What is the mission of God? And what is our role in that?
 .slantMike KingIn his 2006 speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, Bono referred to a spiritual leader to whom he made constant requests for prayers and blessings on behalf of his works of justice around the world. Bono declared, “This wise man asked me to stop. He said, ‘Stop asking God to bless what you’re doing. Get involved in what God is doing—because it’s already blessed.’” So what is God doing? What is God’s mission? The term missio dei (mission of God) implies that God has a purposeful plan. Karl Barth emphasized the reality that God is at work, actio dei (the action of God). We often think of mission when we discuss the mission and activity of God, which, unfortunately, is so enmeshed in a Western mindset of saving the heathen. The script of ministry mixed with colonial ambitions has wreaked havoc throughout Africa, the Caribbean, Central and South America, the Middle East, and Asia. The mission of God must be understood by the church to be much more than soteriological concerns of the church to get people saved. God’s mission is much broader than expansion of the church. No doubt, the church is called to participate directly in God’s mission and activity. However, the activity and mission of God extend beyond the life of the church. God’s mission doesn’t exist because of the church; the church exists because of God’s mission. God’s work in the world has many participants beyond the church. The church must do a better job of bearing witness to the reality that others are participating in God’s mission, even those participants who may not even be aware of their cooperation with God’s activity. The mission of God also must be understood as an attribute of the triune God. The Western church theological focus has been on “sentness”—the Father sending the Son, the Father and Son sending the Holy Spirit, and the Father, Son, and Spirit sending the church. To grasp the beauty of our triune God in relation to the mission of God, we must recover the Eastern Church Trinitarian emphasis on God’s radical communality and the movement toward restoration and shalom. We are being invited to participate in God’s mission and activity through our triune God’s perichoretic activity of relational and complete restoration. As followers of Jesus, we must see our roles within our church communities to participate fully and passionately in God’s overarching mission with the eschatological hope of the absolute reign of God and the restoration of all things. When our future meets God’s eschatological reality, what will this new earth and new world be like? When God’s mission is complete, when God’s reign is on earth as it is in heaven, what will that look like? What is our hope? To answer this, we must focus on Jesus Christ. The best way for us to understand the manifestation of missio dei is to see it Christo-centrically. Through God’s special revelation—Jesus Christ—we are restored and reconciled to God, to ourselves, to others, and to the entire creation. Not only are we redeemed through Jesus Christ’s salvific work but also all things—including all creation groaning for restoration—will be made new. Through the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God’s ultimate plan and purpose for his entire creation was made manifest and was accomplished in an already/not-yet reality. With Christ as the first fruit, we believe there will be resurrection. There will be healing and peace among people. There will be justice for all. No more hunger, suffering, and death. There will be a return of shalom. We must broaden the vision of our young people to understand that they are being invited to cooperate with God’s mission. We are co-agents in God’s restorative work. We are Jesus’ followers engaged in God’s missional activity; we are his friends and co-laborers. This message is so much more compelling for young people to give their lives to. Focusing primarily on getting young people saved so they can go to heaven when they die is insufficient to ignite the imagination of this generation to order their lives in abandonment to God’s entire, encompassing, restorative mission. We must engage in Christian formation of young people that leads to a more robust understanding of God’s overarching mission and activity throughout all creation. This understanding must involve a proper view of the church’s role within this mission as truly unique and special because God planned it that way. But they must also have the spiritual maturity to discern that God’s mission is greater than being bound exclusively within the scope of the church. We must know when to point to those outside the church and to activities outside the church (even in other religions) and bear witness to God’s mission and activity by proclaiming, “There it is.” |
