord, open hearts in advance of your gospel. Prepare people now so that later we will come across those upon whom your Spirit has worked.'
If this is how we think then we're basically conceiving of the gospel as a necessary instrument to salvation but it's not really at the heart of the action. The action happens in some prior (wordless) event. The gospel word merely comes as confirmation of a previous display of divine power - it's not the power itself.
On this view, the gospel is like a barcode gun.
We zap a hundred people and - glory! - we discover that five had been slipped the right barcode in advance.
The gospel here is confirmatory of a change that has happened elsewhere. As I've said, it reveals a prior power. It's not the power itself.
But there's another way to see the gospel.
The gospel is like a magnum!
The gospel is the power of God for salvation (Romans 1:16). Proclaiming the good news is unleashing divine power. We fire off a hundred rounds of the gospel and a hundred people have felt the power of God - whether for their salvation or their greater condemnation.
The gospel does not merely confirm a prior mark placed on a person. The gospel makes the mark!
So as you go out into the world with the gospel, let this affect your confidence, your reverence and your prayerfulness: It's not a barcode gun you carry - it's a magnum.
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