 .slantScot McKnightThe year was 369 AD, and the land was the eastern portion of what we now call Turkey. The church leader of the area was Basil, son of wealthy Christian parents and brother to two future saints, Gregory of Nyssa and Macrina, his sister. The problem was a brutal, enduring famine that was soon stretching humans to their limits. Parents went to bed wondering if it might not be wiser to sell some of their children in order to keep some of the others alive and then wondered if they could ever look the remaining children in their eyes following such a profound breach of trust. What to do? was the question Basil, now bishop, was asking himself daily. Basil the Great answered that question by tapping into the answers he had absorbed so deeply to a different question: What is God doing in this world, and what does God want of us, his people? Answering that question enabled Basil to answer the more pressing question. Basil, if you don’t know the story, began to sell off the acres and acres of land his parents had passed on to him, and when the needs became more pressing, he created the first-ever Christian community, called The New City and eventually known as Basiliad, a place for kingdom living. At the Basiliad, described as a koinobios, a “life in common,” lepers were nursed, the poor were provided for, the hungry were given food, and the Lord was worshiped and served. Living with and for others was the only reasonable response to the breakouts of need Basil faced, but living with and for others was grounded for Basil in what he knew God was like and what God was doing in this world. The mission of God shapes the mission of God’s people. But Basil knew that God’s mission didn’t begin at creation. He knew it never began but always was. This great Cappadocian theologian was one of the architects plumbing the depths of how to understand God as three-in-one and one-in-three. The foundational term used then was the Greek word perichoresis, which describes the mutual indwelling and the mutual inter-penetration of the Father and the Son and the Spirit. Let’s get this down to manageable levels now: perichoresis is the idea that the Father’s life was with the Son and the Spirit and that the Father’s life was for the Son and the Spirit; and the same is true of the Son and the Spirit. When all is said and done, the Trinity becomes an endless dance of love for the “others.” The mission of God begins in the perichoresis of the Trinity. It follows, then, for Basil, that he as leader and his people as followers of Christ were to dwell with those in need and to live for those in need; which they did, and none did it better, and none gave up more, and none sacrificed himself more willingly than this great leader of the church. Basil set the tone and the example, and the Basiliad has become a living testimony of what God’s people look like when they live out the mission of God in this world: they live with one another and for one another. Perhaps it surprises some today, but it would not have surprised Basil that the final scene of the Bible describes God’s people as they are supposed to be. That scene is found in Revelation 21, where we discover that God’s people finally find themselves exactly where they are supposed to be and doing exactly what they are designed to do; and that place is a city, the New Jerusalem, and what they are doing is dwelling with God and for God and with one another and for one another. This city, and I see no reason not to call it the City of God, descends from the heavens to the earth, showing us that life on the earth matters eternally and that what we do now will shape what we can do then. This city is God’s dwelling among his people, and this city is itself the new creation (21:5). This city is perfectly proportioned and made of the best of materials for the best of people because God wants his people to dwell in joy and peace and love. But what is perhaps most powerful is that the city has no temple because the temple is the Lamb, Jesus himself. The mission of God is for you and me to be with God and to live for God and to be with one and another and to be for one another, and all of this we do with Jesus Christ in the center. He is our temple, and he is our light.
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 .slantDave RahnLiving missionally is all the rage today. Makes me wonder if God is impressed that we are getting something so important finally dialed in. Without presuming to speak for the Lord, I do wonder why it’s taking us so long to calibrate what it means to live into the mission of God. This is not a new idea. This mission of God is rooted in the creation story. We humanoids were designed to have our lives centered around the one true God, Creator of heaven and earth and all things in between. By being connected in proper relationship with God, we were made to enjoy him, serve him, interact with him, and love him forever. Among all of the other artistry created by the Lord, we are his masterpiece. He takes pleasure in our comfortable delight in him and that which he created for us to enjoy. Imagine that there was a mission statement hung on some heavenly wall, before God moved on the great nothing to divide it into light and dark, heaven and earth, land and water, sun and moon. The ultimate division was between multitudes of wild creatures and man, made in God’s own image. The mission statement might read: That all who are made in my image might live in joyous union with me and in appreciative harmony with everyone and everything else I have created for their benefit. Or perhaps a pre-automobile bumper sticker: Love me and enjoy my loving provision forever. We can wordsmith this idea of the mission of God, but the ultimate picture is not unlike what Lawrence Richards wrote about when he used hyphenation as a means to express what it’s all about: faith-as-life. Our very life is hidden, discovered, and experienced when we are in right relationship with the Creator God. Every other relationship with everything else in creation has the potential to be life-enhancing when our Creator God is honored as Lord of every aspect of our existence. But we could benefit from some contextualization. The overarching story of the Bible is that sin’s introduction to our existence in Genesis 3 tacks on an important addendum to the mission of God. We know longer naturally know this God who loves us and wants us to know him. Our individual and collective souls have been distorted by sin, inclining us to move away from our created purposes and to flail about in an illusory abyss of self-destruction. We are lost unless rescued by a loving God. We are hopelessly unable to comprehend the truth of our existence if the Lord does not save us from ceaselessly swapping ignorance with ourselves. Our role in the mission of God today—and since the fall—has been to make the one true God known among the nations and to bear witness that in him alone can we find the life for which we were created. Our ability to tell that story well is directly proportionate to our ability to live fully into that story of redemption, reconciliation, and life. Along the way, we endlessly fight off every new contender for the allegiance of our hearts, setting them apart to be wholly given to the one true God. Every time we win large or small battles with idolatrous temptations, we declare over and over again to our fellow flawed humans that false gods fail. And if—by God’s grace and mercy—our lives and words are synched by integrity, we may be honored to play a role as assets in the mission of God.
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Comments
1) Hey Scot, I'm loving those Cappadocians. Gregory of Nazianzus' (the "Trinitarian Theologian")voice needs to be heard in the theological conversations of the day.
2) "Anonymous" people are always interesting. Starts off with "I like this..." so we will think you are a reasonable person but too often ends with something like "BUT the thing I have found troublesome in our conversations is this ever growing universalism idea that all roads/religions lead to the one true God." Huh? Am I missing something? Where are these conversations that propose that "all roads/religions lead to the one true God."??? Yes, God is God, and God gets glory even when someone who is living in false religion or an "idolatrous" life co-operates in some way with God's overarching mission. People outside of the church stumble into God's Kingdom activity all the time and it is theologically correct and important for the church to bear witness when that happens. This can be done without embracing a position of universalism.
Peace,
Mike
I think you make a category mistake in your in critique of Mike's post. By alluding to universalism you imply that Mike's post was about soteriology. While all areas of doctrine are interconnected, I understand Mike's main points to be primarily ecclesiological. Mike's concern, it seems to me, is to call the church to bear witness to God's kingdom as revealed in Jesus Christ by the power of God's spirit wherever that kingdom may be found. That is a wholly different statement than saying that such and such religion, because it may stumble upon God's inbreaking kingdom, leads to God (by which statement I take you to mean something salvific). In fact, because of Mike's emphasis upon God's Christo-centric mission, I assume that when the church calls attention to the unwitting witness of non-believers to God's kingdom, he in fact means to say it is the job of the church to name such activity as the work of the one, true God revealed in Jesus Christ. That is a far, far cry from declaring that all roads/religions lead to God.
But the idea of being able to spotlight the work and mission of God even when it does not emanate directly from the Body of Christ is, as you pointed out Mike, work for the spiritually mature. It's important work; but it can be misleading to those who don't easily separate the issue of God's sovereign hand in all things (look at Paul's "wrap-up" of a tough discussion about Israel in Rom 11:33-36) and the narrow road of salvation. One of the AHA!'s to come away with, I think, is that God is not only active in matters of salvation (creating and sustaining the world we live in is a pretty big deal, after all), so his mission may be understood to be greater than salvation without leading to some universalist conclusions--in all things the one true God is to be known and receive the glory.
I've been chewing on the idea of mission for a while, now, and have concluded that the moment when we get "activated" by mission may not take place until we see our particular role in the progression. So understanding God's mission is only part of our journey. I really come alive when I can see what difference this must make in how I live…and the more granular those conclusions the more pervasive the difference.